Ottessa Moshfegh likes her characters degraded. They live intensely and feel deeply, fuelled by shame, lust, alcohol, overactive imaginations and, occasionally, laxatives. Over the last 10 years, the American novelist has published five novels and one collection of short stories. At first they might not seem that cohesive, spanning medieval gross-fests and 60s psychological thrillers, but Moshfegh is remarkably consistent. She writes about lonely people who are exceptional not because of any kind of unique charisma or talent, but because they are willing to bare all to the reader: every grotty habit and dark urge brought to light. With the film adaptation of Moshfegh’s novel Eileen in cinemas now, here’s a tour of her back catalogue.
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The entry point
In the short story Nothing Ever Happens Here, a young man moves from Utah to LA to try and make it as an actor. He hangs out with “the crazies, the drunks, housekeepers with their romance novels, old men with their spittle, whores with their hairspray.” It’s as neat a summary as any of the kind of characters and situations Moshfegh is drawn to. She likes outcasts and weirdos, mingling the mundane and the macabre. Although it might not be the most obvious entry point, her story collection Homesick for Another World offers an immersion into Moshfegh’s sprawling narrative universe. In the 14 stories, she introduces the reader to teachers who are alcoholics or recreational meth users, and children who gather poisoned berries, convinced that salvation can be achieved through murder. The collection is a great introduction to Moshfegh’s unflinching voice, which reveals the oddity beneath conventional life with a little shrug, conjuring beauty out of even the most abject situations. It’s also a litmus test for Moshfegh’s wider works. Are you compelled by the pimples, the deodorant flakes, the dead squirrels, the pervy neighbours – or turned off by her bleak visions?
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The page-turner
Shortlisted for the Booker prize in 2016, Eileen is another good entry point – especially for those like to be coaxed forward one breadcrumb hint at a time. Moshfegh infamously said of Eileen that she wrote it to be a commercial hit, following the rules of Alan Watt’s creative writing guide The 90-Day Novel. She succeeded and created something scaffolded by elements of noir while telling a sticky story of self-loathing and obsession. Set during a barren New England winter in 1964, Eileen’s titular narrator is a secretary at a juvenile detention centre. When she’s not spying on the boys masturbating or speculating about their sad mothers (her own, like a number of Moshfegh’s characters, is dead), she buys gin for her drunkard father and attempts to tame her body as one might a monster. She fantasises about escape, whether achieved through love or running away. When glamorous director of education Rebecca arrives at the prison, she offers the opportunity for both – becoming an enigma who Eileen would follow anywhere.
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The Marmite one
Moshfegh’s style is often described as flat or cynical – illuminating the inner lives of apathetic young women – but that’s a lazy characterisation based on My Year of Rest and Relaxation. Elsewhere you’re just as likely to endure the company of lecherous men or crone wet nurses. This is also no Eileen, boiling over with rage. Instead, Moshfegh’s third and most popular novel asks what it takes to feel nothing, to obliterate the self with the aid of an amenable doctor and a long list of prescription pills. In it, a gorgeous, privileged twentysomething woman quits her vacuous art gallery job and decides that if she hibernates Sleeping Beauty-style for a year, indulging in some “good American sleep”, she will emerge refreshed into a different kind of life. A healthcare satire, a startling 9/11 novel, a TikTok sensation: where some will find the black humour bracing (especially in the shots it takes at the art world), others may struggle to stick with the nameless narrator through her drug-induced stupor and out the other side.
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The whodunnit
Like Eileen, Death in Her Hands immediately announces its intention to prick the reader’s curiosity. A widow in her 70s named Vesta Gul is out walking her dog in the woods near her home when she stumbles across a note. It reads “her name was Magda. Nobody will ever know who killed her. It wasn’t me. Here is her dead body.” There is no body to be found. Vesta sets out to discover what happened to Magda with the aid of Ask Jeeves and her own powers of speculation as she roams her “mind-space” for clues. In the process she reveals glimpses from the unhappy life that precipitated this solo existence in a cabin in a defunct Girl Scout camp. Like other Moshfegh protagonists before her, she has a violent imagination and a mistrust of others. But there is a delicacy to Death in Her Hands, the novel toying with questions of reliability and the impulse towards storytelling while simultaneously rendering a moving portrait of loneliness one rambling thought at a time. Vesta’s relationship with her dog, Charlie, might also be one of the only uncomplicated loves Moshfegh has ever written.
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The grossest one of all
For those who came to Moshfegh via My Year of Rest and Relaxation, her most recent novel Lapvona may have been a shock – though it shouldn’t be, given that it’s the purest distillation of her interests yet. Set in the feudal medieval realm of Lapvona, a fiefdom in an unspecified eastern European country, this novel is one, long carnival of grotesque people doing grotesque things to one another. Cannibalism, incest, grapes placed in unsavoury places: nothing is off-limits. At the heart of it there is Marek, a 13-year-old boy with a twisted spine who upends his social fortunes when he kills the ruling lord’s son. However, where Moshfegh’s other novels tend to bring you up close with the impulses and neuroses of her characters, close enough to see the lipstick on their yellowed teeth, Lapvona attempts a wider sweep of misery to make its points about power and religion. In doing so it becomes more tapestry of torture than tightly controlled narrative, its shock slowly wearing off.
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The overlooked gem
McGlue was Moshfegh’s debut – a hallucinatory novella narrated by a 19th-century alcoholic deckhand who may have killed the love of his life. Written on her MFA at Brown University, Moshfegh was inspired by an 1851 newspaper headline about a sailor from Salem who murdered someone in the port of Zanzibar. Although McGlue sets in motion many of Moshfegh’s preoccupations (annihilation, intoxication, thwarted freedom, shit and vomit), it is set apart by the woozy urgency of its prose. Closer in places to the baroque sensibility of Hilary Mantel or Jeanette Winterson, Moshfegh’s prose sings as time and physical reality collapse inwards. McGlue has a head injury that makes his consciousness extra-porous, memories leaking out and visions rushing in. In one exquisite passage, he proclaims, “What I have been thinking, captain, is what is exempt from import tax in one country is what I’d like to stick through the crack in my skull to start to fill it: hay, oranges, lemons, pineapples, cocoa nuts, grapes … I fill my head with ships’ blocks, binnacle lamps, signal lamps, compasses, shackles, sheaves, deadeyes, rings and thimbles, dead lights, anchors”. Whatever McGlue fills his head with – all the hurt and half-recollections – the reader savours.
