Ottessa Moshfegh - Here is the story of one man’s pursuit of self-destruction and his friend who drowns in his wake, brilliantly and desperately conveyed. Written in a style at once intoxicating and intoxicated, McGlue is a fierce and sodden historical novel that pulls nary a punch

Ottessa Moshfegh, McGlue. Fence Books, 2014.


excerpt

Window Treatments
The Weirdos
Disgust 
Bettering Myself

McGlue is in the hold, too drunk from the night before to be sure of name or situation or orientation—he may have killed a man. That man may have been his best friend. Intolerable memory accompanies sobriety. A sail on the seas of literary tradition, Moshfegh gives us a nasty heartless blackguard, a knife-sharp voyage through the fogs of recollection.

McGlue was selected by Rivka Galchen as the first recipient of the Fence Modern Prize in Prose.

“A sextant of the psyche, McGlue works its grand knowing through the mouthfeel of language; it’s a sharply intelligent, beautiful, and singular novel. A scion of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Raymond Carver at once, Moshfegh transforms a poison into an intoxicant.”      RIVKA GALCHEN 

“Here is the story of one man’s pursuit of self-destruction and his friend who drowns in his wake, brilliantly and desperately conveyed. Written in a style at once intoxicating and intoxicated, McGlue is a fierce and sodden historical novel that pulls nary a punch.”      BRIAN EVENSON

“Moshfegh shapes McGlue with recollections of deck-side endeavors, childhood encounters, pitiful attempts at intimacy, and most importantly, with language both cutting and clean, describing a man who loves women most when his hands are at their throats—‘all that soft gristly stuff to squeeze.’ But McGlue is much more than simply murderous. He is a soul at sea and unwelcome on terra firma.”      PAMELA RYDER

“Short-fiction genius Ottessa Moshfegh’s first novel is a gorgeously sordid story of love and murder on the high seas and in reeky corners of mid-nineteenth-century New York and points North. McGlue is a wonderwork of virtuoso prose and truths that will make you squirm and concur.”     GARY LUTZ

"Short-fiction genius Ottessa Moshfegh's first novel is a gorgeously sordid story of love and murder on the high seas and in reeky corners of mid-nineteenth-century New York and points North. McGlue is a wonderwork of virtuoso prose and truths that will make you squirm and concur."—Gary Lutz
Salem, Massachusetts, 1851: McGlue is in the hold, still too drunk to be sure of name or situation or orientation—he may have killed a man. That man may have been his best friend. Intolerable memory accompanies sobriety. A-sail on the high seas of literary tradition, Ottessa Moshfegh gives us a nasty heartless blackguard on a knife-sharp voyage through the fogs of recollection.
They said I've done something wrong? . . . And they've just left me down here to starve. They'll see this inanition and be so damned they'll fall to my feet and pass up hot cross buns slathered in fresh butter and beg I forgive them. All of them . . . : the entire world one by one. Like a good priest I'll pat their heads and nod. I'll dunk my skull into a barrel of gin.

Ottessa Moshfegh was awarded the 2013 Plimpton Discovery Prize for her stories in the Paris Review and a creative writing fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. She is currently a Wallace Stegner fellow at Stanford, and lives in Oakland, California.

It is a bright and wasted day.

Ottessa Moshfegh’s first novel reads like the swashbuckled spray of a slit throat — immediate, visceral, frank, unforgiving, violent, and grotesquely beautiful. McGlue, a transient drunk with a crack in his head, beats (at times quite literally) against his own possibility with overconsumption, nihilism, self-destructiveness, and utter depravity. The early staccato sentences read like the quick pulse of a hangover, a throbbing jugular of things not remembered, misremembered, unable to be remembered, or denied. Knives of lucidity occasionally cut into the haze of alcoholism and concussion.
It’s 1851, on the high seas, in the hold. McGlue, a deckhand, is too drunk to be sure of anything. The where, when, why, who are all a blur; he’s blind beyond the desire for another drink. His shipmates tell him he killed a man: his best friend, Johnson. Where is Johnson? he wants to know. Why is Johnson not visiting him? McGlue is being shipped home to stand trial. All he wants is to drink.

I yearn for ale and a song. This is home — me down in the heart of the drifting vessel, wanting, going somewhere.

The use of single word imperative sentences (primarily, “Drink.”) show the disease stitching its commands into McGlue’s narrative. Adrift, port to port, headed toward trial, he combats sobriety, his head trauma’s lingering drum, and memory. Still, memories wisp up: a brother with the “brittle blue eyes like a tired pastor” who died in their childhood house, crushed by a fallen stone wall; his mother tormented by loving her wicked son, McGlue, and his constant fuck-uppery and feral-ness; nearly freezing to death at 15, drunk in New Haven, Johnson coming along to save him; McGlue’s falling from a train in New York City, cracking his head; Johnson sparing him again and again. But as the ship rises and falls, so does the haze, and through it moments of tender friendship clarify, as does Johnson’s own dire need for McGlue.

Yet everything [Johnson] did to me he did to save my life. Fed me crumbs in bed nights, all I could keep down, helped me glug and didn’t deny me any kind of drink. “I’ve got a dream of us on the high water,” he’d said. He made it happen. He was like that — burning with want and courage, drunk that way. I had so much in kin with him, drunk on drink and supped and with my mouth full of deep meaning, drooling, head half caved-in from my fall from the train. He had changed full round from that dolt who came across me freezing in the woods outside New Haven. He had become, truth be told, a kind of monster. He talked of killing his father, wrath and bloodlust wrinkling his fine brow. “You’ve helped me,” he always said. I knew what he meant. Fuck the world and go on, that was what I taught him. It seems he’s fallen from his own train.

These equally hazy references to Johnson’s father, and Johnson’s spoken desire to kill him, occasionally litter the memories. It goes unexplained in detail, but Moshfegh makes us feel the weight of it — whatever that pressure or pain is that a parent can bring upon a child — and there’s weight enough to derail Johnson and send him running to sea. Perhaps it’s the unhappiness of young men that provokes them to self-medicate and go in search of “some dumb fantasy” that will fulfill them; perhaps it’s some disappointment, shame, or a rejection of Johnson’s family’s wealth and prominence, his inheritance. What Johnson wants is to see the world, labor, make his own way, perhaps prove something, or escape, indulge in the very smut and debauch for which McGlue, from the moment Johnson happened upon him freezing, is a poster boy.
McGlue, imprisoned, sobers further, remembers more: Johnson talking about being done with old ties, going someplace where they both can make it.

I didn’t want to make it. I wanted to lie down with it and strangle it and kill it and save it and nurse it and kill it again and I wanted to go and forget where I was going and I wanted to change my name and forget my face and I wanted to drink and get my head ruined but I certainly hadn’t thought about making it.

What is this it? Sobriety is only the obvious answer. This it is a deeper seed. The it is the memory of McGlue’s dead brother. The brother who “was more than me and brave and cooked at the fire and pushed me away when I put my hand out for it.” The it is that God exists but goodness is killed anyway. Perhaps this disillusionment activates McGlue’s alcoholism, or his subsequent refusals to sober up, or make peace with it, or Him; perhaps it is why he debauched, ran away; why he cannot speak of the Bible his lawyer leaves him as anything other than “that book.”

For good measure, I open the book Foster has left me. I want to see if God himself will guide my finger to an answer. The question being why the woe, why such tidings? Why not just the breeze and the ocean? Why me?

And in the “Why me?” there is, possibly, the “Why him?”
As McGlue awaits trial, his withdrawal ripples less. His mother visits him, heartbroken, and McGlue twists her arm and tells her not to come back unless she brings him a drink; sickness upon sickness upon sickness. Memories clarify still, and Johnson’s sickness becomes clearer, his teetering imbalance; whatever weight he carried becoming too much to bear. The sentences escalate in complexity and coherency, and a question arises from this newfound clarity: which sickness had a tighter grip, and on whom?

In truth it is a miracle I can read at all, my head broken as it is and my mind constantly on what is not going down my throat. But I should say that my vision of a drink is less potion than pain as I see it these days. I’d rather not think of it at all. Something has altered beneath the few still live wires on the surface of my brain. I am beginning to be thirsty for something more. I can barely explain it. And I feel I don’t know anything. I never did, as a kid or man, nothing.

But McGlue does not give himself enough credit.
What comes from the memory of Johnson’s death is the truest, most difficult sense of friendship — a tender portrayal of sacrifice, of revelation, of McGlue’s own possibility in the rancid corners of a violent and callused world. There are different kinds of torture, self-loathing, painful memory, buried things, definitions of vice, loneliness. There are kinds of friendship in which one tormented identifies in the other something worse, and not out of anything but love, helps his friend, puts him to bed.

I stand. I stand praying, just to see what happens. All I know to do is put my hand on my heart. There’s no real evil there, I’m sure. But it is empty.

Ottessa Moshfegh’s novel calls to mind the blackness, torment, and self-infliction of Poe and Robert W. Chambers, and the sensory detail, guttural prose, raw wit, and sincerity of Wells Tower’s “Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned.” McGlue has the urgency of short fiction married with the grandiosity of an epic at-sea classic.
Yet, the economy of language and pacing removed me from moments I wished to linger in and explore for a few more beats. There is so much foulness to McGlue that, at times, he almost becomes a mockery; his monstrosity is so amped up and lopsided, the tender moments so few, that my engagement was less sincere than I wanted it to be. I would have liked more of McGlue and Johnson’s relationship, more of his brother’s story to counteract McGlue’s irredeemable qualities, and more of that poor heartbroken mother. Moshfegh’s use of white space and subtext generally function at a high-level, but there were times I had to fight against the speed of the prose to make connections. And, so, this criticism is more of a wanting — for more McGlue, more memory, more meat. - Zachary Tyler Vickers 


Caught stealing silver spoons, you can go to jail, or you can go to sea. Which makes a sailor out of McGlue.
Ottessa Moshfegh’s debut novel seems to use a classic plot driver: Johnson’s dead, McGlue stands accused. Does McGlue set about straightening the record? What record? Locked in the hole, McGlue is very hazy about what’s happened to him recently — only Johnson and McGlue go back much further than that. His shipmates insist: he killed his best friend. McGlue takes some of the air out of the Kafkaesqueness by appearing not to care either way. McGlue wants to be brought one thing, and that’s booze: will you go get him some?
Open on Zanzibar, McGlue puking on himself. There’s satisfaction in a historical novel that, without bells or anachronistic whistles, shakes off the yoke of authenticity. Don’t get me wrong: “I think, yeah, I’ll fuck it” sounds Five Points-y and totally nautical. But there’s something rather sly about this ode to a nineteenth-century Fleet Week wino. The effect is more pronounced given the kind of literary textures — McGlue is covered in a lush filth — at Moshfegh’s disposal. 
I think of my mother as I imagine her always at the loom through the nailed-down windows of the mill, me a wee tip-toed kid, fingers hoisting my eyes barely above the horizon of the window ledge, watching my stoop-backed, prim, high-nosed mom at work, and watching her again that night at the table in our little house, calling me and brother “good boys,” pushing crumbs, counting coins and coughing, my sisters in bed already, my mother’s pale, tuckered out hair splayed across her back.
The details impress, though almost any one of them is overexplicit — the crescendo of Mom wearing her tiredness in her hair is the most on the nose and the most beautiful to me. Perhaps realness is always felt in spite of itself. Come to think of it, has there ever been a more enduring critique than that which presumes the priority of flash over substance? Which flavor do we prefer: when it’s directed at the current generation as a whole or just the one young culprit? Naturally, I’ve come to be moved by flash and agnostic on substance, so I mean it as a compliment: Moshfegh is flashy. When she decides to go long, the sentence careens through the entire paragraph; swooping, multiplying clauses in sustained bodily function: “all the cringey nerves and blood, swimming vessels puckered and empty and breath blowing for nothing and bones just creaking, mad, swaying like strained and knotted rope.” That McGlue manages not to exhaust itself is a testament to pacing — short stepping-stone sentences launching into the intestinal ones — and Moshfegh’s knack for all things tactile and olfactory. It’s this ornate style that accounts for one of Zadie Smith’s “Two Paths for the Novel.” In the essay — not quite as hostile to literary realism as they say — she dissects the profusely delicate passages of Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland, where “rinsed taxis . . . shone like grapefruits.” Of that particular still life Smith asks: “Grapefruits?” Ever since, whenever a physical description jumps the cartilaginous shark, I think, Grapefruits? How many distinct fronds in the tableau? (Grapefruits?) In fairly quick succession in McGlue, a description of facial hair as “wavering” and arm hair as “bristly.” (Grapefruits?)
Except there’s no way I’m saying turn off the tap. Though decidedly maximalist, McGlue prefers not to pull together threads from Moshfegh’s short fiction — the novel is a tangent in setting and a contraction of their concerns. Of her extant stories, I cannot readily describe their appeal. I want to say that I read them with some speed — what readers say to indicate pleasure that they can’t quite explain. Worse than that, I even want to say that I finished them, even though they were short stories. They’re that good. “Disgust” delves into the male psyche, a room with two pieces of furniture: longing and menace. The protagonist of “Bettering Myself,” come the season for performance-incentivized state tests, is jealous of the math teacher who took “all the kids who back in the Ukraine had been beaten with sticks.” She thinks, “Whenever anyone talked about the Ukraine, I pictured either a stark, gray forest full of howling black wolves or a trashy bar on a highway full of tired male prostitutes.” Funny, when I picture the shipping route around the Horn of Africa, I think about parrots on shoulders and oh God, oh God, if I should drown. End of list.
On the other hand, Moshfegh’s fiction converges in a sense that, whether by project or inclination, it suggests a decoupling of authorial ambition and literary psychology. The points of view of Moshfegh’s characters, McGlue especially, don’t speak the received language of poetic mental acuity — they’re in the world. The narrator of “The Weirdos” bears almost silent witness to her boyfriend popping the buttons off his yellow woman’s blazer. McGlue’s stream of consciousness doesn’t mince words (“I am hungry, I think.”). His alcoholism is a farce, and his visions are as coherent as a liar’s dreams. McGlue is just a man; he sees what’s before him, and when he does feel, sets out immediately to make it stop.
Off he goes to the brothel with the rest of the guys. But McGlue reserves a tenderness for memories of Johnson, protector and sweet enabler of his alcoholism. “Simply put, without Johnson I’m just mess pork, sugar, tallow oil, cannel coal and rye.” McGlue’s lawyer encourages him to write his confession, and Moshfegh proceeds with a depiction of male companionship rather sensitive to the idea that the bond between men is, precisely, not homoerotic — unless it is. McGlue longs for the world refined by Johnson’s presence. Nothing is the same without him. McGlue likes girls, even though — in a somewhat broad casting of the fear of the womanly other — they come as a vertiginous blow to his senses. In contrast, the way the guys love each other — easily, fearlessly — is portrayed with beauty and surprise. “‘I’ve got a dream of us on the high water,’ he’d said. He made it happen. He was like that — burning with want and courage, drunk that way. I had so much in kin with him, drunk on drink and supped and with my mouth full of deep meaning, drooling.”
Regarding the smoking crater of adulthood, it remains unclear just how seriously we should take the juvenile. Is it a stunted rut, boyish and dumb to the core? Or is it onto the world, wise to its false promises: patriarchal families, GDP-contributive careers, realism without puke?. For me, McGlue puts two items from recent literary discourse in stark relief: all genres are dissolved by talent, a quantity — whether we like it or not — unevenly distributed (though hopefully not zero-sum; Moshfegh has a lot of it already). But fiction — whether skewed to market or to whim — can be too narrowly contrived; it must take in as much life as it can, no matter the apparent volume of its storytelling. Though it may be that life itself is the greatest of uncertain parodies, McGlue’s world is slight, his perspective necessarily blurry.
The model for McGlue might well have been some salty American classic of arrested masculinity. It’s an awfully impressive stab at it, and it’s also on par with an article in The Toast, say, “Skirts I’ve Been Privy To.” Contemporary novelty gets a strange reception. Clear departures are accused of a kind of tokenism just as often as the status quo is bemoaned or re-invoked. To read McGlue is to be aware of how unmistakably different it is. The term “voice” has too much essentialist baggage — it lowballs the composition involved with sentence-making on Moshfegh’s level. But there’s no other available shorthand for what makes McGlue — literary cul-de-sac, perhaps — a thing of beauty. From where I sit, I still want to be passed a killer note like this one, a doodle of a ship on choppy seas, writing that is what it is with strange aplomb. - M.C. Mah  

 At the heart of Ottessa Moshfegh’s first novel, McGlue (122 pages; Fence Books), is a man who dampens life and feeling with drink—a man who is accused of murdering his best friend. Set in the mid-19^th century, atop the high seas and throughout New England, the eponymous protagonist awakens aboard a ship, banished to the hold where he languishes drunkenly. As McGlue’s trial for murder approaches, the narrative moves backward in time, through the haze of memory obfuscated by a massive crack to McGlue’s head, which he received falling off a train. Moshfegh, whose stories have been published in The Paris Review, Fence, and Noon, is highly attuned to the tradition of the novel— she rarely reveals the protagonist’s internalized thoughts (a convention of 18^th century authors like Defoe and Sterne), allowing the novel to dance smartly around the edges of perception and morality, and sustain the mystery of the murder while inviting an existential reflection in the reader.

Moshfegh delivers her novel in the first person, crafting a poet out of McGlue, an imprisoned man who considers his body as it atrophies in confinement: “I look down at the lovely alabaster ridged cliffs and valleys of my body…” He describes the drunk cabin boy as having a “wolfish smile,” and his mother, after he wrenches a knife out of her hand, as having a “wrist, dry and pointy and like made of crinkled papers.” On sobriety: “My head is clear now, the night sky sparkling like wet, broken glass.” That a man who is largely illiterate should also be so lyrical in his thought seems slightly out of place. But when McGlue drinks, everything seems to flow for him; alcohol makes him bolder, he can read things in context. In fact, he can really only function normally with a drink in his system. “I cannot sleep without having already forgotten my name, my face, my life.” This is not simply a tale of a drunken sailor—McGlue’s drunkenness fuels character development and steady plot exposition. But it is also no coincidence that McGlue has a head wound. (This is reminiscent of Goethe’s The Sorrow of Young Werther, in which the protagonist, because of the torture of unrequited love, shoots himself in the head). Where his drunkenness would threaten to dissolve into simple lyricism, the crack McGlue keeps digging at serves as a sustaining symbol of his lack of reflection.
Throughout the novel, McGlue sees his slain friend Johnson in hallucinations, smoking in the ship hold, materializing out of the shadows of his jail cell. McGlue cannot understand, does not believe, Johnson is dead. Or if perhaps he does, he thinks Johnson had wanted to die anyway, had in fact asked for it. (“It makes some sense, though I know I’m dreaming.”) In a later scene, Johnson walks into the sea, flailing with the whitewater at his shoulders. When paired with other fleeting admissions by Johnson of depression and “madness,” this event is painted as a failed or halfhearted suicide. Johnson is a mysterious character, a Gatsby of sorts, condemned to dissatisfaction with his life as a result of his secret—a secret McGlue has sealed in blood.
This mystery—as well as the cloaking of  McGlue’s sense of self, of his motivation, of his actions, even— comes to full fruition when the truth of Johnson’s murder is divulged. The resolution, much more than the solution of a “whodunit,” reveals clever omissions of thought and speech. Propelled by a masterful combination of lyrical prose, mystery, and plot, McGlue is a highly impressive novel about the oppressed self. Ottessa Moshfegh commands fiction with natural grace and is a modern voice to be reckoned with.- Alexander Helmintoller

Ottessa Moshfegh Is the Next Big Thing, and Here Are 7 Reasons Why

You might not see the novella McGlue on A Hot Books for Fall list or touted as a Great Stocking Stuffer, but, regardless, Ottessa Moshfegh’s debut should be on the top of your to-read list. Rivka Galchen selected Moshfegh’s brutal and beautiful book for the 2013 inaugural Fence Modern Prize in Prose, which honors the best in open-form prose with a cash prize and publication by the eponymous indie-superstar press. Much renowned in the poetry world, Fence is gunning for the fiction market with Moshfegh’s blood-curdling tale of a young, alcohol-addled sailor, who may or may not have killed his best friend.
A frequent contributor to The Paris Review, Moshfegh keeps a slim online presence at best, which means her fans are always hungry for her next piece. She is a writer’s writer, and one of the most multitalented new voices to come along in years. Moshfegh’s forthcoming work, a novel titled Eileen and an untitled collection of short stories, will be coming out on Penguin, and I’ll bet that we’ll be seeing her name for a long, long time. And let’s raise a glass to that: Moshfegh’s writing gives voice to characters on the brink of decency; her sentences alternately ricochet and stream-of-conscious Virginia Woolf to shame. Big names including Jeffrey Eugenides, Gary Lutz, Brian Evenson, and Rivka Galchen have sung her praises. If you’re wise, you’ll heed the masters and listen up.
Here are seven reasons to read her now:
1. SHE’S WON THE PLIMPTON PRIZE

As William Styron put it in his 1953 letter in the first issue of The Paris Review, the magazine welcomes “good writers and good poets, the non-drumbeaters and the non-axe-grinders. So long as they’re good.” Since George Plimpton, Peter Mathiessen, and Harold L. Humes founded the magazine, the likes of Jack Kerouac, Philip Roth, and Mona Simpson have debuted in the Review.

Also known as the Discovery Prize, the Plimpton Prize is awarded annually to a writer appearing in The Paris Review for the first time. Previous winners of this $10K-purse award include Elizabeth Gilbert, Julie Orringer, Wells Tower, Yiyun Li, and Benjamin Percy, but only Ottessa Moshfegh won the prize for two stories (“Disgust” and “Bettering Myself”) appearing in the Chanel of lit mags. This signals that she’s a prodigious talent to watch.
2. HER STORIES DEMONSTRATE INCREDIBLE RANGE
“Disgust,” which appeared in The Paris Review in 2012, is the story of the middle-aged Mr. Wu, who pines for the woman who manages a computer arcade he frequents daily. Set in China, “Disgust” is a tragedy filled with alcohol, debasement, visits with local prostitutes, awkward text messages, incidental repulsion, and other side effects of un-understood emotions. But what makes this story incredible is Moshfegh’s narrative control. Told in a restrained third-person, “Disgust” is a story replete with grime and grace that never fails to depict the full-range of its characters’ humanity.
While Moshfegh explores similar themes in “Bettering Myself,” the voice could not be more different. Set in an urban school, the math-teacher-narrator, Miss Mooney, is a recently divorced alcoholic — a hot mess whose problems are so out of control she keeps a sleeping bag in the back of her classroom so she can pass out between classes. Juxtaposing the shocking with the profane, “Bettering Myself” will make you laugh out loud (i.e., when the narrator announces to her students: “My boyfriend and I don’t use condoms. That’s what happens when you trust somebody.”) and pause in grave shock (“I’d been up on bad cocaine and drinking for days. I’d roped a few men back to my apartment and showed them all my belongings, stretched out flesh-colored tights and proposed we take turns hanging each other. Nobody lasted more than a few hours.”) and appreciate the clear-eyed sureness of Moshfegh’s writing.
3. SHE’S BEEN AWARDED THE STEGNER FELLOWSHIP AT STANFORD…
…and past recipients have gone on to do amazing things. Case in point: Raymond Carver, Larry McMurtry, Thomas McGuane, and Tillie Olsen are just a few of the writers who have been awarded the prestigious fellowship. Often a gateway to major literary fanfare, recent recipients have included NoViolet Bulawayo, James Gavin, and Molly Antopol. This fellowship offers writers two years of funding in one of the most competitive programs in the country. Moshfegh’s term as a Stegner ends in 2015, by which time we’ll all be eagerly awaiting her novel.
4. MCGLUE IS AN INCREDIBLE BOOK

“I swallow some blood, a tooth,” writes Moshfegh in McGlue. Part-ghost story, part-detox horror, this novella tells the story of McGlue, a soused New England sailor, imprisoned for having murdered his best friend, Johnson. Kept company only by slop buckets of excrement and the lowly deckhands, McGlue’s solitary confinement writhes with the headaches and tremors of withdrawal and realization. In McGlue, Moshfegh’s facility with voice (here she’s inhabiting that of a 19th century scoundrel) competes with her ability to expose the gritty, mucky corners of the human condition. “Nothing doing but dark hearts,” McGlue contemplates, showing the reader the omnipresence of so many eternal midnights.
5. NO, REALLY, JUST READ HER STORIES
Moshfegh’s fiction rewards repeat reads — and long pauses to ponder just how she makes behavior so revolting sound so good. Partially, her sense of humor keeps these stories buoyant, even when characters are “sick for death, dirt, anything wreckish, darkened, just out of reach,” as in “The Chaperone.” In “A Dark and Winding Road,” for instance, a deviant husband indulges in some inappropriate adult-sibling rivalry; in “The Weirdos,” winner of a 2014 Pushcart Prize, the first line introduces the narrator’s droll sense of humor:  
On our first date, he bought me a taco, talked at length about the ancients’ theories of light, how it streams at angles to align events in space and time, that it is the source of all information, determines every outcome, how we can reflect it to summon aliens using mirrored bowls of water. 
6. SHE CREATES MYSTIQUE
“Writer, rarely on here” is the description of Moshfegh’s Twitter. Facebook turns up a nondescript author page. In the age of writers and celebrities splashing about social media, Moshfegh’s faint digital footprint heightens her elusiveness, her allure. Yes, a quick Google tells you she’s from Boston and received her MFA at Brown, but the drought of personal information suggests Moshfegh herself really wants her readers focused on the work. 
7. HER SENTENCES ARE ALL KINDS OF GOOD

Her prose is breathtaking, inventive, and electric. Moshfegh’s writing ranges from bawdy to refined, from single-word self-imperatives (“Drink.”) to half-page, labyrinthine paragraphs, like this one from McGlue, which transforms a list into a character dissection:  

The world of DRY GOODS is luxury: doeskins, vestings, all wool tweeds. Colored cambrics, printed cashmeres and fancy Earlston ginghams. Velvets. All that soft wadding. I imagine it’s Johnson’s natural habitat, a cradle filled with fluffy silk pillows. He sought out these rank and fuck-it muddy pastures, the shit I showed him. He was just a student misery. He had this idea that there was something like grace and victory to be found in smiting your good fortune, choosing the worst. In answering what he would do with is life say to follow the most putrid path, to ruin his life. See, he was all kind and mete when I met him that night in the snow. By Spain he wasn’t impressed by anything. Spat on whores in Seville and thought himself worldly, that moron. And later shed tears on the ship to me, speaking what I thought at the time were really heartwrung philosophies. Life words. And I awoke for him, always, to listen. To me it felt like more than conversation. But I don’t think he ever had much respect. I was like a heavy bleached cottonade that would hold a lot and show much what he spill. A vanity. But by that time I was already drunk on him. And I told him how it felt to wear the cloak of his shit. It felt good, I said. It felt better than drunk, I’d tell him.

Have your eyes peeled, I’m telling you. - JoAnna Novak
Ottessa Moshfegh received the 2013 Plimpton Prize for Fiction from The Paris Review, where she has now published four stories, with one on the way. Her first novella, McGlue, will be published by Fence Books this month.
The following interview was conducted by e-mail during August and September 2014, with Moshfegh answering questions from New York, Paris, and Nairobi.

Lorin Stein Unlike your stories—at least the ones I've read—McGlue is set in the past. How did you come to write an historical novel?

Ottessa Moshfegh McGlue is set in 1851. It was inspired by a brief article in a New England periodical from that year. I have lost the article by now, but the moment I read it, McGlue's character emerged in full form. It was one long run-on sentence, as I recall, and read something like: “McGLUE. Salem. Mr. McGlue the sailor has been acquitted on the count of murder which he was found guilty of committing in the port of Zanzibar by reason of his being out of his mind since having hit his head when he fell from a train several months prior and because he was in a blacked out state of drunkenness at the time he stabbed a man to death.” There was the whole book right there: the character, the plot, the deformed language. I felt like I'd struck gold. I'd grown up in New England and could relate to McGlue’s self-destructive rebellion in the face of all that Puritanical cold. Once I started working on the book, I could hear him rambling around in my brain, impatient and wild. I spent my writing-energy trying to squeeze that chaos down into prose. Most of the book came out of me that way—painfully, as if possessed. It was important that I not think too hard about what I was writing down. When I started intellectualizing, the voice shut down. It helped to be diligently, uselessly researching what was happening in mid-nineteenth-century America. I couldn't tell you what I learned, but the research was a good distraction.

LS By “intellectualizing,” what do you mean? 

OM My mind is so dumb when I write. Each story requires a different style of stupidity. I just write down what the voice has to say. I use my intellect in the final stages of editing, when I stand back and get thoughtful about what the story actually is and what a stranger's experience of it might be. At that point I can separate myself from the voice and “intellectualize” if necessary. But I must wait until the very end to deal with the story on that level. If I try to process what I'm writing while I'm writing it, the work gets stiff, meaningless, forced, and then dies. I'm not saying I don't get ideas. I obsess about the work when I'm not at my computer. But that's just more stupidity. I don't know how the mind works, but isn't there a part of it that deals specifically with reason and sense? The brainy asshole of the mind? The nerd on the dance floor in a tweed jacket, drinking sherry, constantly parsing and analyzing and judging and shaking his head, making faces? That asshole is my intellect. He's a really shitty writer, as you might imagine. I don't rely on him when I'm composing. He goes to bed and has a little wet dream about how smart everyone will think he is when the story's published. What a douche bag!

LS You've touched on something I love about your writing. Each of your narrators is different from the others, and yet you always seem equally at home in their heads, whether they're old or young, man or woman. Take the narrator of “A Dark and Winding Road”—a young man uneasy in his own masculinity. A douche bag, you might say. Do you remember how his voice first came to you?

OM Last summer I went up to Maine where my family has a summer place on a lake outside Bangor. The area is rural, poor, beautiful, scary. It's the Maine in Stephen King's It and The Body (which turned into the movie Stand By Me). My family's property is an old Girl Scouts camp with three small cabins. I'm always terrified up there. I went there alone and spent most of my time watching movies, canoeing, and editing. In the afternoons I drove to the closest McDonald's to use the Wi-Fi. One day, I was changing a lightbulb in one of the cabins and found an old pornographic VHS tape. Just the cover, actually. It was hidden up on a crossbeam. I looked for the tape and couldn't find it. That night was cold so I made a fire in the wood stove and ran out of newspapers. I burned some of my writing, which put me in a dark philosophical place. I found this little paper box to burn. There was a crack pipe inside. Also, I'd just spent time in New York City, and so the disparity between New Yorkers and my neighbors on the lake came into question. I guess at the time I was feeling that New York was a ridiculous place full of pathetic egomaniacs, and I wanted to lash out and take a big shit on all that. Thus the narrator of “A Dark and Winding Road” was born. I don't know if that answer will make sense to anyone who hasn't read the story. In a more general way, finding the voice has less to do with the imagination, and more to do with designation, like casting an actor in a movie. I ventriloquize the voices at first, but then they pretty much take over. That was particularly true in McGlue.

LS What do you mean, “designation”?

OM I mean I'm not sitting around going, What can I invent? Rather, there are tones and language and inflections to my thoughts and feelings. If I'm moved to express them in a story, I assign a voice to them, and the voice will dictate the story. I designate that task to the voice. You do the talking, I say to it. Am I making sense?

LS I think so. You don't sit around trying to think up stories? 

OM Do other people do it that way? Like Hmm, what should I write about today? The way I “get ideas” for stories is from everyday life, what ails me, what scares me, what makes me laugh. Of course. Somehow I don't feel I'm ever staring at a blank page. Something triggers a desire to write, and so I do. Presto, the page is no longer blank. Right now I'm working on three short stories and another novel. I've had a lot on my mind, I guess. I also keep an e-mail chain of notes to myself containing first lines, or fragments of a voice, or things to write about, like a to-do list. They're just little placeholders for when and if I go back and revive that scrap of inspiration. I don't like keeping a notebook these days. Paper and ink depress me.

I just looked at the list. A lot of the entries are repetitions of things, events that haunt me, secrets I've kept. The most recent entry was "You ain't nobody Until somebody Kills you—find out what rap artist this is." Of course, it's Notorious B.I.G.

LS Of course. Could you share a couple of first lines or donnés that never went anywhere?

OM “sweet teens.” story of a truly closed and fake and boring person. THE JEREMY/JAKE WEEKEND.

You saw them here first.

LS What was “The Jeremy/Jake Weekend” supposed to be about?

OM The story of that weekend is quite easy to summarize: big mistake.

LS Now that you're finished with McGlue, do you hear the influence of other writers on his way of talking?

OM Actually, no, I do not hear the influence of other writers on McGlue's way of talking. What writers do you hear? As I've told you, I'm a terrible reader.

LS It's not that McGlue sounds like anybody else, in particular. I guess the approach reminds me of Gordon Lish, at one or two removes. Take a sentence like: “Straw from the mattress sticks up and riles me, all poke and scratchy.” The reader is made to pay attention to the word choice—to the artifice, to the writing as writing—in a way that rarely happens in your stories. In your stories, we don't notice the individual words because they follow, as it were, naturally from our sense of the character and situation, and from cadences that read to us as normal speech. But you've said that it's different for you, writing novels.

OM You've pointed out something that's changed in my writing since McGlue. I used to be more of a painter with words and certainly internalized Gordon Lish's consecution/swerve methodology. I liked that kind of palpable use of language, the “artifice” you describe. I grew up reading secondhand issues of Lish's Quarterly and weaseled my way into his tutelage, briefly and disastrously, when I was seventeen. These days I feel that his writing-philosophy tends to birth narcissistic, solipsistic, exclusionary prose. I love it, but there's no vulnerability. So McGlue represents the last days of that old approach to writing and a surrender to what would follow. After I finished McGlue, I discovered that more traditional prose forms were not limitations, as I'd previously thought. Plot and clarity were not the enemy. Mediocrity was. I began to write honestly from my own experiences for the first time, and fell in love with the short story form, its elegance, power, divine beauty, all over again. A reference point for this form, in my mind, is “The Necklace” by Guy de Maupassant. It was the first short story I ever read, sixth grade, Mason-Rice Elementary, Mr. Roberts. It was devastating. That's not to say that McGlue isn't personal or dear to me. It is. But if I were to write it today, it would be a very different book. Actually, “Bettering Myself” is, in some sense, a McGlue story.

The other day, an editor commented on the manuscript of my first full-length novel, Eileen, that it had failed to live up to the expectations set by my short stories. I see her point, but I simply can't write a novel the way I write a short story. It's impossible. They're two different art forms. They require a completely different attitude and meter. My novels aim to entertain and provoke and engross. My short stories don't have aims. Because of their brevity, I can allow them to bubble up organically, one cell splits into two, the story emerges. I have little to do with it. A novel requires way more forethought. And honestly, a good short story can break my heart in a way a novel just can't. Novels require so much human tinkering. The author's fingerprints are all over the place. When I read a short story, a good one, the author disappears for me. Short stories are spiritual in that sense. As though out of thin air, they appear. Woosh. Myths. Gorgeous. They resonate for me in the heart. Novels, in the head. Also, I have problems with my eyesight and can only read twenty or thirty pages at a sitting. Perhaps all these opinions stem from that one shameful handicap! Anyway, I've begun a new novel this summer, something more personal and, in tone, more similar to my short stories. We'll see how that goes.
I realize that I'm contradicting myself all over the place. Shrug.

LS You contain multitudes. This last answer of yours is very interesting to me. You mention “consecution/swerve methodology”—how would you describe that, to a layman? Could you give an example from McGlue?

OM The method was explained to me over a martini in the man's kitchen at nine in the morning when I was a teenager, so take this with a grain of salt. As I understood, the writer must perpetually refer back to her previous sentence, pulling out the elements that carry the most heat and, in her next sentence, deepen them through consecution, or complicate and enrich them by swerving away. I think it's a brilliant pedagogical tool and helps writers with undeveloped instincts who would otherwise write stories as long lists of sentences with zero causality—poetic nonsense heading to an ineffectual end. When consecution and swerve are employed on the superficial level, there's a lot of repetition of words and loops of language and imagery. In the bigger picture, themes and objects revolve and build on their relationships with the other themes and objects in the story. Everything coheres.

As for McGlue, he's an addict, and his thinking as such is circular, repetitive, mostly to do with alcohol, a lot of consecuting. He perpetually returns to memories of drinking and how he might get alcohol while being confined in the ship and, later, in his jail cell. The pain of being denied alcohol forces him to question the reason for his incarceration, namely Johnson's murder. So that swerves his thinking away from the drink and into the subtler emotional life beneath his alcoholism. The pain from that awareness makes him want to drink. Thus his awareness builds gradually, around and around, until the memory of the murder has finally reached the forefront of his consciousness, which is the end of the book. I can't find a good example of consecution and swerve on the sentence level. Or rather, I don't want to go there.

LS What would it mean for writing to have “no vulnerability”? To be solipsistic or exclusionary? What are the symptoms of vulnerability in prose?

OM You're not letting me get away with anything, I see.

A primary symptom of vulnerability is subtlety created by a disruption in the dream of the fiction. What might look at first like the writer's error can carry a great deal of meaning, like when you think you see the voice speak out of character. A stutter, a moment of skewed perspective, something that rings wrong, makes the reader pause, wonder, feel, engage, and so on. When a narrator acts as a kind of ruler of his own fictional reality, stomping around from paragraph to paragraph, expertly addressing the story without any self-awareness, or too much self-awareness for that matter, it gets solipsistic. There's nothing to be discovered there. It's all surface. That sort of writing is exclusionary because it sets the reader at a far distance from the narrator. There's no room for feelings or having instincts about the emotional underbody of the story. It's all just information and style. Look at me writing so well! It's like talking to a complete asshole who's trying to sell you a photo he took of himself in a tuxedo. Don't ask me for an example of this kind of writing. This is all theoretical. I'm just chewing the cud here.

LS Why would plot or clarity be the enemy? 

OM In the past, I thought plot was trite, something for mystery novels and TV shows. And I thought clarity was tacky. People shouldn't demand clarity from me. They should just ride my language-wave. It's a very pompous attitude. I also thought it was tacky to have a computer in a story, or give the name brand of something. Proper nouns were tasteless. Now I think the opposite. The novel I'm writing now is all about Whoopi Goldberg and Ambien.

LS You say novels can “entertain and provoke and engross,” but it also sounds as if they don't engross you, really, as a reader. And yet I know they have. Can we look at that contradiction? Is there a kind of novel you have in mind, in each case?

OM When I read a novel, I want my sense of self to disappear. Take Bukowski's Women for example. I don't feel that he's trying to impress me, and I feel I can adopt Chinaski's psychology, digest it, and still be surprised and excited by it. The questions it raises for me, at least the last time I read it, aren't questions about craft or authorship. I'm not wondering how Bukowski wrote the book. As soon as I start wondering about that, the book is dead. Then again, I haven't read Bukowski in a couple years and Chinaski's attitudes might disgust me in the wrong way now. On a plane last week I opened up Tropic of Cancer, read ten pages, and left it in the seatback pocket, dismissing the book as narcissistic mumbling penis-breath nonsense. I'm quick-tempered and pretty ADD with reading. Right now I'm reading Elizabeth Hardwick's Sleepless Nights. It isn't exactly “engrossing,” but each passage I read gives me a little brain damage and makes me feel naive and inspires me to engage in life and writing in new ways.- Interview by Lorin Stein