This has been an interesting month of reading. I’ve been getting through books at a rate rivalling that of my most earnest teenage self. I remember picking up a copy of Jude the Obscure from my local bookshop one Friday, when I was around 18, and finishing it on the Sunday in a daze, with pages of impassioned notes beside me. I did the same with The Idiot, and with Karen Armstrong’s The Battle for God, and many others—‘difficult’ books, complex ones and not only novels, in which I was searching for something I couldn’t explain.
The speed of this month’s reading has in part been fuelled by the simple relief of being able to do it again. The last stages of writing my novel kept me locked in that world and reluctant to connect too much to other voices. I know I can be a good mimic, in writing, and that isn’t a bad thing—it’s how I learned to write, after all. Knowing its importance for Deborah Levy’s Things I Don’t Want to Know, I read Orwell’s Why I Write a few years back, and I was so happy to learn that I wasn’t the only child to be so enraptured by the lyricism of Blake as to churn out pastiches of ‘Tiger, Tiger’ in my early attempts at writing poetry. But the inclination towards mimicry would, I thought, be best avoided as I approached Amourette’s finish line.
The other goal in reading has been practical. I’d been out of the loop in recent publishing trends, as I mention in my post on Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation. The twin pillars of Fleabag and My Brilliant Friend stood behind me as I wrote my novel, but both are too famous and too old, I have since learned, to mention as ‘comps’ in letters to agents. So, in a self-serving fashion, I plundered more recently-published books for retconned evidence that Amourette is current and necessary and sellable. A grim endeavour, but the reading itself has been mostly a joy.
But there’s a darker side to my inability to read novels over the last few months. I’ve quipped in the past that there’s no point—if they’re good I’ll be jealous of the author, if they’re bad I’ll be angry I wasted my time. This isn’t quite true. I do still have in me that lovely open-hearted sense of emotional and intellectual seeking that enlivened my teenage reading. But I’ve been burned pretty badly by the cultural worlds I’ve attempted to serve in my adult life. I read as a teenager with an almost monastic devotion to a world of ideas and felt so convinced that this devotion would make my life meaningful. I was wrong, and my anger about that is not going anywhere. There is a deep vulnerability I mask with my quips about choosing not to read. I am very disappointed in the world around me, and disappointed, too, by my apparent inability to thrive in it.
Enter Ottessa Moshfegh, my personal literary antihero. When I wrote about My Year, I deliberately avoided reading reviews or interviews with the author. I’ve since caught up, and read Eileen as well, in an audiobook which benefits from the deadpan, addictive voice of Alyssa Bresnahan. I absolutely adore this interview with Moshfegh, ‘Vanity is the Enemy’, which is completely hilarious and insightful and, to me, deeply and powerfully inspiring. “Eileen is the miracle that saved my life,” she says:
That gave me a life of not hiding. Because I could have not written Eileen and just, like, hid for the rest of my life, but, it’s like, I know I can do something important with the talent and the channeling ability that I have. I can help us all out, a little bit. Because I’ve been gifted with this perspective and a knack for creativity and craft.1
It's inspiring because I so much admire the decisiveness and determination here, the deep recognition of an innate ability and a need to write the piece that will get it out into the world. I am at exactly the same moment in my own life, and I suspect that Amourette will not be my Eileen. I'm working on an unhinged campus novel right now with Moshfegh as my model. My anger, disappointment, and vulnerability will have to be my guides.
In ‘Vanity is the Enemy’, Moshfegh admits that she felt humiliated after the sensationalised Guardian piece about the way she wrote Eileen. As I mentioned in my review of Jen Beagin’s wonderful Big Swiss, Moshfegh’s first commercial success was written as an experiment in adherence to a particular set of rules. I can see why the Guardian piece might put people off, but I loved it right away, loved her honesty about her own anger and frustration. “I said: fuck it. Which was also: fuck them. I was pretty hostile. I thought: I’ll show you how easy this is.”2
I know this so well. I know this same fuck it, and fuck them. I felt it when I was at my lowest point in recent years, on benefits and sobbing to my work coach in the job centre over my dead dog, telling him that I’d applied for every job I could that week and had got nowhere, as usual. He glanced at the latest job postings and told me, with breathless enthusiasm, that he’d found one I was qualified for. Butcher. I cried harder, thinking of all those poor animal corpses, of my own beloved pet now in the incinerator with her shaved wrist and arthritic shoulders and mysteriously malfunctioning spine that the vet hadn’t been able to fix. “I’m a vegetarian,” I said, frantically, between panicked sobs. The work coach told me I could take a month off our weekly meetings, on account of my bereavement, and that I would not receive any sanctions. This time. The government money came in, and I was able to pay most of my rent out of it. The rest I made up as usual from dog walks, a bit of teaching, and selling whatever of my shit I could part with. Another month survived, in which I was able to find enough peace to write for perhaps an hour a week, if I was lucky.
At the beginning of this year, I was recovered enough to write for an hour a day, on a good day. A few months later, on a stable dose of ADHD medication and experiencing some financial stability, I wrote all morning, drinking coffee and listening to whimsical Japanese pop music and churning out thousands of words. By June, I was writing from the moment I woke up till the moment I fell asleep, breaking occasionally for food or to go and walk the various dogs who have helped me tolerate the loss of my own dog, as well as providing an income upon which I cannot survive indefinitely but can at least slow the draining of my savings. The good moments were magical—I would not ask more of life than to be able to have those perhaps once a week, if that isn’t too much to hope for. The bad were almost unbearable.
But not unbearable with self-hatred, as my worst teenage or young adult moments would have been. At some point, that belief in my own worthlessness—exacerbated by those weekly sojourns to the job centre—disappeared. It wasn’t a joyful disappearance, because there was still the frustrating truth of my lack of success, and my anger about it. But that’s where the fuck it, fuck them attitude came in. It powered me to the finish line. And now, having seen how Moshfegh harnessed it to insist upon getting noticed in the literary world, I am beginning to see how I might do that myself.
The result for Moshfegh was Eileen, a book I was completely delighted by. It’s bleak, skin-crawlingly uncomfortable, and gorgeously disturbing, but I did find it fundamentally compassionate, too. I loved the attentiveness to the eponymous protagonist’s obsessive nature. Born into different circumstances, Eileen could have turned her talent for detailed observation to other things. As it is, her attention is circumscribed, forced inward. She wears lipstick because her natural lip colour matches her nipples, and she cannot bear the implicit intimate revelation of going out bare-faced. She experiences euphoria from her laxative-induced emptyings over the basement toilet, where her dead mother once lingered over laundry for a mysteriously long time. Sharing a bottle of wine wrapped in gold cloth stolen from a nativity scene with the object of her strongest obsessions, Rebecca, she notes—with some satisfaction—that the drink smells like the gin-induced vomit traces she never quite cleaned out of her car.
This self-hating self-obsession and uncomfortably close attention to the body, along with a desperation to leave home that keeps being thwarted, reminded me of Ignatius in A Confederacy of Dunces. The sapphic tension set against a dark and wintery suburban America several decades back made me think of Carol. But Moshfegh’s own voice, perfectly enhanced by Bresnahan, is distinctive here—unrelentingly honest, awe-inspiring in its audacity, utterly unsentimental, always evading a reader’s hunger for moral resolution. I finished Eileen with a similar thrill to that I experienced with My Year—inspired by the capabilities of the human mind, alarmed by how circumstances can warp it into something frightening, excited by Moshfegh’s ability to present all this with searing, unjudgemental clarity.
In a piece originally published in Granta Magazine, Moshfegh describes an encounter with a famous male novelist—to whom she gives the moniker Rupert Dicks—when she was 17. It’s a fascinating read, but what I was especially interested in was Moshfegh’s description of herself as a teenager:
My ambition was not to be successful—to publish books and be renowned, rich and powerful, like Dicks; I wanted, truly, to use my writing to rise up to a higher realm of existence, away from the stupidity I saw in my classmates, teachers and parents, or on television and on the subway. I understood that life would be meaningless unless my art reached toward an understanding of who I was, and what I was doing here.
I knew Moshfegh's style in fiction and in interviews well enough to value the earnestness and honesty of this insight deeply, and to recall with a sudden waning of shame my own earnest teenage self, the one who powered through books at a rate I've only been able to match in the last two months. I had the same dream, and a similar disdain for those around me: arrogant disdain, I originally typed just now, but I deleted the qualifier because I don't think it was fair. I was defensive, then, because I'd been treated cruelly for that dream. It wasn't arrogant to protect it, and myself.
With Amourette finished and in the inboxes of a few literary agents, and my doubt over whether I can even finish a novel extinguished in the face of clear evidence to the contrary, I have my own Eileen to write, now, my own miracle. I have a clear and practical plan for it, a multistage operation that takes advantage of the limitations of my present circumstances. I will write more about this as the project unfolds. And I keep the audacity of my literary antihero Ottessa in my heart, as I charge ahead.
