For example, Eileen scratches her vagina under her desk and smells her fingers, then shakes hands with a manager who is retiring that day with the same unwashed hand.Įileen’s narration and grim detail show how a nasty character can have a reader cheer for her. It’s heady and seductive writing, so intimate sometimes it feels like too much. It is a study in damage, and how that is projected onto others, a private world of pain only now being shared like a sacred secret, or picked scar. Themes are strangled sexuality, the loss of body as a sensual tool, and how this manifests when faced with the mirror of an attractive, socially assured woman in Rebecca. It is when she befriends Rebecca, a bright and breezy co-worker who is uncannily nice to her, and an attractive prison guard, Randy, that Eileen cannot draw appropriate boundaries.Īs in Plath’s “The Bell Jar” Eileen is unlikeable and yet magnetic, whisked along by her own demons into the worst, obscure decisions instead of the obvious, happier solution, in the vein of Plath’s fatalism. By the fifth page, Eileen is a confidante – but her memories are not trustworthy.Įileen’s story builds a picture towards something terrible, as she describes her suffocating near-sexual co-habitation with her widowed father in a dirty, hoarded house, the pair held together by a fragile loyalty to her dead mother. Moshfegh is a fiction writer who has an eye for dark twists, and a beautiful yet mysterious way of telling her stories.Eileen relates her young life from fifty years ago. But soon, Eileen’s affection for Rebecca will pull her into a crime that far surpasses even her own wild imagination.Įileen was Ottessa Moshfegh’s first published novel, which was shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Man Booker Prize, and won the PEN/Hemingway Award for debut fiction. When the beautiful, charismatic Rebecca Saint John arrives on the scene as the new counsellor at the prison, Eileen is enchanted, unable to resist what appears to be a miraculously budding friendship.

In the meantime, her nights and weekends are filled with shoplifting and cleaning up her increasingly deranged father’s messes. Trapped between caring for her alcoholic father and her job as a secretary at the boys’ prison, she tempers her dreary days with dreams of escaping to the big city. The Christmas season offers little cheer for Eileen Dunlop.

Book eileen by ottessa moshfegh