She lives in virtual squalor, catering to her abusive, perpetually drunk retired-cop father who is wont to wave his old pistol at passing school buses, yet she professes to be “a glutton for punishment.” She relishes all things awful in her life, to the point that she not only wills it there but seeks it out. I considered the personal paradigm of a bored, imaginatively escapist person…who plumbs the depths of her own delusions and does something incredibly brave.”Įileen is a splendid blend of this vicarious naivety and Moshfegh’s trademark sordidness. I pictured a plausible audience of avid readers as people who live vicariously through books-in other words, people with boring lives. On the genesis of Eileen, she writes, “I deliberately embraced the conventional narrative structure in order to reach the mainstream. But my aim was to shit out new shit.” While the prevalence of the word shit is uncommon in most discussions of the nature of fiction writing, here Moshfegh hits on the artistic compromises required for financial and creative independence. In an essay for The Masters Review, she describes the act of writing Eileen: “I drank the Kool-Aid. Moshfegh herself is an interesting character, willing to talk about the business of being a professional writer in as brutal terms as she uses to describe her degenerate characters. All this makes her sound resoundingly ordinary for a Moshfegh character, but Eileen keeps a dead field mouse in her glove box, imagines icicles over her door piercing her body and “parting nether regions like a glass dagger” and dreams of escaping her dreary hometown of “X-ville” for a vibrant life in New York. Hence, her acute self-awareness becomes all the more blatant under the scrutiny of revisited memories. Opening with Eileen’s thoroughly self-deprecating description of herself, the book goes to great lengths to establish its heroine as an unremarkable woman in a colorless world that she experiences vicariously: “I looked like a girl you’d expect to see on a city bus reading some clothbound book from the library about plants or geography…” She describes herself as “nothing special” and “a waif, invisible.” But the narrative has the benefit of being told by Eileen in the present as she looks back on a particularly formative week in 1964.

Moshfegh hinges the success of her book on Eileen’s ability to stealthily draw readers into the author’s sordid world. In contrast, Eileen Dunlop is a character primed for reader projection, a pitiful blend of crushing self-loathing and debilitating self-awareness. Her short stories have consistently focused on the grisly and downright disturbing. Author Ottessa Moshfegh characterizes her first novel, Eileen, as her most conventional work yet.

Eileen ottessa moshfegh review