“Seeing Past the Mirror”: Ottessa Moshfegh on Her New Story Collection, Homesick for Another World
Photo courtesy Penguin Press
Ottessa Moshfegh became something of a household name with the 2015 publication of her debut novel Eileen, whose protagonist-narrator charmed (and sometimes horrified) readers and prize juries alike. But Moshfegh has spent years cultivating a dedicated following of readers through her short stories, which she began publishing in a steady drip in 2012. In Homesick for Another World, Moshfegh arranges some of her best-known stories alongside previously unpublished work in what amounts to a symphonic display of brilliance. Her stories, and the characters that inhabit them, crackle with desire, debasement, cowardice and alienation—as well as bright flashes of real, unfiltered joy.
Paste caught up with the writer—who says she is done writing short stories—by phone in the desert outside Palm Springs, where she has been spending more and more of her time. “I think I’ll probably move out here—I feel great in nature. The city makes me a little bit insane. Or more insane.”
Paste: This is your third book, but readers first got to know you through many of these stories, which have come out everywhere from Vice to The Paris Review. What’s your relationship with these stories like now, several years after many of them were first published?
Moshfegh: They seem a little bit more permanent in the world, and they seem less mine—in a really good way. The positive response to my short fiction has been so heartening. When I hear that someone is excited by my stories, has a sense of what I’m trying to do and what I’ve done, that’s amazing. The collection doesn’t feel the same way my other two books did when they came out. With Eileen, I experienced a total mind-fuck introduction to the world of book publishing in a really large way. I learned a lot really quickly. And the book—and I—got a lot of attention. And I freaked out for a year because of it. (laughs)
With Homesick for Another World, I really took my time. This isn’t a collection of random fiction slapped together into a book. I pieced these stories together intentionally and thoughtfully, and I’m really proud of the way it moves and ends. I’m glad that it is going to exist in the world as a finite book. I don’t think I’ll be writing short stories again for a long time, so this feels like the end of an era for me, and the beginning of something new and challenging and mysterious.
I wrote the stories over four or five years, and a lot happened in my life since I started “Bettering Myself,” the first story in the book. So the stories definitely reflect the personal and spiritual growth and movement over time: I moved all over the country writing those stories. Fell in and out of love writing those stories. Was delusional and disillusioned and sick and recovered and all this shit happened—and I learned a lot—so the stories are in some ways an archive of my life in my early 30s. Some of them are thinly veiled non-fiction. With a lot of sarcasm and self-satire.
I write a lot from my own experience, yes. Who doesn’t? But the true experience doesn’t make for a great short story. And I wouldn’t have been able to have the objectivity and creativity to see what was funny or different or meaningful if it was nonfiction. I think fiction in many ways exists because trying to capture reality is like putting your hand into a flame that just keeps flickering and you can’t actually touch it. And with fiction, I feel that I can grab it like a rock. A magnetic rock. It feels real, and manageable, and magical at the same time.
Paste: Many of your characters are self-destructive, though only slightly: they know their limits and don’t often surpass them. How does writing allow you to play and find humor within the idea of destruction?
Moshfegh: Well, there’s this really cheesy Picasso quotation. “Every act of creation is an act of destruction.” (laughs) I think it’s really true. For me, dealing with self-destructive characters in a creative way is a means to search for salvation for these weird people. And, I love them, you know? Enough to want to kind of save their souls (laughs), in this pathetic, self-ridiculing way. I’m not setting out to ruin these characters, but they sometimes set out to ruin themselves. I think sometimes people try to ruin themselves out of boredom. Maybe they don’t like who they are. But in the end it’s kind of out of our control, who we get to be.
Paste: You have called your stories “hostile,” but it seems to me that there’s a lot of joy and warmth in your work. Your characters never really sink into despair, and even though they oftentimes seem to be pretty deluded, they are also really quite lovable. What do you attribute that disconnect to?
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