It failed, she felt, to communicate that if she can be flippant about the literary marketplace, it is only because she takes writing and creating the circumstances in which she can continue to write so seriously.

Eileen was shortlisted for the Man Booker, and has been optioned by Scott Rudin for a film adaptation touted, in somewhat baffling whispers, as the ‘next Gone Girl.’ Moshfegh’s frankness about her process, has, however, occasionally landed her in trouble: one Guardian piece ran with the headline, ‘Eileen started out as a joke – also I’m broke, also I want to be famous.’ ‘They made it a little sensational,’ she later told Fanzine.

At twenty-four I would give nothing to aid any imagining of my naked body.’ Eileen is a kind of mutant creation in whom the damaging imperatives of patriarchy emerge in almost exclusively unintended and comedic ways.īut Moshfegh’s gambit certainly worked. She wears lipstick ‘not to be fashionable, but because my bare lips were the same color as my nipples. Eileen appears unassuming, but, she warns us, don’t be fooled. Eileen is a young woman in 1964 living in an unnamed town with her alcoholic father. The result is a noir-by-numbers – literally written according to a manual – put through the Moshfeghian machine. McGlue‘s prose evinces the concern of a former classical pianist turned experimental writer for sound and rhythm above elaboration of plot.Įileen, by contrast, arose from an attempt to appeal to the mainstream and Moshfegh’s desire to make writing a practice that could financially sustain her. The novella lurches along a path of hallucination towards the moment of death. The deceased in question is Johnson, McGlue’s friend, patron, beloved. McGlue’s brains are spilling out and his memories too, the unpleasant consequence of enforced sobriety after he wakes up bloodied and befuddled to find himself accused of murder, possibly at the victim’s request. The titular antihero of McGlue is a nineteenth century sailor with a hole in his head. She now splits her time between Los Angeles and the California desert. Newton is a town she has described as being the safest in America and possessing the highest number per capita of psychiatrists. She descends from Croatian partisans on her mother’s side and a dispossessed Iranian billionaire on her father’s.

Moshfegh herself grew up in Newton, Massachusetts, where her parents immigrated after meeting in Belgium. For one, both protagonists are New England misfits. But despite the contrast between McGlue (2014) and Eileen (2015), she acknowledges that ‘they come from the same imagination’. Ottessa Moshfegh’s first two books are, as she tells me, very different from one another.

Eileen ottessa moshfegh review