My “sad girl” fans concern me

July 7, 2022 3:59 AM

Ottessa Moshfegh in conversation with Carmen Maria Machado.

Becca Rothfield reviews Lapvona for the Guardian

Ottessa Moshfegh’s petulant corpus, [...] is populated almost uniformly by wastrels and wantons. In My Year of Rest and Relaxation, the protagonist takes designer pharmaceuticals to stay unconscious, while in Eileen she binges on laxatives after every meal and fantasises about patricide. These forays into negativity and repulsion provide welcome respite from a culture otherwise submerged in pep and positivity – but Moshfegh’s latest effort reveals the limitations of [the] approach

Andrea Long Chu reviews Lapvona for Vulture:

If you have ever worked with one, you’ll know that assholes don’t respond well to input. “Coaxing something up there, into the light, can take all day,” reports the narrator of Ottessa Moshfegh’s “Brom,” a 2017 short story about a shut-in feudal lord who spends his days easing foreign objects into his rectum.

posted by dmh (15 comments total)

Thanks for posting this — I've been following Carmen Maria Machado for a while, but I hadn't heard of Ottessa Moshfegh — her work sounds interesting, I'll have to check it out.
posted by wesleyac at 4:13 AM on July 7, 2022 [1 favorite]

That's a great conversation but it's a shame it's not ten times longer. I'm also a little devastated to read that Machado isn't working on a new collection of stories, or better yet a novel. I keep hoping! But also I want to say, I've rarely read a review as convincing as Andrea Long Chu's--when it was going around the other day, I read it and immediately rushed to buy several of Moshfegh's books just because they sounded so weird-but-literary? I'd avoided them thus far because they did sound like books specifically for a younger, sad-girl audience. I have no idea what I'm in for.
posted by mittens at 5:24 AM on July 7, 2022 [1 favorite]

I loved reading My Year of Rest and Relaxation at the height of worldwide Covid lockdowns in 2020. It felt as soporific as the mood felt. I don’t know if it would quite hit the same. It’s a marvellous novel, and worth getting to the end of it.
posted by chronic sublime at 5:56 AM on July 7, 2022 [2 favorites]

I have not read her newest book yet, but of her other books, Eileen is my favorite and has held up to rereading.
posted by Dip Flash at 6:05 AM on July 7, 2022 [2 favorites]

I couldn’t put down My Year Of Rest and Relaxation when I read it in a weekend earlier this year. Same and even more so for Machado’s In The Dream House in early pandemic. Haunting and captivating. This year I’ve been slowly savoring Her Body and Other Parties. Very much looking forward to reading this interview. Thanks for posting!

For any other Machado heads, I highly rec the episode of Cameron Esposito’s podcast Queery where she interviews CMM.
posted by moonbeam at 6:09 AM on July 7, 2022 [2 favorites]

That is one heck of an Andrea Long Chu review. Highly recommend reading to the end.

It's even better if you happen to have read some of her other pieces and reviews - there are a couple of points where I felt like she sort of...underplayed her point in a way that made it extremely LOUD to me.

This is the problem with writing to wake people up: Your ideal reader is inevitably asleep. Dang! Don't hold back, all attack!!

Lapvona sounds very sixties-y in these reviews and probably not my thing, although it's an improvement that women can write that kind of novel now.

We as a society seem to be having a shit-and-gore moment - there's lots of gore in queer fiction and SF right now, I notice, and definitely the cultural moment is one in which one can talk a lot more about shit and shitting than in the past. Some of this seems like it's probably a medial imaging-plus-internet thing - a lot more consciousness of the body's insides. Some of it is probably post-Hannibal. Some of it is...our moment and the horrors thereof.
posted by Frowner at 6:34 AM on July 7, 2022 [9 favorites]

definitely the cultural moment is one in which one can talk a lot more about shit and shitting than in the past.

A step back for the culture as a whole.

Moshfegh is not my thing, but I gave some of her work a chance because she's mentioned a lot in the context of other writers whose work I unabashedly adore (like Elif Batuman and Sloane Crosley). I listened to the audiobook of My Year at the beginning of the pandemic and was caught between finding it an impressive work and really hating how that character was a voice in my ear at that time. (In retrospect I should have read the book instead of listened to it.) I also read Death in Her Hands, which was compelling and well-written but (spoiler) the death of the animal was upsetting to read. I'm probably not going to read her other work.

I think I liked her better the less I knew about her. Learning that she had an eating disorder put a lot of her hatred of fat people into context for me, but the comment she made about "men being turned into children" from the Tank Magazine interview Long Chu mentions in the Vulture article made me think she was just another pick me, albeit one with undeniable talent who got really lucky.
posted by pxe2000 at 7:10 AM on July 7, 2022 [4 favorites]

This review and another brutal one which I can't find at the moment convinced me I don't need to pick anything of hers up--and I have a decent tolerance for authorial cruelty, deployed in the right way. But even putting aside whether it specifically persuaded me, the linked piece is superb as a review. The other review bitched about the scatology, which on the one hand is understandable but on the other suggests that it was not evaluating the work on its own terms and indeed might be suffering from mere squeamishness; this one embraces it to show that the critique is not merely the result of an offput sensibility.
posted by praemunire at 7:40 AM on July 7, 2022 [5 favorites]

I think Otessa Moshfesgh is a fascinating writer, even if I struggle, at times, to say that I like her work (and I think I've read most of it at this point, save Lapvona. Eileen is still my favorite). But I also like books that make me feel uncomfortable.

Carmen Maria Machado is a treasure. Her recent co-host on the You're Wrong About Go Ask Alice episodes have been a joy to listen to.
posted by thivaia at 8:59 AM on July 7, 2022 [6 favorites]

From Eileen:
“Death was alive in that picture”
If you’ve read Eileen you may remember that sentence. The ending of that book is horrifying but well earned.

I dunno about booktok’s wild obsession with everything mossfegh tho
posted by angrycat at 9:48 AM on July 7, 2022 [3 favorites]

Oooh going to track down those You’re Wrong About episodes now, thivaia!

And I share your sentiment about Moshfegh. I blazed through My Year of… but I have zero desire to reread it.
posted by moonbeam at 10:17 AM on July 7, 2022 [2 favorites]

Ottessa Moshfegh's "Homesick for Another World: Stories" is a superb collection of stories. She's shining one of those ultra bright tactical flashlights up the USA's dirty hemorrhoidal butthole, and it's dazzlingly/blindingly repulsive, astute, and tragicomic.
posted by nikoniko at 11:54 AM on July 7, 2022 [2 favorites]

Ottessa Moshfegh's "Homesick for Another World: Stories" is a superb collection of stories.

I agree. After Eileen, this is my second favorite of her works.
posted by Dip Flash at 7:01 PM on July 7, 2022

We as a society seem to be having a shit-and-gore moment - there's lots of gore in queer fiction and SF right now, I notice,

It's because these scenes became more sex-negative, and gore is filling in the gap left by sex and sensuality.
posted by subdee at 10:52 AM on July 9, 2022

After finishing a horror novel I didn't particularly like (everything was very nice and safe, and even death was not terribly disturbing, which is a weird thing to say about a horror novel and yet!), I moved over to Eileen, and oh my god! I'm only a third of the way through, but I'm already ten times more horrified than I was at the book with all the murders. And it's a very sympathy-tinged horror; when someone comes at you with that many bad habits, bad opinions and bad choices, then eventually you're going to find one or two that you share too (even if you'd never admit which ones), and then maybe one or two more, and what kind of person are you, anyway, to have so much similarity to such a disgust-drenched narrator? It's amazingly effective, and it would be so easy to go wrong with it. I keep finding myself wondering about the craft of it. Did she just sit down and write this terrible, terrible scene, or did she write, say, a less terrible scene with less disgust and less body-horror, and then keep going back over and over to make it worse and worse until it hit this level of dry terrible perfection?
posted by mittens at 3:39 PM on July 9, 2022