VANITY IS THE ENEMY

"Well, when that Guardian article came out, I didn’t think it gave people the right impression of me, but now I think it absolutely did. Because it’s true that I don’t care if people hate me or misinterpret my intentions. They’re reading my books, that’s all that matters. I am not important. My personality, whatever, like sure, that might inspire some different feelings in people, but the work is what’s important. You can talk to me all day and I’ll say a million different things depending on my moods.

"But as a rebuttal to the Guardian thing, I’ll just say that I’ve dedicated my life to being a writer and I haven’t done it selfishly. I’m writing for all of you fucking assholes, and I need to figure out a way to do that. And I also think, don’t flatter yourself, I published a book before Eileen. It was called McGlue. I got two thousand dollars for it, almost nobody fucking read it, and it’s so much better than Eileen. But nobody wants to talk about McGlue because it’s too far away from the commercial crap that they’re used to reading. So I knew I needed to write something that was going to be reminiscent of the crap that people are used to, so it wasn’t going to threaten them so much. I needed a way into the mainstream, because, you know what? How do you expect me to make a living?! I’m not going to be making cappuccinos. I’m fucking brilliant! I don’t know what people expect me to do. I needed to be proactive. And Eileen ended up being a very important book for me. It taught me a lot and it allowed me to have a lot of conversations with people about repression, and the repressed world was exactly what I was entering as an author so I can make it better. And now I just want to be like, fuck that. I’m so happy this collection is coming out, because I feel like people can laugh when they read it, men can read it and not feel estranged. I’m incredibly cynical about the public."

Ottessa Moshfegh in Fanzine