Finding Meaning in Going Nowhere
By Heart is a series in which authors share and discuss their all-time favorite passages in literature. See entries from Karl Ove Knausgaard, Jonathan Franzen, Emma Donoghue, Michael Chabon, and more.
A few weeks ago, Ottessa Moshfegh, the author of the new short-story collection Homesick for Another World, sent me a video of the Scottish-born singer Lena Zavaroni. I couldn’t believe I’d never heard of her: Zavaroni’s performance of Neil Sedaka’s “Going Nowhere” is so charismatic and emotionally affecting that she seems destined for the brightest fame. Then I read the story of her tragic, too-short life. A child star with a grown-up voice, people once thought she’d be the next Barbra Streisand. But anorexia, a lifelong struggle that started in her early teens, drew her inward and ultimately away from public life. Zavaroni’s final, most dramatic attempt to save herself was to request experimental brain surgery—the exact details are unclear. Some accounts suggest the procedure was successful, but we’ll never know: She contracted pneumonia in the process, an infection her starved body couldn’t handle, and she died at 35.
In a conversation for this series, Moshfegh explained how the lyrics to “Going Nowhere” recall her own struggles with depression, eating
