Jump to content

Ottessa Moshfegh

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Ottessa Moshfegh
Moshfegh at the 2015 Texas Book Festival
Moshfegh at the 2015 Texas Book Festival
Born
Ottessa Charlotte Moshfegh

(1981-05-20) May 20, 1981 (age 44)
Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.
Occupation
  • Novelist
  • writer
NationalityAmerican
Alma materBarnard College (BA)
Brown University (MFA)
Genre
  • Fiction
  • essays
Notable worksEileen
My Year of Rest and Relaxation
Signature
Website
ottessathisottessathat.substack.com

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.

Early life and education

[edit]

Moshfegh was born in 1981 and raised in Boston, Massachusetts.[5] Her mother was Croatian and her father an Iranian Jew[6][7] and both were musicians who taught at the New England Conservatory of Music. As a child, Moshfegh learned to play piano and clarinet.[4]

Moshfegh attended the Commonwealth School in Boston[8] and earned a BA in English from Barnard College in 2002.[9] In 2011, she completed an MFA in Literary Arts at Brown University,[9] where she also taught undergraduates, including Antonia Angress.[10] From 2013 to 2015, Moshfegh was a Wallace Stegner Fellow in fiction at Stanford University.[11][12]

Career

[edit]

After college, Moshfegh moved to China, where she taught English and worked in a punk bar.[4] In her mid-twenties, she relocated to New York City, working for Overlook Press and later as an assistant to Jean Stein. After contracting cat-scratch fever, she left the city and pursued an MFA at Brown University.[4] During those years, she supported herself by selling vintage clothing, which she has described as mostly "tea dresses."[13]

Works

[edit]

In 2014, Fence Books published Moshfegh's novella McGlue, the first winner of the Fence Modern Prize in Prose.[14] In August 2015, Penguin Press published her first full-length novel, Eileen, which received favorable reviews[15][16] and was shortlisted for the 2016 Man Booker Prize.[17] In Eileen, the protagonist and narrator recounts a series of events from her youth in a Massachusetts town she calls "X-ville". At the start of the novel, she works as a secretary at a local juvenile prison while living with and caring for her abusive father, a retired police officer struggling with alcoholism and paranoia. As the story continues, the circumstances that led her to leave X-ville are revealed.

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 a 15-month period starting in mid-June 2000.[19] Recently graduated and ambivalently mourning her parents' deaths, she quits her job as a gallerist and embarks on a yearlong plan to sleep, aided by sleeping pills and other medications prescribed by a dubious psychiatrist.[19]

Also in 2018, Moshfegh wrote a piece for Granta in which she recounted an experience with a much older male writer when she was 17 years old.[20] She is a frequent contributor to the Paris Review, having published eight stories in the journal since 2012.[21][22] In 2020, Vintage published her third novel, Death in Her Hands,[23] which Moshfegh has called "a loneliness story".[11]

In 2021, Moshfegh's short story "My New Novel" was published as a stand-alone artbook by Picture Books, an imprint of Gagosian. The book features a foldout painting by Issy Wood illustrating "the most directly surreal part of the story".[24] In 2022, Penguin Press published Moshfegh's fourth novel, Lapvona, which follows Marek, the abused son of a shepherd, along with other characters from the fictional medieval fiefdom of Lapvona.[25]

Moshfegh co-wrote the 2022 drama film Causeway with Luke Goebel and Elizabeth Sanders.[26] It premiered at the 2022 Toronto International Film Festival.[27]

Personal life

[edit]

Moshfegh was married to the writer Luke B. Goebel, whom she met during an interview.[28] As of 2020, they were living in Pasadena, California.[29] She has cited the poet and novelist Charles Bukowski as an influence on her work. Like Moshfegh, Bukowski created characters who were considered socially deprived and isolated.[30] In 2026, Moshfegh announced she and Goebel were separated.[31]

Awards and honors

[edit]

Bibliography

[edit]

Novels

[edit]

Short fiction

[edit]

Novellas

[edit]
  • McGlue (2014)
  • My New Novel (2021)

Filmography

[edit]
  • Causeway (2022; co-written with Luke Goebel & Elizabeth Sanders)
  • Eileen (2023; based on her novel; co-written with Luke Goebel)

References

[edit]
  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. ^ a b c d 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. ^ "Character Finds A Path Out of Her Personal Prison In 'Eileen'". NPR. August 15, 2015. Retrieved August 15, 2015.
  7. ^ White, Duncan (August 5, 2018). "Ottessa Moshfegh: why I wrote the story of a girl who tried to sleep for a year". The Telegraph.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: deprecated archival service (link)
  8. ^ Sullivan, James (January 24, 2017). "The moral to her stories is... not there". The Boston Globe. Retrieved May 18, 2021.
  9. ^ a b "Ottessa Moshfegh | Literary Arts Program". 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. ^ a b Christensen, Lauren (April 16, 2020). "Ottessa Moshfegh Is Only Human". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved May 18, 2021.
  12. ^ a b "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. ^ a b "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. ^ a b Stein, Lorin (October 28, 2014). "Ottessa Moshfegh". BOMB Magazine. Retrieved October 18, 2023.
  22. ^ "Ottessa Moshfegh". The Paris Review. Retrieved October 2, 2025.
  23. ^ "Death in Her Hands by Ottessa Moshfegh review – meandering murder mystery". the Guardian. October 9, 2020. Retrieved May 18, 2021.
  24. ^ "My New Novel / The down payment". Gagosian Shop. Retrieved October 17, 2025.
  25. ^ "Lapvona by Ottessa Moshfegh". Kirkus Reviews. March 30, 2022. Retrieved November 26, 2022.
  26. ^ "Causeway". Writers Guild of America East. Retrieved August 15, 2022.
  27. ^ Brunner, Raven (October 7, 2022). "'Causeway' on Apple TV+: Trailer, Cast, Premiere Date and More". Decider. Retrieved April 12, 2024.
  28. ^ Phillips, Kaitlin (July 19, 2018). "Ottessa Moshfegh Plays to Win". The Cut. Retrieved March 2, 2019.
  29. ^ "You're Probably Wrong About Ottessa Moshfegh".
  30. ^ "Ottessa Moshfegh | Biography, Books, Eileen, & Facts | Britannica". www.britannica.com. March 23, 2024. Retrieved April 23, 2024.
  31. ^ https://substack.com/@ottessa/note/c-245043463?r=17jaa
  32. ^ "The Believer Book Award". The Believer. November 2015. Retrieved November 23, 2015.
  33. ^ "Ottessa Moshfegh - Artist". MacDowell. Retrieved August 15, 2025.
  34. ^ Mark Shanahan (March 16, 2016). "Newton's Ottessa Moshfegh wins 2016 PEN/Hemingway Award". Boston Globe. Retrieved June 22, 2016.
  35. ^ Treisman, Deborah (December 28, 2015). "This Week in Fiction: Ottessa Moshfegh on the Repressed Western Consciousness". The New Yorker.
  36. ^ 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.
[edit]
Wikiquote has quotations related to Ottessa Moshfegh.
Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Ottessa_Moshfegh&oldid=1350547640"