Eileen – Ottessa Moshfegh

I’ve been an Ottessa Moshfegh fan-girl since I read the very first pages of My Year Of Rest And Relaxation. So, it was inevitable that I would pick up its precursor: Eileen, Moshfegh’s first full-length novel, first published back in 2015.

Eileen is narrated from the present(ish) day, but the protagonist is reflecting on events that took place the week of Christmas in 1964. Despite that choice for timing, I’ll warn you right now that Eileen is a holiday novel in the same sense that Die Hard is a Christmas movie. That week was the last that the titular main character spent in her hometown, a small Massachusetts village she calls X-ville. She is narrating for us what she calls her ‘disappearance’ at age 24.

At that time, Eileen was a secretary at a boy’s prison that she calls Moorehead, living in squalor with her paranoid alcoholic ex-cop father. So, it’s not hard to imagine why she fantasised about running away and moving to New York City. That dream is little more than idle fantasy – alongside the more explicit fantasies she has about Randy the buff prison guard – until a new counselor, Rebecca Saint John, is hired to work with the Moorehead boys. Suddenly, Eileen is offered a taste of a different life, one where she could be friends with someone as enchanting and sophisticated as Rebecca – but it ain’t all beer and skittles.

Now, a timid author might have given the reader a bit of distance from a protagonist as repugnant as Eileen, but Moshfegh is anything but timid. No one writes confronting fiction about distasteful women quite like her. And it’s not subtle: Eileen actually says to the reader, on page 7, “I am not one of those women who try to make people happy all the time,”. The most generous reader might feel sympathy for Eileen, whose life is dreary (to say the least), but most of us will find her pretty unpalatable. She hates everyone and everything – including herself – and her only solutions to any problem seems to be stalking, shoplifting, or sniffing something gross.

Eileen is a grim read, but it’s also funny. Someone unfamiliar with Moshfegh’s oeuvre might assume that the humour is an unintentional side effect of having a story narrated by such a dry and cutting character, but I know my girl well enough to know that nothing she puts on the page is unintentional. Likewise, the character of Rebecca Saint John is very carefully crafted, and the allusion to Daphne du Maurier’s (slash Alfred Hitchcock’s) Rebecca is no accident.

Jean Zimmerman (NPR) called Eileen “charmingly disturbing”, “delightfully dour”, and “pleasingly perverse”, which sums it up about as well as I possibly could. Moshfegh hits all the right beats, and proves to us all that she was a master of the form from the very beginning. My only objection to Eileen, of course, was a very, very sad dog death in the ‘Sunday’ chapter – but I had some warning, so I knew it was coming and I could steel myself. I offer the same to you now, of course.

Read Eileen on audiobook via Libro.fm here. (affiliate link)

My favourite Amazon reviews of Eileen:

• “Just some grungy girl with no self esteem or conscience.” – G. Jahn
• “This book is disgusting. This writer should have kept this one for her diary. I kept hoping it would get better. I read 85% and deeply regret the waste of my life spent reading the bowels of someone’s warped mind. I read it because it was recommended by a writer I admire. I will NEVER do that again. If you enjoy shallow perversion, you might love it!” – Amazon Customer
• “How is this so highly thought of? It is a girl bitching about her life for 300 pages. Hard pass” – SUSAN
• “Part way thru the book, I paused and read some of the reviews. One mentioned that getting to page 221 make the whole thing worthwhile. So I trudged on. Spoiler alert! No it doesn’t.” – karen wulff
• “Turgid, plodding, narrow, unrealistic in the exact sense of realism. It must have been a great hit in a writers workshop.” – jms333