By Celia Papavasileiou,
If you were a part of the online reading community in 2020 there is no way you haven’t heard of Ottessa Moshfegh and her brilliant novel “My Year of Rest and Relaxation”. Her story about a depressed woman using prescription pills in an attempt to sleep for an entire year fascinated the community and her fanbase started growing rapidly. Who is Ottessa Moshfegh? And what makes her work so special?
Moshfegh was born in Boston, Massachusetts in 1981. Her mother was Croatian, named Dubravka Sajfar Moshfegh, and her father was Iranian Jewish, named Farhoud Moshfegh. She also has two siblings. Her parents being musicians, she has been involved with the arts since a young age, she learned how to play the piano and showed great interest in following a music related career.
Her relationship with music contributed to her growth as a writer. In her own words: “what was a big part of the beginning of my writing, weirdly, was classical music and playing piano, just creatively as a means of expression and discipline, and learning about how to develop technique”. However, her official first encounter with writing was at fourteen years old, when she participated in a summer creative writing course.
For her bachelor’s degree, she studied English at Barnard College. After college, she moved to Wuhun, China for two years, where she taught English. Her teaching career was followed up by her moving to New York and attending Brown University’s M.F.A. program. After that, she moved to California and was awarded a Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University. During those years, she also worked in publishing and as the assistant of Jean Stein.
Her career didn’t take long to take off. She quickly published short stories in “The Paris Review” and in “The New Yorker”. In 2014 she got officially published. Her first publication is the novella “McGlue”, a story following a sailor who’s being accused of the murder of his best friend. The novella is inspired by a real-life story, which Moshfegh happened upon when studying at Brown.
During her Stanford years, she created her first novel “Eileen”. Her writing process, while unusual at first glance, proved to be a powerful tool to her career. Determined to make a living out of her writing, she followed a book titled “The 90-Day Novel”, which was written by Alan Watt, until day 60. The narration follows a melancholic woman working in a juvenile prison as she forms an obsession with a mysterious woman.
Her debut novel received critical success and was short-listed for the Man Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 2023 it got adapted into a movie featuring Thomasin McKenzie and Anne Hathaway. Her other publications include the short story collection “Homesick for Another World” (2017) and the novels ‘My Year of Rest and Relaxation” (2018), “Death in Her Hands” (2020) and “Lapvona” (2022).
The main themes in Moshfegh’s works is hard to describe. She has a distinctive writing style, but that doesn’t make her novels neither repetitive nor less unique. They tackle cruelty, paranoia and even death. In “The Guardian”, writing about “Eileen”, she highlighted that everyone asked her why she had written “such a disgusting character”. Her protagonists aren’t necessarily pleasant or even likeable. Some even characterize them as gross and even repulsive. But they sure are interesting, authentic and, although it sounds scary, realistic.
“I’ve been a teenager my whole life and being disgusted was a big part of my response to the world. And it saved me from hiding from it because it was a way of reacting. Honestly, at this point, I’m not even disgusted, I’m just hiding”. This is exactly what her novels and stories make you feel: they don’t let you hide. They urge you to face your fears, feelings and desires, whatever that might mean for each of us.
Ottessa Moshfegh’s work is one of a kind. It can be confusing, weird and even disgusting. But it’s also thought-provoking, challenging and definitely refreshing. She manages to scratch under the surface and present to the reader the parts of life they usually choose to ignore. If you want to challenge your way of viewing and thinking about the world, I strongly urge you to pick up one of her books.
References
- DISGUST HAS BEEN AN ENORMOUS THEME IN MY LIFE. grandjournal.net. Available here
- Ottessa Moshfegh. Britannica. Available here
- Ottessa Moshfegh, BC ’02, on Substack, disgust, and becoming a writer. Columbia Spectator. Available here
- Ottessa Moshfegh: ‘Everyone asked me why I had written such a disgusting female character’. The Guardian. Available here
