Ottessa Moshfegh’s Riveting Meta-Mysteries
“I’ve disguised the ugly truth in a kind of spiffy noir package,” Ottessa Moshfegh said about her debut novel, Eileen, published in 2015. Convinced that readers wouldn’t pick up a novel about a self-loathing woman with little desire to please others, she masked her “freak book” as a mystery. To Moshfegh’s frustration, readers still fixated on the grossness of Eileen—a laxative-addicted clerk at a juvenile prison who has vivid, violent thoughts—so she funneled similarly off-putting traits into the narrator of her second novel, My Year of Rest and Relaxation, but gave her the looks of an off-duty model. (“Try to tell me disgusting!” one interviewer.) In her latest novel, , Moshfegh is back to her old formal tricks. This time, she uses a meta-mystery-gone-mad to explore a question that applies to her own oeuvre: How much control can women have over their narratives?
