Ottessa Moshfegh

It does not really improve, just gets sillier

What a coincidence: she wrote the introduction to a new selected edition of Shirley Jackson stories I checked out of the library.

oh man Eileen is so good. keep going! and yea i preordered that Shirley Jackson collection just for Ottessa's intro, still have to actually read the book beyond her intro

so she's writing a novel about oprah and ambien? love it

Shirley Jackson is sooooooooooooooo much better than Moshfegh

new novel!

My Year of Rest and Relaxation - July 10, 2018

A shocking, hilarious and strangely tender novel about a young woman’s experiment in narcotic hibernation, aided and abetted by one of the worst psychiatrists in the annals of literature. Our narrator has many of the advantages of life, on the surface. Young, thin, pretty, a recent Columbia graduate, she lives in an apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan paid for, like everything else, by her inheritance. But there is a vacuum at the heart of things, and it isn’t just the loss of her parents in college, or the way her Wall Street boyfriend treats her, or her sadomasochistic relationship with her alleged best friend. It’s the year 2000 in a city aglitter with wealth and possibility; what could be so terribly wrong?

This story of a year spent under the influence of a truly mad combination of drugs, designed to heal us from our alienation from this world, shows us how reasonable, even necessary, that alienation sometimes is. Blackly funny, both merciless and compassionate – dangling its legs over the ledge of 9/11 – this novel is a showcase for the gifts of one of America’s major young writers working at the height of her powers.

https://www.penguin.co.uk/content/dam/catalogue/pim/editions/173/9781787330412/cover.jpg.rendition.460.707.png

holy shit that sounds/looks good

i started reading mcglue, gnarly

stoked

xp me too! halfway thru

EILEEN disappointed me a few weeks ago. I'm still curious about this one.

Really enjoying the beginning of EILEEN but can imagine that it might go awry

I just finished Eileen & was very satisfied w it ftr

Interesting to read that ppl were waiting for the plot to get going, I absolutely wasn't - just didn't seem like that sort of story, even with the "I should tell you again about the gun" stuff. When something did happen it was more consequential than I was expecting tbh - don't want to get too spoilery so will leave it there.

I thought Christian Bale was laughably awful in American Psycho but later I read an interview where he explained he was doing a Tom Cruise impression the entire time, and there's definitely a similar thing going on in Eileen where the author is deliberately writing in a way that might seem simply laughably bad if you're not in on the joke.

Interesting to read that ppl were waiting for the plot to get going, I absolutely wasn't - just didn't seem like that sort of story, even with the "I should tell you again about the gun" stuff. When something did happen it was more consequential than I was expecting tbh - don't want to get too spoilery so will leave it there.

― scrüt (wins),

My problem was too much plot! It read like an attenuated short story, extended beyond its scope.

at least the cover's good

I get that tbf, I was thinking similar things (but with a more positive slant, like man I really wanna read her short stories cause that seems like the form she'd excel in) - but I don't really mind it. It's a pretty short novel so it feels like a short story where you just spend a little bit longer in the world. I also felt that there was a point to the structure in that Day 2 already feels like it should be the day of her disappearance, Eileen's situation feels unbearable and untenable, so the slow progress through several days of cringe-comedy setpieces was effective for me.

Xp

I should go back to eileen, I think, though I heard real mixed reviews. I got to the end of the first chapter, thought 'you should have started the story here' and have not gone back to it since

i don't think Eileen is as flawed as others do, but imo whatever problems it has are with mechanics or plot (if you read the interviews i posted upthread, Moshfegh repeatedly admits she 'sold out' to her og literary audience by making it so conventionally plotted, while i felt the plot dragged) while the writing line-by-line or paragraph-by-paragraph, is incredibly high quality. <tmi/slight spoiler> the scene where eileen describes her bowel movements was one of the funniest things i've read, but also an example of Perfect Writing imo

Totally mystified by all the Eileen criticisms itt. McGlue was the one that felt like an overextended short story. flopson otm about that particular scene, though iirc constipation is a recurring theme throughout the book, and I just remember reading it and seeing that house so vividly and feeling how cluttered and trapped she was. Never thought once that it was overextended or too conventional, it was a very weird, dark, and satisfying novel. I do prefer Homesick for Another World though.

https://longreads.com/2018/07/05/a-person-alone-leaning-out-with-ottessa-moshfegh/

new moshfegh alert! drudge sirens!

The narrator of Ottessa Moshfegh’s new novel, My Year of Rest and Relaxation, a 24-year-old New Yorker, wants to shut the world out — by sedating herself into a near-constant slumber made possible by a cornucopia of prescription drugs. In various states of semi-consciousness, she begins “Sleepwalking, sleeptalking, sleep-online-chatting, sleepeating… sleepshopping on the computer and sleepordered Chinese delivery. I’d sleepsmoked. I’d sleeptexted and sleeptelephoned.” Her daily life revolves around sleeping as much as possible, and when she’s not sleeping, she’s pretty much obsessed with strategizing how to knock herself out for even longer the next time, constantly counting out her supply of pills.

oh there's already an update on that up there. sorry.

yea im excited for this

preordered way back in February

Looks like this is the Ambien and Oprah novel

I think the thing that I have in common with this character is that I am acutely aware of how much I do not like my own mind. When I’m not distracted by my imagination or by something external, time passing feels like I’m just waiting for the time to pass until I die. It’s kind of like vigilant awareness of mortality and mindfulness.

otm

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/07/09/ottessa-moshfeghs-otherworldly-fiction

Moshfegh once told Vice, which published some of her early work, “My writing lets people scrape up against their own depravity, but at the same time it’s very refined . . . it’s like seeing Kate Moss take a shit.”

lmao. love her

Yeah, will be buying this next week.

When I’m not distracted by my imagination or by something external, time passing feels like I’m just waiting for the time to pass until I die.

This is an ego problem, not a mind problem.

Get one mustard seed, why dontcha

new book is great so far, pretty early on tho

yea im maybe 60 pgs in

i mean this in a value neutral way but it reads like fight club sorta idk
getting away from toxic femininity and social climbing by sleeping
rather than getting away from toxic consumerism by fighting

Dwight Garner says that she writes with "so much misanthropic aplomb, however, that she is always a deep pleasure to read."

otm

Also 60 pages in, waiting for the bomb to split.

I can’t quite get with Dwight Garner, sorry.

I mean in general, not what he said about OM.

Finished the book just now. Really disappointed.

~~~~SPOILERS~~~~

using 9/11 for suspense / as a central dramatic device is such a cliché and so worn out and I'm stunned that a writer as talented as OM would utilize it.

Having a similar reaction to this as I had to The Killing of a Sacred Deer. Need to sit with it.

Ottessa Moshfegh really, really loves herself, doesn't she?

haven’t read the nyorker profile yet but a friend recounted to me the story of how she met her partner (came over to interview her, and stayed inside her house for 17 days) i thought that was very romantic

Ottessa Moshfegh really, really loves herself, doesn't she?

― Mince Pramthwart (James Morrison)

don't you?

Should be part of yr Buddha nature.

I loathe myself, and I'm not that keen on her, either.

i've only read her short story collection which is at times brilliant and at times truly horrendous, which is how i feel about her generally and her persona in interviews. the husband seems like such a massive bellend.

i've started to read the interviews for a laugh, generally. this one is fairly good: https://longreads.com/2018/07/05/a-person-alone-leaning-out-with-ottessa-moshfegh/

The ’90s were really, really different from the decades that preceded. At least, I felt. A lot of cultural shifts happened. You could get away with being weirder. Now things are so policed. You can’t even really express an opinion without getting haters on social media. But in the ’90s we had Nirvana

not sure i could bother with a novel.

lol

seems like a smart decision

saying she’s a bad writer is crazy to me

O'Connor's remarks about endings have been myblodesrsrs foryears

Uh lodestars

this book makes me want to reread tao lin and a.m. homes and bits of lydia davis

although now there’s a random mention of mao II and i am going, oh, yes, of course

Ok I’ve got an example: the story Nothing Ever Happens Here. Last paragraph tries to put a spin on the events to that point but it’s not necessary. Why kill the mystery? The story should have ended with the old lady touching the dude’s face. Maybe OM just needs an editor.

eileen was chronic

is patricia highsmith really as raunchy and grotesque as Eileen, james?

https://garage.vice.com/amp/en_us/article/wjm5xm/whoopi-goldberg-ottessa-moshfegh

Not content to EGOT, Whoopi Goldberg is setting her sights on the fashion industry. Novelist Ottessa Moshfegh, her biggest fan, pays her a visit.

The last quarter of Eileen is so dumb, ridiculous and cliched. I feel like I’ve been cheated out of hours of my life getting this far.

every time this thread gets bumped im like well looks like me and flappy are the only 2 ppl on this entire site who don’t hate this writer lol

Going to read Eileen so I can say it's bad itt

time honoured ilx tradition

Also she has a bad take on Whoopi in TNG

lol some other people like her I think

calstars maybe you'd like McGlue, can't remember if you already read it. pretty different from the rest of her stuff and my least favorite, I feel like if you don't dig Eileen or the stories you might like McGlue.

Thanks flappy, I just started Year and will check out mcGlue after that. I like her a lot, just get frustrated with her

Whenever she appeared on-screen, I sensed she was laughing at the whole production. Her presence made the show completely absurd. That was true of all her movies, too.

Kind of a strange compliment to give an actor. Apparently Whoopi is chill about it though.

Totally wrong

Guinan is a totally earnest performance and whoopi approached the producers about appearing on the show as a fan of the original Star Trek (the part was then written for her)

I liked Eileen! The whoopi and Harrison ford stuff in the new one felt like some sub-American psycho shit

Yeah. Not to mention that Trevor seems to be based on P Bateman or maybe since it’s set 15 years after A Psycho, that character might be modeling his personality on the book / movie.

The scenes with him in it with the main character read like rosencrantz and guildenstern style perspective shifts of scenes that could be A Psycho outtakes.

read the first two stories in the collection. (i know -- not enough to form an impression -- but still, form one i did.)

she is an extremely talented humorist. both "bettering myself" and "mr. wu" are kind of like, elaborate and fucked up jokes. "bettering myself" is less depressing because the narrator, who is the butt of the joke, is also in on the joke.

the characters are profoundly alienated and misanthropic. their lives feel like a kind of purgatory. probably more than half of all contemporary literary fiction seems to feature characters like this, which seems notable.

the ending of "mr wu" is brilliant, deranged and masterfully crafted. but i'm not sure what i'm supposed to make of that story or that character. i also wonder if anyone found that story racist.

HOLY SHIT

Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation is to be made into a movie by none other than Yorgos Lanthimos. Name a more iconic duo. H U G E !

— Louise Benson (@benson_louise) January 6, 2020

New novel Death in Her Hands out in August (was scheduled for this month)

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/71D6XhjXZQL.jpg

Cover art on her books is consistently far better than the contents deserve

I'm surprised I haven't seen more mentions of 'My Year...' as proto-quarantine lit.

“Sub-American Psycho shit” is still basically where I am with “my year” but I would watch the lanthimos adaptation no question

sad this got pushed back but i have enough to read rn i guess

i read mcglue a little after i was being grumpy on this thread. maybe i would have felt more charitable about it had i not read my year first but, gosh.

She is very gifted but what I’ve read of her work is incredibly and unrelentingly misanthropic. The fact that someone so talented is writing about characters like this—like, that this is for her a plausible representation of humanity as such, even if it’s supposed to be a slight parody—is cause for alarm I think.

I’ve only read that short story collection and the stories were really funny and well-crafted but unrelenting. There really wasn’t any sympathy or generosity in there, that I saw, to add levity to the pettiness and seething hatred. This was the source of the humor, obviously—like a really committed version of curb your enthusiasm—but it seems notable that these kind of characters and narratives feel naturalistic to contemporary. It’s like one part of human psychology has been given outsized prominence. It’s either a problem with capitalism or with fiction.

*feels naturalistic to contemporary readers

Including myself, I should say. I wouldn’t be surprised to open up the minds of other New Yorkers, for instance, and find these kinds of bizarre solipsistic dramas playing out.

McGlue seems like it could be interesting though. Hard to imagine what she’d do with a historical setting.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/16/books/ottessa-moshfegh-death-in-her-hands.html

Just finished the new one, love it.

Nice didn’t realize it was out yet