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| ‘How do you solve a mystery in your mind? That’s basically what writing a novel is’ Ottessa Moshfegh. |
Ottessa Moshfegh: 'Americans are really good storytellers and really good liars'
Lisa AllardiceFamous for writing about isolation, the author of My Year of Rest and Relaxation talks about her new novel, chronic pain and growing up as the child of migrants in America
Lisa Allardice
Saturday 15 August 2020
“It is just kind of a coincidence, obviously,” Ottessa Moshfegh says of the importance of isolation in her fiction, from her home in Pasadena, California. “But yeah, it has been a major theme in my life.” She was due to be in the UK this summer as part of a publicity tour for her third novel, Death in Her Hands, but she had an odd sense “that something was going to get fucked up”. Clearly, she didn’t foresee a global pandemic, but her 2018 cult novel My Year of Rest and Relaxation, in which her unnamed narrator holes up in her New York apartment, has made her the unofficial laureate of lockdown. “I guess it makes me glad that people are having a place to put their isolated misery,” she says of the novel’s resurgence in recent months.
Routinely hailed as one of the most exciting young American authors working today, she has been compared to Flannery O’Connor, Shirley Jackson and Charles Bukowski (one of her heroes). Her characters are a miserable ensemble of drunks and dropouts, misfits and murderers, pervs and pill-heads – all loners. And she has created an inimitable band of angry, sometimes amoral, often unpleasant and always unreliable narrators, who challenge our assumptions about femininity in uncomfortable ways. Her work takes dirty realism and makes it filthier. But it is is also beautiful: “like seeing Kate Moss take a shit”, as she memorably described her writing; the depravity of her material matched by the purity and precision of her prose (a sort of American Edward St Aubyn, minus the aristos). Just don’t call her a millennial writer, “even though I am millennial”, says the author, who turns 40 next year. “There’s nothing flattering at all about the description right now.”
It is barely 8am Pacific time when we talk on Skype. The house where she lives with her husband, the novelist Luke Goebel, and their two dogs was built by an artist in the 1920s and is called “Casa de Pájaros” she tells me, as if I were actually visiting, “which means house of birds”. As you’d expect from her fiction, she is intensely serious, given to flashes of dry wit: “It’s too late”, she deadpans, when I say we need warning of what she’s writing next (“a novel which begins in China and comes to America”, she adds grimly). Careful in her replies, she sometimes pauses so long that I worry the screen has frozen.
The pandemic has provoked “a kind of war-like situation” in the US, she says. But the rise of Black Lives Matter and the recent Native American protests against Trump’s speech at Mount Rushmore have given her hope, despite “everything else that is coming to the surface, which is so rotten and so overdue in its exposure”. Americans are “really good storytellers and really good liars”, she says, especially about their country’s history. “It’s over! Enough of us have woken up … have disabused ourselves of a fantasy that everything is OK here because our own lives are fine.” Of course “things can always get worse”, she says, especially “if Trump is re-elected. You can’t underestimate the incredible power of stupidity.”
Famous for writing about isolation, Moshfegh is herself no stranger to spending long periods in monk-like retreat from the world. A couple of weeks into California’s lockdown, she knew that the only way she “would survive this period creatively” was to work: “How else do you survive this feeling of endlessness?”
This question goes to the heart of all Moshfegh’s fiction, from her 2014 novella McGlue, a feverish monologue by a drunken 19th-century sailor accused of murdering his wealthy gay lover; to her first novel Eileen, shortlisted for the Man Booker prize in 2016, in which poor Eileen, living with her abusive alcoholic father, is as trapped as the boys in the prison where she works. It is most obvious in My Year of Rest and Relaxation, which is set at the turn of the millennium and builds inexorably to 9/11. The narrator withdraws from the world, sustained only by Whoopi Goldberg movies and a panoply of pills, in the belief that if she can only sleep enough she will “become a whole new person”. “As summer dwindled, my sleep got thin and empty, like a room with white walls and tepid air conditioning.”
All of Moshfegh’s characters are in some sort of solitary confinement, self-imposed or otherwise: “Isolation is the natural condition that we need in order to be introspective, to go on a journey with ourselves towards some new thing,” she says. Seventy two-year-old Vesta, the narrator of Death in Her Hands, is no exception: following the death of her controlling husband, she has moved to a remote cabin in rural Levant to live out her last years in peace, with only her beloved dog for company. “I had no need for a phone. I had nobody to call and nobody would ever call me.”
Moshfegh calls Death in Her Hands “a loneliness story”, lonelier even than its predecessors, which seems a bit like distinguishing between shades of jet black. She wrote the first draft back in 2015, at “an extremely lonely point” in her life. Her “tendency as a novelist”, she explains, is to bring a story to a certain point “then to leave it alone so that I can go off and learn everything that I need to learn from my life and writing experience so that when I come back to it, I’m a smarter writer with better ideas. It’s just my instinct.” She had just finished her blistering collection of stories, Homesick for Another World: “It was almost like someone had died when I finished that book,” she told the New York Times recently. “I was in so much emotional pain and confusion that I needed a project that was going to keep me in the present moment,” she says now. “This book was born out of a need to give myself another world to live in that was safe.”
Safe seems an odd description for a novel that opens, ostensibly at least, with a murder, when Vesta discovers a note while out walking her dog: “Her name was Magda. Nobody will ever know who killed her. It wasn’t me. Here is her dead body.” Although Death in Her Hands is “probably even more literary than McGlue”, she is prepared for it “to be mistaken for a mystery novel”. She still regrets comments in an interview for this paper in 2016, saying that Eileen had started as a “fuck-you joke”, written in two months following a how-to-write formula to help her break into the publishing mainstream. (In interviews, her openness and unapologetic self-assurance can seem almost shocking.) Like Eileen, Death in Her Hands uses the conventions of crime fiction to explore the writing process itself, as Vesta’s wild imaginings about Magda’s fate turn her into a detective-novelist figure. “It is about how a character can construct a story with almost nothing to go on,” she says. “How do you solve a mystery in your mind? That’s basically what writing a novel is.”
The other clue to the novel is in the title – death. “There’s a lot to write about death,” she says wryly. “That was the thing that was waiting for me.” In 2017 she endured “a year of death after death in horrible and shocking ways”. In May, Jean Stein, part of American publishing aristocracy killed herself by jumping from the 13th floor of her Manhattan apartment. Moshfegh had worked as her assistant in her 20s, and found her death a horrifying echo of the falling woman at the end of My Year of Rest and Relaxation. “I loved her deeply,” she says. “She was like a godmother to me.” Then in November her younger brother Darius died from an overdose. “My brother’s death completely changed my life,” she says. He was 30.Death had been lurking in her consciousness ever since she was five years old, when, as she tells it in an unmissable fictional letter to President Trump, “a black hole” opened before her feet. “I heard a voice echo up from the hole and say to me with complete authority: ‘You will die one day.’ ‘Well, shit, I thought.’” For a long time she felt she knew when that day would be, but now she’s not so sure. “I think maybe my destiny shifted or something,” she says, which may sound like so much Californian hokum. But that experience at kindergarten was her first realisation that she is “not like other people. I am just pretending to operate in the more mundane quotidian world for much of the time,” she says. “In my heart and soul I’m mostly in that other place.”
As a child she was “very well-behaved”, she says. “Very quiet and very, very observant.” But she was always bothered by the same question: “Why did I feel like such a weirdo?” The answer she has arrived at is a knotty combination of her unusual ancestry and upbringing. The middle child of an Iranian father and Croatian mother, both professional violinists (they met at the Royal Conservatory in Brussels) who fled Tehran at the outbreak of the Iranian revolution, she was always “acutely aware” of her troubled heritage, in a way that had “zero place” in the suburban America of the 1980s. “It was a lot to take on as a child, growing up in a country whose culture your parents don’t know,” she says, “and they were still recovering from all of the shit that happened to them, which was horrifying and unexpected, and everything that happened to their parents.”
Their house in the leafy town of Newton , just outside Boston, Massachusetts, was always a mess, she says, with violins and books everywhere. Everything was “secondary” to music: her elder sister Sarvanez was “a prodigy cellist”. Ottessa learned to read music before words, and could play four instruments by the time she was seven. “Music is so mysterious in the way that it affects us,” she says. “It is this sort of intangible resonance that gets inside our body and affects our emotions, and I think of words in the same way.” Her supreme self-discipline and confidence stem, perhaps, from such an intense, competitive environment. She “discovered she was a writer” at 14, when her mother sent her on a creative writing summer camp (they had missed the deadline for the music programme): “I accepted my destiny.”
Between the ages of nine and 12, Moshfegh had to wear a brace for severe scoliosis of the spine for 23 hours each day, which is hard not to read as an embodiment of the themes of pain and entrapment that shape her fiction. “That brace fucked me up in many, many ways,” she says. “I am still fucked up.” It was prescribed for her “to try to control and constrict my growth, because I was growing in the wrong directions,” she says. Pain is still something she “deals with 24 hours a day”; ironically for the author of My Year of Rest and Relaxation, she now writes mainly in bed “with a very specific pillow situation”. In 2007 she contracted a nasty case of cat-scratch fever, which made her feel as if she “was going totally nuts” and forced her to leave New York to return home to be looked after by her mother for a while.
Dealing with the body, and physical appearance, are fraught issues in Moshfegh’s novels, which subvert any objectification of women (you won’t find an author photo on any of her books). Her own struggles with an eating disorder (“an enormous element of my relationship with myself and my life”), and alcohol – she was in AA for much of her 20s – recur like aftershocks throughout her work: drunken McGlue, laxative-guzzling Eileen, bulimic Reva in My Year. “My classroom was on the first floor, next to the nun’s lounge. I used their bathroom to puke in the mornings,” begins “Bettering Myself” the first short story in Homesick for Another World. In Death in Her Hands, Vesta lovingly feeds her dog a whole chicken while making a bagel last all day for herself; her disgust at the local women, “dull heifers … with nothing to do but eat”, a response to her self-starvation. “Drink wine” is on her to-do list. “It’s up to you whether you think she’s likable or not,” she says sharply. “She’s supposed to be human.”
Today Moshfegh’s only addiction is to work, which has at times also threatened to consume her; at one point she renounced romance to concentrate on writing. Until, in a story that has become part of Moshfegh legend, Goebel appeared at her door one day to interview her, just as a Vedic astrologer had predicted he would. “I saw him with his dog, and my precise thought was ‘Oh, shit – here it is.’ Then I kind of surrendered,” she wrote. The interview lasted a month, and ends: “Yup, and I love you.”
The novel she is working on at the moment (having put the China one on hold – “It hasn’t felt like the right time to work on it”) is set in an eastern European village during the middle ages, and has come really fast. “It is giving me a place to put all the things that I don’t necessarily understand about humanity and why we do the things that we do to each other,” she says. To “unfix” her mind she watches things on YouTube, in particular police interrogation confessions. “There’s something about watching someone get worn down into telling the truth, at least in this project, that is kind of helpful,” she explains. “Helpful but also sort of entertaining and horrifying.” (At a particularly low point in her early 20s, while teaching in the Chinese city of Wuhan, she got into “the habit” of googling images of dead people.)
After years on the move, she is finally settled with Goebel in Pasadena. “I kinda wanted to move to the suburbs,” she says, when they tired of travelling between her apartment in East Hollywood and his place in the desert. Her dog Walter (also the name she gave Vesta’s creepy dead husband) joins her on Skype after his nap. “Stability only makes me smarter,” she says. “Because I don’t have to waste energy trying to stabilise.” Lockdown or not, she still spends her time “constantly writing”, or thinking about writing. “All of the pain and suffering and frustration and insanity that results in writing a novel, all of that difficulty is what I’ve chosen,” she says. “I do it because I love it.”
• Death in Her Hands is published by Jonathan Cape (£14.99).
THE GUARDIAN
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