Ottessa Moshfegh

Ottessa Moshfegh was born on 20 May 1981 in Boston, Massachusetts, to a Croatian mother and an Iranian father, both musicians. She studied at Barnard College and earned her MFA at Brown University, where she won a Stegner Fellowship to Stanford. She published her first novella, McGlue, in 2014.

Life and Career

McGlue (2014), a novella about a nineteenth-century drunk sailor accused of murder, won the Fence Modern Prize in Prose. Eileen (2015), her first full novel, was narrated by a miserable, self-loathing young woman working in a juvenile detention centre in a small Massachusetts town in the 1960s. The voice was electrifying — repulsive, funny, and utterly compelling. It was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and won the PEN/Hemingway Award.

Homesick for Another World (2017), a story collection, established her range: each story featured a narrator consumed by some form of obsession, addiction, or self-destruction, rendered with the same dark precision.

My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018) was the novel that made her famous. The unnamed narrator — young, beautiful, wealthy, orphaned — decides to hibernate through the year 2000 by taking a cocktail of prescription drugs, seeking a kind of rebirth through oblivion. The novel is set in pre-9/11 Manhattan, and the shadow of the towers’ destruction hangs over the narrator’s pursuit of unconsciousness. The book became a social media phenomenon and one of the most widely read literary novels of its decade — its pink cover ubiquitous on Instagram and TikTok.

Death in Her Hands (2020) was a short, unsettling novel about an elderly widow who finds a note in the woods that reads “Her name was Magda. Nobody will ever know who killed her.” Lapvona (2022) was her most ambitious and polarising novel — a medieval fable of grotesque violence, starvation, and class warfare set in an unnamed fiefdom.

Major Works and Themes

Moshfegh writes about the body with an intensity that makes many readers uncomfortable — bodily fluids, skin conditions, digestive processes, the physical textures of decay and desire. Her narrators are alienated, often repellent, and frequently female. They resist the world’s expectations of them by retreating into sleep, addiction, violence, or simple refusal.

Her fiction asks a disquieting question: what happens when a person stops performing the social self? Her characters abandon hygiene, reject ambition, pursue oblivion — and the novels make this withdrawal seductive rather than pathetic.

Her literary antecedents include Patricia Highsmith, Flannery O’Connor, and Thomas Bernhard — writers who combine misanthropy with formal control.

Critical Reception and Legacy

Moshfegh is one of the most polarising literary novelists of her generation. Her champions praise the voice, the wit, and the willingness to go where other writers flinch. Her detractors find the misanthropy monotonous and the shock effects calculated. My Year of Rest and Relaxation is her most widely read work and has become a cultural touchstone for discussions of burnout, withdrawal, and the desire to opt out of contemporary life.

Key Works

• Eileen (2015, Man Booker shortlist, PEN/Hemingway Award)
• Homesick for Another World (2017, stories)
• My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)
• Death in Her Hands (2020)
• Lapvona (2022)

Collecting Moshfegh

McGlue (2014, Fence Books) is the scarce novella debut — small-press, limited printing. Fine copies bring $100–$400.

Eileen (2015, Penguin Press, New York) is the most collected title. Fine first editions bring $50–$200; signed copies $100–$300. The Booker shortlisting boosted visibility.

My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018, Penguin Press) is the most culturally significant. Fine firsts bring $40–$100; signed copies $80–$200.

Lapvona (2022, Penguin Press) is widely available at $20–$50.