“We’re all together on this weird planet doing weird shit”: an Interview with Writer Ottessa Moshfegh

Ottessa Moshfegh is the author of the novella McGlue (2014), the Booker Prize-shortlisted Eileen (2015), and, most recently, a collection of short stories, Homesick for Another World (2017). I first met Ottessa when we were both students at Brown University in 2009, and was surprised and delighted by the first story she brought to workshop—an eloquent, pithy, obsessive tale about a man who shoves a jewel up his ass. I had not seen her since we both left Providence in 2011, but we met up in late January to chat at The Tattered Cover, a bookstore in downtown Denver, as she was wrapping up her most recent book tour. What follows has been trimmed of its fat and gently edited for clarity.

—Kameron Bashi

I. AN ATTEMPT AT A GEOGRAPHIC CURE

THE BELIEVER: What was the attraction to California?

OTTESSA MOSHFEGH: I wanted to get the fuck away from winter. I was done. I had been living in the northeast—I grew up outside of Boston, I lived in New York for ten years minus two years that I lived in China, and then I moved to Providence. When I finished grad school I knew I needed to do something. I couldn’t stay in Rhode Island. The move to LA was definitely an attempt at a geographic cure. “Well, maybe if my environment is really different I will be different.” It ended up being kind of true.

I got to LA and I had one or two friends. I had no money. I could not find a job. I just wrote all the time. But I liked LA, I was fascinated by it. I knew I didn’t fit in there. In New England it was like, “I know I’m from here, but I still don’t feel like I belong here.” In LA it’s like, “I know I don’t belong here.” There are all these levels of pretension in that city. Every time you walk into a café or a bar or a restaurant in LA everybody turns around to see if you’re famous. Everybody can seem like a celebrity. You can meet somebody who looks like Joe Schmoe and he turns out to be the head of HBO or something. Or you meet a person who just won an Oscar and he looks like he just won an Oscar. And it’s a sprawling city, there’s so many different parts to it. The way that it’s segregated is really strange, and I’ve always been attracted to this one part of Hollywood. Hollywood is a lot of different things. Hollywood central is a freak zone, a lot of people living on...