Interview with Ottessa Moshfegh

“[Moshfegh’s] sense of alienation is expressed with humour, but is genuine and profound. ‘I felt like I was living in hell for most of my childhood and adolescence and my 20s,’ she says. ‘There was a brief period in my early 30s when I felt life was OK, and now it feels like hell again. The shape the hell took is precisely what my work is about.’”

Interview with Ottessa Moshfegh
The Guardian

I appreciate it when smart women talk straight about their lives and refuse to smooth over the unpalatable parts. Sometimes you feel terrible. Sometimes you feel terrible for a while, and there’s no redemptive arch. I reread “Bettering Myself” after this, which, in her interview, Moshfegh suggests isn’t entirely fictional. I don’t know. I feel pressure to be put together all the time, which I resent and concede to in equal measure. I like reading fiction written by a woman who says when shit sucks and refuses to offer apology for making the reader uncomfortable.