Literary Birthday – 20 May – Ottessa Moshfegh

Happy Birthday, Ottessa Moshfegh, born on 20 May 1981.

Ottessa Moshfegh Quotes

1. Eileen is a character that makes people uncomfortable. She is not going to…cheer you up. But might it not be liberating to hear the thoughts of someone who is completely ignored by society? (The Guardian)
2. I write straight on the computer. When I’m editing a novel, I’ll print out the draft and edit on paper, cutting things and taping them back together, stuff like that. (Electric Lit)
3. And every day I wouldn’t look back. I would just, you know, read the sentence I had written the night before or whatever and write another thousand words. And that’s how I got to know my protagonist and the way she works, and the way she thinks and handles reality. (The Believer)
4. I feel like the short story is more immediately discoverable, like it’s more surprising in a lot of ways because things can shift in a sentence. (Desperate Literature)
5. I think it’s important that there’s a frank and honest space in writing where people can acknowledge their humanity in ways different from what is celebrated in mainstream culture. (Desperate Literature)
6. I can handle a certain amount of background noise. The best kind of background noise is a sleeping dog. I think I write better when my dog’s asleep next to me. (The Believer)
7. I’m also a big believer in waiting, because you can say, “Okay, I’m going to write this thing,” and you can sit there and stare at an empty screen or page for seven days and have no idea, and then in the last ten minutes, you could write something amazing. (Desperate Literature)
8. I love plot. I don’t know if I think about it as plot. More like story line, but one thing I’ve discovered I love about writing movies is that I ask myself different questions when I’m in a scene. When I’m writing a script, I’m asking myself, Well, how can I make this the most dramatically interesting moment? What unexpected thing could this person say? (The Believer)
9. The plot is the story in linear motion. The story line is what you choose to show in what order about the plot. That’s how I see it. (The Believer)
10. I allow my characters to think and do what they will. So it’s liberating – to have a character act out or really be in the trenches with something or be so delusional that it’s ridiculous… It is cathartic in a way. (The White Review)
11. As a writer, yes, and as a person, I thrive at home by myself. A meeting or public event, or even a coffee date with a friend, can inspire resentment in me for having to break up the quietude and steadfast immersion into my own mind with some real-life experience. (The Guardian)
12. The best writing advice I ever received was from my mother. She told me she liked books whose stories happened over the course of several days…To inhabit a character in real time became a goal in my fiction. I don’t know if all the credit should go to my mom, but why not? (Lithub)

Ottessa Moshfegh is an award-winning American author of literary fiction. She is known for her novels and short stories that centre on introspective, isolated protagonists—mostly young women who live on the margins of society. Her fiction is raw and unflinching, portraying flawed characters without apology. She says the poet and novelist Charles Bukowski has influenced her writing. Moshfegh had early success publishing short stories in The New Yorker and The Paris Review, followed by the publication of her novella McGlue. Her debut novel, Eileen, won the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and was a fiction finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Moshfegh’s subsequent novels include My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Death in Her Hands, and Lapvona. Eileen was adapted into a film in 2023. She is also the author of the short story collection Homesick for Another World. Subscribe to her substack.

Source for image: Larry D. Moore, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ottessa_Moshfegh_2015.jpg

by Amanda Patterson

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