Ottessa Moshfegh

I don’t mean to sound down on her, she’s brought me a good deal of pleasure. Still reading the short stories but will definitely go on to Eileen and Year. It’s just the endings...dark and winding is a good example of how she tries to up-end / shock the reader. Or “the beach boy” which isn’t very interesting to start with and just kind of putters to a stall. I know short stories are hard to end well - it takes a good measure of poetry. Maybe I’m being too hard on her.

Stories okay but at least we had Nirvana

(if the end of the short story is shit then it is a fail, I liked her collection a lot but also feel many great writers finish stories well)

What's considered a good ending though, especially when it's not particularly plot oriented?

I'm rereading Flannery O'Connoor, and, boy, she could end'em, sometimes at the risk of being reductive.

she sold her hair to buy him a watch chain - but he sold his watch to buy her a set of combs

I'm only answering this because I just read it, but Robert Aickman's short story "The Inner Room" has a *great* ending

the extent of the american annoyance at comparing a bad book of yours to one of ours is half amusing and half dispiriting

and i haven’t read the others. mcglue sounds .. more amenable? .. and certainly it is possible for writers of talent to produce bad books so i might give her another go. but this one just seems a spectacular series of own goals and self-owns

McGlue is her worst one imo, Homesick & Eileen are the gems

Eileen is at best OK, but why read it when you have the complete works of Patricia Highsmith doing it all so, so much better

I think the really great short stories are so much about character that maybe they've gone deep enough along the way to earn a fairly simple ending. tbf I don't remember thinking the Mosfegh stories ended badly, though I'd have to reread. I did think one or two, particularly the final story in the collection, were really poor. But I think that's common with short story collections, it is rare for every story in a collection to be brilliant and they do tend to frontload them. I've read collections where the last two or three were so bad it almost ruined a brilliant beginning.

I think it's Flannery O'Connor's Good Country People about which she said something to the effect of not knowing the end until the second she wrote it, and then realising it couldn't end any other way. Even that feels a bit too focussed on the importance of plot to me but I still like the quote, and all her writing about writing.

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