Ottessa Moshfegh

Ottessa Moshfegh (born May 20, 1981, Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.) is an American writer who is known for novels and short stories that feature bitterly introspective, isolated protagonists, most often young women, living on the outskirts of society. Her fiction has been characterized as being distinctively gritty and uncompromisingly honest in its depictions of unlikeable characters. Her best-known works include the novels Eileen (2015) and My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018), both of which attained a devoted readership. Eileen was made into a movie in 2023, earning Moshfegh even more-widespread fame.

Moshfegh is the middle sibling of three children born to a Croatian mother, Dubravka Sajfar Moshfegh, and an Iranian Jewish father, Farhoud Moshfegh. Her parents were professional musicians who met while studying at the Royal Conservatory in Brussels. The couple married in 1975 and were living in Tehran when the Iranian Revolution broke out in 1978, which forced them to flee Iran for the United States. The couple first settled in Boston and began teaching at the New England Conservatory of Music. They eventually moved to the suburb Newton, where Moshfegh grew up. As a child, she learned to play piano and was initially interested in pursuing music, but she switched to writing after enrolling in a summer creative-writing course at age 14. Beginning in her teens, Moshfegh developed a dependence on alcohol and an eating disorder. She attended Alcoholics Anonymous meetings for much of her 20s, and her writing would regularly feature characters with similar struggles.

After graduating from high school, Moshfegh attended Barnard College in New York City, where she received a bachelor’s degree in English in 2002. She then moved with a boyfriend to Wuhan, China, to teach English. After two years she returned to the United States, where she lived in New York City and began working for a publishing house and as an assistant to Jean Stein, a former editor at The Paris Review. A serious bout of cat-scratch fever led Moshfegh to seek a break from New York City. She was accepted into and attended the M.F.A. program at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. After completing that program, she moved to California and was awarded a Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University in Palo Alto.

Moshfegh had early success publishing short stories in The New Yorker and The Paris Review, followed by her first book, the novella McGlue (2014). McGlue focuses on a sailor who is accused of murdering his best friend while black-out drunk. Moshfegh had conceived the idea for the book during her studies at Brown. While browsing articles at the library, she found a periodical from 1851 with a short article titled “McGlue.” The article detailed the real-life event that she transformed into a work of historical fiction.

Moshfegh developed her first novel, the critically acclaimed Eileen, while at Stanford. Motivated by the desire “to write a novel to start a career where I could live off publishing books” (as she told The Guardian in 2016), she bought a book titled The 90-Day Novel (2010), by Alan Watt, and followed it as a guide until day 60. According to Moshfegh, the plan started out as a joke on the publishing industry and an exercise in experimenting with the format of commercial fiction. She told The Guardian, “I thought, ‘I’ll show you how easy this is.’…Then it turned into a work of its own.” The story follows the life of a miserable woman named Eileen who works in a juvenile prison in a small New England town and becomes tragically interested in another woman. The novel is told both from the perspective of young Eileen, who lives with her alcoholic father and is caught up in a vicious circle of self-loathing and intense social isolation, and from the perspective of Eileen as an older, wiser woman. Moshfegh believed that marketing the novel as a commercially accessible work of fiction—i.e., as a psychological thriller—would attract readers who otherwise would not have been interested in the story’s dark themes. Instead of being turned off by the commercial motive behind its conception, critics recognized Eileen as a well-crafted and experimental work of fiction. It won the PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Fiction and was short-listed for the Man Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. The 2023 film adaptation starred Thomasin McKenzie as the titular character and Anne Hathaway as Eileen’s femme fatale crush, Rebecca.

Following Eileen, Moshfegh published Homesick for Another World in 2017, a collection of short stories. With themes similar to those in her previous works, the stories focus on the lives of men and women who exhibit social quirks and are largely unsatisfied with their place in the world. The following year, Moshfegh published My Year of Rest and Relaxation, about an unnamed protagonist who attempts to immerse herself in a yearlong drug-induced coma after the death of her parents. The book’s readership expanded beginning in 2020 amid lockdowns imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic. Its popularity spawned a trend on the social media site TikTok in which fans of the novel posted clips of themselves mimicking the protagonist’s slothful behavior.

In 2020 Moshfegh published Death in Her Hands, the story of a woman who becomes obsessed with another woman’s murder and slowly loses her grip on reality. Lapvona (2022) is set in a fiefdom in medieval Europe and centers on the son of a village shepherd.

Moshfegh has cited the poet and novelist Charles Bukowski as an influence on her brand of fiction. Like Moshfegh, Bukowski created characters who were considered socially deprived and isolated. Though Moshfegh’s works have received overwhelmingly positive reviews, some critics have taken a negative attitude toward the so-called unlikability of her characters or the “gratuitous” details she includes in her works to flesh out her dark subject matter. Moshfegh has responded to such critics by defending her interest in embracing and confronting uncomfortable tropes as a means of forcing readers into a reconciliation with these topics. As she told The Guardian in 2016, in defense of her most notorious protagonist, “Eileen is a character that makes people uncomfortable. She is not going to…cheer you up. But might it not be liberating to hear the thoughts of someone who is completely ignored by society?”