Ottessa Moshfegh Is Only Human

“It was almost like someone had died when I finished that book,” Moshfegh, 38, said in early February over lunch at her favorite hole-in-the-wall Thai restaurant in Los Angeles, where she now lives. “My future was so terrifying,” she said, “I needed to write something to get me onto the other side of an experience.”

So she forced her mind into the present using a strict regimen: She’d get down 1,000 words a day, without looking back, “until I’d reached the conclusion of something.”

Once she had, she immediately abandoned it in a drawer, only to rediscover it four years and three books later. That manuscript will be published later this year as her third novel, “Death in Her Hands.” An eerie tour through an aging woman’s psyche as it loosens its grip on reality, the book reads as a noir, a riff on the tropes of detective fiction. But for Moshfegh, it’s simpler than that and more personal. “I wrote it for myself,” she said. “It’s a loneliness story.”

The book was originally scheduled to come out this month, followed by an international publicity tour. In a cruel irony, the reason all that’s been postponed — the social distancing required to contain the coronavirus — is the very reason readers might find this “loneliness story” more relatable than ever.

Moshfegh’s publisher, Penguin Press, has not yet specified the new publication date, but it will likely be later this summer. “I hope that when people read this book,” Moshfegh said over the phone in late March after the change in plans, “they’re not like, ‘Oh God, it’s another Ottessa book about this woman in isolation.’”

It’s a fair concern. Six years into the game, Moshfegh knows you might already have an opinion about her. She’s built her reputation on characters who exist on the margins of society. They are murderers, substance abusers, deadbeats, pervs. She reveals them at their least refined: They fantasize about being raped or are themselves violent; they vomit; they release “torrential, oceanic” excrement.

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Moshfegh has been called “superabundantly talented” (by Dwight Garner, in The New York Times) and “easily the most interesting contemporary American writer on the subject of being alive when being alive feels terrible” (by The New Yorker’s Jia Tolentino). To others, like critic Sam Sacks, her writing is “dead-eyed and apathetic,” her crudeness a “dubious trademark,” amounting only to “hokum.”

But perhaps no one puts it more directly than the author herself, in pithy quotes of offhand self-congratulation that are like catnip for her interviewers: “I don’t know anyone like me.”

If you are put off by her candor, by the impression she gives of being sure of her own skill, oh well. Modesty is a luxury Moshfegh can’t afford; life is too short. She knows when she’s going to die (she won’t say, too private), so until then she’s going to focus on accessing the spiritual corners of her being through narrative, and not on whether or not you like her.

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“Are people reading because they don’t have friends?” she asked between mouthfuls of duck soup, sounding genuinely puzzled. She hopes “Death in Her Hands” won’t inspire the conversations about attractiveness and geniality that have surrounded her previous work. “People don’t want to talk about how they relate to a character’s more unsavory qualities,” she said, “so they’re like, ‘God, she was really gross.’ Everybody’s so obsessed with being liked.”

Not Moshfegh’s protagonists. McGlue, the title character of her 2014 novella, is a drunk sailor, imprisoned for killing his best friend. Eileen is a solipsistic, laxative-addicted prison clerk turned accessory to murder who enables her father’s alcoholism as much as she suffers from it.

Frustrated with readers’ fixation on Eileen’s ugliness, Moshfegh gave the self-harming, unnamed heroine of her next novel, “My Year of Rest and Relaxation,” the looks of a supermodel. “It required me to imagine what it’s like to not be an outsider,” she said. Here instead was “an insider who wants out”: a beautiful, tormented 20-something trying, with the help of prescription narcotics, to black out of life altogether.

Whereas that unnamed protagonist escaped into oblivion, Vesta Gul, in “Death in Her Hands,” escapes into delusion. Mourning her controlling, Mr. Casaubon-like husband, Walter, Vesta lives in a secluded lake cabin — inspired, the author said, by an abandoned Girl Scouts camp in Maine that her mother bought in the 1990s. Since adolescence Moshfegh has spent long stretches of time there, by herself, frightened. “It’s like, ‘The call is coming from inside the house,’” she said. “That’s the scary thing.”

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Vesta knows paranoia all too well. The novel opens with a cryptic letter, which she discovers while walking her dog in the woods: “Her name was Magda. Nobody will ever know who killed her. It wasn’t me. Here is her dead body.” But there is no body, no evidence at all that any of this is real. Yet Vesta proceeds to spin an entire life for Magda in her mind, itself unraveling. This amateur criminal investigation becomes so absurd it verges on comedy. (“‘Is Magda dead?’ I Asked Jeeves. … Well, that didn’t help me.”)

But Moshfegh doesn’t find it funny at all. “What kills me about Vesta, she’s really trying so hard,” she said. “She’s done everything her whole life just to keep it together and do the right thing, and then she can’t hold it together anymore.” The death in Vesta’s hands is not just Magda’s or even Walter’s but the prospect of her own. Her insanity — like the narrator’s chemically induced “hibernation” in “My Year of Rest and Relaxation” — is not a surrender but a means of survival.

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As unreliable as Moshfegh’s narrators are, as unstable, insecure and full of hate, they are also hellbent on pulling themselves out of their wretchedness, on saving themselves. What makes Moshfegh’s characters most human is that they don’t give up.

Sound familiar? On that February afternoon, Moshfegh, a self-described workaholic, reported she was already halfway through her next novel, about a woman who emigrates from China to San Francisco in the early 1900s. And she’s come up with a concept for the novel after that, which she plans to write in “several years.” In the meantime, there are multiple film projects she can’t yet speak about. (Is she adapting one of her novels for the screen? “I might be doing that,” she replied coyly. “I might be doing a lot of that.”)

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So is she as self-assured in person as she comes off in print? Yes, but “if there was anything that I would want to correct for the record,” she emphasized, “it would be that I never said it was easy.”

It takes hard work, she said, to find “that deeper connection to myself and to the greater power out there.” Quarantined or not, that need “makes my work really specific. Like, I’m not finger painting with my eyes closed.”

Her editor, Scott Moyers, says it’s this “control” that sets Moshfegh apart. Other authors will “turn in something not feeling themselves as if it’s quite fully cooked,” he said. “That’s not Ottessa.”

Moshfegh’s intense concentration requires a degree of insulation. “All the work that I do is a performance,” she said, a deliberate distancing intended “to preserve who I am.” As her friend, writer Patty Yumi Cottrell, put it, Moshfegh “doesn’t participate in the literary machinery,” declining to write reviews or blurbs or to engage on social media. Those who know her say her aloofness is a reflection of sensitivity, not egotism.

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For all this guardedness and all the “aloneness” she poured into “Death in Her Hands,” Moshfegh isn’t alone anymore. In December 2018, she married writer and editor Luke Goebel. “The ritual of making your marital vows is really powerful,” she recalled while driving east on the Ventura Freeway from Hollywood to Pasadena, where she and Goebel purchased and are now fixing up a house. “You kind of surrender to your commitment.”

A 1945 stone retreat built in the foothills by an eccentric, wandering painter, the “Casa de Pájaros” is as much a work of art as a home. Even before they were stuck there, Goebel compared the space to “an artist’s residency,” the couple working (and sleeping) in separate quarters but making time to “come together and cross-pollinate and feed each other, and then go back and work again.” Where in this domestic idyll was the Moshfegh who not long ago swore she’d be “celibate the rest of my life”?

“The difference between 28 and 38 is really big for me,” she said, sipping green tea on her living room sofa next to her 1-year-old rescue mutt, also named Walter. Her mentor Jean Stein committed suicide in 2017. Seven months later, Moshfegh’s younger brother, Darius, died of a drug overdose. “Being battered around by loss,” she said, “that changed the way that I think about time.”

Entering the peak of her career, somewhere between youth and whatever comes after it, Moshfegh recognizes the path has narrowed. Vesta’s physical and mental decline — “that’s just around the corner for me, in the grand scheme of things,” Moshfegh said. “I’m very aware that I won’t last forever.”

Despite earlier attempts to deny that mortality, Moshfegh, now sober and approaching her 40s, feels “more embodied than I expected to be,” she said. “Fantasies often have this tinge of mystical disembodiment for me. And I’m like, OK, well, that didn’t happen. I’m still human.”

When she was writing “Death in Her Hands” five years ago from a different kind of seclusion, Moshfegh couldn’t have predicted the resonance the story would have in 2020. She herself is seeing it through a new lens.

“It isn’t so much that Vesta was alone and she went insane,” she said, in what sounded like a defense not just of a character but of a condition. “This is a woman who chose to live in isolation to find peace toward the end of her life — and, in the process, encountered her imagination.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times .