Author: Ottessa Moshfegh
Title: Eileen
Year of publication: 2015
Page count: 272
Rating: ★★★★
This is my second novel by Moshfegh, and clearly, her niche is writing about repugnant women in grotesque scenarios. It would all be too much—too cynical, misanthropic, bizarre—for me under normal circumstances, but I once again reached for her work at just the right time in my life. She writes about fucked-up, repressed women’s inner turmoil; about being alive when being alive feels fucking terrible. Perfect for indulging and wallowing in self-loathing.
“I deplored silence. I deplored stillness. I hated almost everything. I was very unhappy and angry all the time. I tried to control myself, and that only made me more awkward, unhappier, and angrier. I was like Joan of Arc, or Hamlet, but born into the wrong life—the life of a nobody, a waif, invisible. There’s no better way to say it: I was not myself back then. I was someone else. I was Eileen.”
The novel details a week in the life of unassuming, unstable Eileen, leading up to her disappearance, narrated by her much older self. In the 1960’s, she was an isolated young woman trapped in a small Massachusetts town, working as a secretary in a correctional facility for teenage boys and living in utter squalor with her alcoholic father suffering from paranoid delusions. She is morose, resentful, full of self-loathing, and spends her days indulging in perverse sexual fantasies, shoplifting, stalking a prison guard she has a crush on, and dreaming of escaping to New York City. Enter beautiful, glamorous Rebecca, a new counselor at the prison—Eileen is immediately smitten by her charm, and when Rebecca invites her out for an after-work drink and to spend Christmas with her, she thinks that she may have finally found a friend and kindred spirit… and from there, things quickly escalate in a wild twist.
“Love can be like that. It can vanish in an instant. It’s happened since, too. A lover has left the warm rapture of my bed to get a glass of water and returned only to find me cold, uninterested, empty, a stranger. Love can reappear, too, but never again unscathed. The second round is inevitably accompanied by doubt, intention, self-disgust. But that is neither here nor there.”
More than a bleak psychological thriller, I’d say that Eileen is primarily a dark character study made all the more compelling by just how repulsive it is. Moshfegh’s claustrophobic writing is perfectly suited for taking us, the voyeuristic readers—disgusted, but unable to look away—into the dark recesses of young Eileen’s slowly unraveling mind. This novel most certainly won’t appeal to everyone, but as someone who’s currently going through a similar sort of vicious inner self-scrutiny behind a slowly cracking mask of self-control, this uninhibited, morbid debut novel resonated in a some really weird and beautifully terrible ways.
“I couldn’t be bothered to deal with fixing things. I preferred to wallow in the problem, dream of better days.“
watercolorstain 