Ottessa Moshfeghmay have manifested this house.
The sale listing that Moshfegh found warned that the house would “choose its owners.”
“Nobody wanted it,” Moshfegh, 39, says.
Nolwen Cifuentes for EW
“I saw it and thought, ‘I have to have this.
I need it.’
" Given the occasion for this visit, it all seems a bit uncanny, too.
Nolwen Cifuentes for EW
Moshfegh completed her M.F.A.
She writes thrillingly unlikable female protagonists.
InEileen, a self-loathing prison secretary shares her bleak outlook on life and love.
InRest, her millennial New Yorker basically quarantines herself (how timely!)
Moshfegh lives with her husband, writer Luke Goebel.
She spirals deeper and deeper into insanity, dragging the novel’s prose along with her.
(Sample line: “I’d been so pretty once.
And now I was ruined, an old lady with a mouth full of dirt.")
The book was never intended to be published.
She was writing another novel at the time, about a woman who assumes her deceased brother’s identity.
She put that project on the back burner and focused on her found project.
Moshfegh notes the parallel between our current reality and Vesta trying to make sense of her isolation.
“Reading is essential therapy during this period,” she says.
One might assume that Moshfegh relishes this darkness.
She happily consumes her fair share of horror and confesses to a deep love of true crime as well.
(Unsolved MysteriesandAmerica’s Most Wantedare old favorites.)
“I fall asleep with true crime blaring in my face every night,” she says.
But her stories are more about a desire for answers about the things that scare her.
A brief list of Moshfegh’s fears: the paranormal.
Whether an entity will possess her when she falls asleep.
9/11 (which, spoiler alert, figures intoRest and Relaxation).
Her family’s cabin, an abandoned Girl Scout camp in Bangor, Maine.
The forests in Bangor, home toStephen Kingand an inspiration forDeath’s setting.
Writing her own stories.
Whether this [gestures around] is the real world.
Moshfegh isn’t afraid of reading her own work, though.
For her, writing allows a certain control.
She’s got company, at least.
“You have so much life to reflect back on, all of your mistakes, things you missed.
I get the chills just thinking about it.”
