Ottessa Moshfegh

Ottessa Charlotte Moshfegh (/oʊˈtɛsə ˈmɒʃfɛɡ/;^[1][2] born May 20, 1981) is an American author and novelist.^[3] Her debut novel, Eileen (2015), won the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and was a fiction finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.^[4] Moshfegh's subsequent novels include My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Death in Her Hands, and Lapvona.

Ottessa Moshfegh
Moshfegh at the 2015 Texas Book Festival.
Born	Ottessa Charlotte Moshfegh (1981-05-20) May 20, 1981 (age 42) Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.
Occupation	Novelist writer
Nationality	American
Alma mater	Barnard College (BA) Brown University (MFA)
Genre	Fiction essays
Notable works	Eileen My Year of Rest and Relaxation
Partner	Luke B. Goebel

Early life and education

Moshfegh was born in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1981.^[5] Her mother was born in Croatia and her father, who is Jewish,^[6] was born in Iran.^[7] Her parents were both musicians and taught at the New England Conservatory of Music. As a child, Moshfegh learned to play piano and clarinet.^[4]

She attended the Commonwealth School in Boston^[8] and received her BA in English from Barnard College in 2002.^[9] She completed an MFA in Literary Arts from Brown University in 2011.^[9] During her MFA study at Brown, she taught undergraduates, including Antonia Angress, author of the 2022 novel Sirens & Muses.^[10] Moshfegh was a Wallace Stegner Fellow in fiction at Stanford University from 2013 to 2015.^[11][12]

Career

After college, Moshfegh moved to China, where she taught English and worked in a punk bar.^[4]

In her mid-twenties, Moshfegh moved to New York City. She worked for Overlook Press, and then as an assistant for Jean Stein. After contracting cat-scratch fever, she left the city and earned an MFA from Brown University.^[4] During those years, she supported herself by selling vintage clothing which she has described as mostly "tea dresses."^[13]

Works

In 2014, Fence Books published Moshfegh's novella McGlue. McGlue was the first recipient of the Fence Modern Prize in Prose.^[14]

In August 2015, Penguin Press published Moshfegh's novel Eileen. It received positive reviews.^[15][16] The book was shortlisted for the 2016 Man Booker Prize.^[17] In the book, Eileen, the protagonist and narrator, describes a series of events that occurred years ago, when she was young and living in a Massachusetts town that she calls "X-ville." At the beginning of the novel, she is working as a secretary at a local juvenile prison while living with and caring for her abusive father, a retired police officer with alcoholism and paranoia. As the story continues, we learn more about a dramatic situation that causes her to leave her life in X-ville.

Homesick for Another World, a collection of short stories, was published in January 2017.^[18]

On July 10, 2018, Penguin Press published Moshfegh's second novel, My Year of Rest and Relaxation. The book describes a young art history graduate living in New York City over 15 months from mid-June 2000.^[19] Recently graduated from college and ambivalently mourning the recent deaths of her parents, she quits her job as a gallerist^[19] and undertakes to sleep for a year with the assistance of sleeping pills and other medications prescribed by a disreputable psychiatrist.

Also in 2018, Moshfegh wrote a piece for Granta in which she describes an experience she had with a much older male writer when she was 17 years old.^[20]

Moshfegh is a frequent contributor to the Paris Review and has published six stories in the journal since 2012.^[21]

In August 2020, Vintage published Moshfegh's third novel, Death in Her Hands.^[22] Moshfegh has called the book "a loneliness story."^[11]

In June 2022, Penguin Press published Moshfegh's fourth novel, Lapvona, which follows Marek, the abused son of the town shepherd, along with other characters from the fictional, medieval fiefdom of Lapvona.^[23]

Moshfegh and her husband, Luke Goebel, were awarded a shared "written by" credit (with Elizabeth Sanders) for their work on the A24 film Causeway.^[24] The film premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in September 2022.

Personal life

Moshfegh is married to the writer Luke B. Goebel, whom she met during an interview.^[25] They live in Pasadena, California.^[26]

Awards and honors

• 2013–15 Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University^[12]
• 2013 Plimpton Prize for Fiction from The Paris Review for her story "Bettering Myself"^[21]
• 2014 Fence Modern Prize in Prose (judged by Rivka Galchen), inaugural winner for McGlue^[27]
• 2014 Believer Book Award winner for McGlue^[28]
• 2016 MacDowell Colony Fellowship
• 2016 Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award for Eileen^[29]
• 2016 Man Booker Prize (shortlist) for Eileen
• 2018 The Story Prize finalist for Homesick for Another World

Bibliography

Novels

• Eileen (2015)
• My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)
• Death in Her Hands (2020)
• Lapvona (2022)

Short fiction

Collections

• Homesick for Another World (2017)^[a]

Stories^[b]

Title	Year	First published	Reprinted/collected	Notes
McGlue	2014			Novella
My new novel	2021	Moshfegh, Ottessa (2021). My new novel. Artwork by Issy Wood. Picture Books/Gagosian. ISBN 978-1-951449-24-7.		Novella. Includes The down payment by Issy Wood.

• "Medicine", Vice, December 1, 2007
• "Disgust" (alternately titled "Mr Wu"), The Paris Review, No. 202, Fall 2012
• "Bettering Myself", The Paris Review, No. 204 Spring 2013
• "Malibu", Vice, July 3, 2013
• "The Weirdos", The Paris Review, No. 206, Fall 2013
• "A Dark and Winding Road", The Paris Review, No. 207, Winter 2013
• "No Place for Good People", The Paris Review, No. 209, Summer 2014
• "Slumming", The Paris Review, No. 211, Winter 2014
• "Nothing Ever Happens Here", Granta, Issue 131, Spring 2015
• "The Surrogate", Vice, June 5, 2015
• "Dancing in the Moonlight", The Paris Review, No. 214 Fall 2015
• "The Beach Boy", The New Yorker, January 4, 2016
• "The Locked Room", The Baffler, Spring 2016
• "An Honest Woman", The New Yorker, October 24, 2016
• "Love Stories", Vice, December 5, 2016
• "Brom", Granta, Issue 139, 2017
• "The Pornographers", Vice, March 26, 2017
• "I Was a Public Schooler", The Paris Review, No. 233, Summer 2020
• "The Imitations", Apartamento, No. 27, May 17, 2021

Essays

• "Anything to Make You Happy", Lucky Peach, May 2015
• "How to Shit", The Masters Review, October 2015
• "Coyotes, the Ultimate American Tricksters", The New Yorker, July 2016

Critical studies and reviews of Moshfegh's work

Homesick for another world

• Livingstone, Josephine (January–February 2017). "Ordinary monsters : Ottessa Moshfegh plots twisted fairy tales for an age of alienation". The New Republic. 248 (1–2): 59–60.

———————

Notes

1. Treisman, Deborah (December 28, 2015). "This Week in Fiction: Ottessa Moshfegh on the Repressed Western Consciousness". The New Yorker.
2. Short stories unless otherwise noted.

References

1. "Ottessa Moshfegh's 3 Favorite Wanderers and Weirdos". The Dinner Part Download. American Public Media. February 10, 2017. Retrieved December 2, 2022.
2. "Ottessa Moshfegh". 10 Things That Scare Me. WNYC Studios. December 4, 2018. Retrieved December 2, 2022.
3. Novak, Joanna (November 3, 2014). "Ottessa Moshfegh Is the Next Big Thing, and Here Are 7 Reasons Why". Bustle. Retrieved April 13, 2015.
4. Levy, Ariel. "Ottessa Moshfegh's Otherworldly Fiction". The New Yorker. Retrieved July 3, 2018.
5. Moshfegh, Ottessa (February 28, 2016). "Ottessa Moshfegh: I didn't set out to write Eileen as a noir novel". The Guardian (Interview). Interviewed by Kate Kellaway. Retrieved June 1, 2017.
6. "Ottessa Moshfegh's Otherworldly Fiction". The New Yorker. July 2018.
7. "Character Finds A Path Out of Her Personal Prison In 'Eileen'". NPR. August 15, 2015. Retrieved August 15, 2015.
8. Sullivan, James (January 24, 2017). "The moral to her stories is... not there". The Boston Globe. Retrieved May 18, 2021.
9. . www.brown.edu. Archived from the original on May 19, 2021. Retrieved May 19, 2021.
10. "Antonia Angress, "Sirens & Muses," | Reading the Room". YouTube. The Bar and the Bookcase. August 9, 2022. (See 34:04 of 39:22 in video.)
11. Christensen, Lauren (April 16, 2020). "Ottessa Moshfegh Is Only Human". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved May 18, 2021.
12. "Former Stegner Fellows | Creative Writing Program". stanford.edu. Retrieved October 18, 2023.
13. Phillips, Kaitlin (July 19, 2018). "Ottessa Moshfegh Plays to Win". The Cut. Retrieved April 29, 2022.
14. "McGlue Otessa Moshfeg | Fence Books". www.fenceportal.org. Retrieved May 19, 2021.
15. "Eileen: A Novel". Penguin Press.
16. King, Lily (August 14, 2015). "'Eileen,' by Ottessa Moshfegh". The New York Times. Retrieved August 14, 2015.
17. Laity, Paul (September 16, 2016). "Ottessa Moshfegh interview: 'Eileen started out as a joke – also I'm broke, also I want to be famous'". The Guardian.
18. Sarah Shaffi (September 19, 2014). "Two from Moshfegh for Cape". The Bookseller.
19. "My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh – caustic and acute". the Guardian. July 22, 2018. Retrieved May 18, 2021.
20. "Jailbait". Granta Magazine. August 9, 2018. Retrieved September 6, 2019.
21. Stein, Lorin (October 28, 2014). "Ottessa Moshfegh". BOMB Magazine. Retrieved October 18, 2023.
22. "Death in Her Hands by Ottessa Moshfegh review – meandering murder mystery". the Guardian. October 9, 2020. Retrieved May 18, 2021.
23. "Lapvona by Ottessa Moshfegh". Kirkus Reviews. March 30, 2022. Retrieved November 26, 2022.
24. "Causeway". Writers Guild of America East. Retrieved August 15, 2022.
25. Phillips, Kaitlin (July 19, 2018). "Ottessa Moshfegh Plays to Win". The Cut. Retrieved March 2, 2019.
26. "You're Probably Wrong About Ottessa Moshfegh".
27. . Past winners. Archived from the original on November 24, 2015. Retrieved November 23, 2015.
28. "The Believer Book Award". The Believer. November 2015. Retrieved November 23, 2015.
29. Mark Shanahan (March 16, 2016). "Newton's Ottessa Moshfegh wins 2016 PEN/Hemingway Award". Boston Globe. Retrieved June 22, 2016.

External links

 

Wikiquote has quotations related to Ottessa Moshfegh.

• Ottessa Moshfegh at IMDb
• Hazlitt interview