Everything you need to know about Eileen by Ottessa Moshfegh

Trapped between caring for her verbally abusive alcoholic father and her dead-end job as a secretary at a juvenile correctional facility for teenage boys, 24-year-old Eileen Dunlop dreams of escape. It’s December 1964, in the sleepy suburbs of wintery New England – a town which Eileen aptly names ‘X-ville’. ‘I looked like nothing special,’ she says of herself, while filling her spare time shoplifting and surreptitiously observing a co-worker and former inmate named Randy from afar.

Haunted by her neglectful upbringing, Eileen is consumed by a profound sense of self-hatred. As a result, her father offers a continued source of resentment and Eileen tries to contain him while he drinks until he blacks out, and suffers from disturbing paranoia as a consequence of his crippling addiction. 

Eileen is a loner, and a nihilistic one at that, but when glamorous new counsellor, Rebecca Saint John, arrives at the prison, Eileen is beguiled and desperately seeks a connection with her. Quickly, their budding friendship turns into a parasitic obsession – one that comes with a price, as Rebecca draws Eileen into a shocking act of violence.  

Moshfegh’s novel is narrated in the first person by an older Eileen, looking back on the fateful acts of that Christmastime, 50 years earlier. ’There’s no better way to say it,’ Eileen muses, the passing of time affording reflection. ‘I was not myself back then. I was someone else. I was Eileen.’

Throughout her body of work, Moshfegh’s characters are usually transgressive and amoral. She uses her series of misanthropes to subvert societal notions of beauty and desire, leaving the reader to pause and question. 

Eileen, the novel’s protagonist, is – and always has been – an outcast. One whom Patrick Anderson at the Washington Post described as ‘one of the strangest, most messed-up, most pathetic – and yet, in her own inimitable way, endearing – misfits I’ve encountered in fiction.’ 

Eileen is a mass of contradictions. She’s a young woman who has no qualms about wearing her dead mother’s dowdy clothes, while filled with her own relentless self-loathing. She has a difficult relationship with her body, pinching any sign of excess flesh she can locate on her scrawny frame, and disgusted at the sight of her genitalia. Her addiction to laxatives leaves her revelling in her own functions and secretions. Beyond this Eileen wants nothing more than to pack up and run away to New York City, away from the banality of X-ville, to begin life anew. 

Rebecca, on the other hand, is the antithesis of Eileen. ‘Rebecca was a dream to me, she was magic, she was powerful and everything I wanted to be.’ Beautiful, glamorous, confident and commanding, Rebecca’s appearance at the boys’ prison sends Eileen into a tailspin. And when Rebecca invites Eileen to a local dive bar, her fascination descends into infatuation. Yet Rebecca is not what she seems, and is all too aware of the power that she holds, using it to lure Eileen into taking part in a life-changing crime. 

Eileen was widely acclaimed, with Kirkus Reviews naming it one of their best books of 2015 while readers were captivated by Moshfegh’s unusual style. Booker Prize judge Jon Day, writer, critic and lecturer, called it a ‘dazzling, original novel with noirish flourishes voiced by a wickedly sardonic narrator’.

In the Guardian, Lydia Kiesing wrote how the novel reminded her of The Bell Jar. ‘In some respects Eileen is the odd double of Plath’s Esther Greenwood. Both New England women of the 1960s, both poor, both at the mercy of a single parent who pushes them to live a life they don’t necessarily want to live. Both are placid without and turbulent within.’

Jean Zimmerman at NPR drew comparisons to the greats. ‘Eileen could have stepped out of Flannery O’Connor or Shirley Jackson. Wonderfully horrible Humbert Humbert also comes to mind. Eileen may be “unfit for the world,” but I was pulling for her. I wanted her to escape the prison of life with father, wished that her dreams of fleeing to New York might come true.’

Writing for the LA Times, Porochista Khakpou referenced Moshfegh’s knack for creating a ‘strange, savage universe’. ‘Her fiction offers a sense that is of our world but also altogether hostile to clear distillation of it,’ they wrote. ‘Here is art that manages to reject artifice and yet be something wholly new and itself in sheer artistry.’

In the Washington Post, Patrick Anderson said ‘the attention that is greeting Moshfegh’s first novel is not undeserved. Eileen is a remarkable piece of writing, always dark and surprising, sometimes ugly and occasionally hilarious.’

The Telegraph gave Eileen a five-star review, where Anthony Cummins said: ‘This expertly paced novel – the first British outing for a rising star from the United States – spends so much time hinting at the past crimes of its outsider heroine that I felt sure the eventual “reveal” would be an anticlimax. And that’s exactly where Ottessa Moshfegh wants you: softened up and ready to be knocked flat by a narrative left turn of gut-curdling horror.’

Lily King of The New York Times Book Review praised Moshfegh’s literary prowess. ‘Moshfegh writes beautiful sentences. One after the other they unwind – playful, shocking, wise, morbid, witty, searingly sharp. The ­beginning of this novel is so impressive, so controlled yet whimsical, fresh and thrilling, you feel she can do anything.’ 

While at Flavorwire, Judy Berman wrote ‘Moshfegh’s debut novel mixes the setup of midcentury domestic suspense tales with the psychological richness of gothic literature, resulting in an unputdownable story where very little actually happens… Eileen is an addictive psychological thriller, but it’s also a fascinating character study, from an author whose ascension to household-name status seems inevitable.’