Eileen
Ottessa Mosfegh, 2015
Penguin
272 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781594206627
Summary
A lonely young woman working in a boys’ prison outside Boston in the early 60s is pulled into a very strange crime, in a mordant, harrowing story of obsession and suspense, by one of the brightest new voices in fiction.
So here we are. My name was Eileen Dunlop. Now you know me.
I was twenty-four years old then, and had a job that paid fifty-seven dollars a week as a kind of secretary at a private juvenile correctional facility for teenage boys. I think of it now as what it really was for all intents and purposes—a prison for boys. I will call it Moorehead. Delvin Moorehead was a terrible landlord I had years later, and so to use his name for such a place feels appropriate. In a week, I would run away from home and never go back.
This is the story of how I disappeared . . .
The Christmas season offers little cheer for Eileen Dunlop, an unassuming yet disturbed young woman trapped between her role as her alcoholic father’s caretaker in a home whose squalor is the talk of the neighborhood and a day job as a secretary at the boys’ prison, filled with its own quotidian horrors. Consumed by resentment and self-loathing, Eileen tempers her dreary days with perverse fantasies and dreams of escaping to the big city. In the meantime, she fills her nights and weekends with shoplifting, stalking a buff prison guard named Randy, and cleaning up her increasingly deranged father’s messes.
When the bright, beautiful, and cheery Rebecca Saint John arrives on the scene as the new counselor at Moorehead, Eileen is enchanted and proves unable to resist what appears at first to be a miraculously budding friendship. In a Hitchcockian twist, her affection for Rebecca ultimately pulls her into complicity in a crime that surpasses her wildest imaginings.
Played out against the snowy landscape of coastal New England in the days leading up to Christmas, young Eileen’s story is told from the gimlet-eyed perspective of the now much older narrator. Creepy, mesmerizing, and sublimely funny, in the tradition of Shirley Jackson and early Vladimir Nabokov, this powerful debut novel enthralls and shocks, and introduces one of the most original new voices in contemporary literature. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—May 20, 1981
• Where—Boston, Massachusetts, USA
• Education—Stanford University
• Awards—Paris Review’s Plimpton Prize; Fence Modern Prize in Prose
• Currently—a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California
Ottessa Moshfegh is an American author and novelist, born in Boston, Massachusetts. Her mother was born in Croatia and her father was born in Iran. She received the Plimpton Prize for Fiction from The Paris Review in 2013 for her story "Bettering Myself."
Moshfegh is a frequent contributor to The Paris Review; she has published six stories in the journal since 2012. Fence Books published her novella, McGlue, in 2014, as the inaugural winner of the Fence Modern Prize in Prose judged by Rivka Galchen. It was shortlisted for the Believer Book Award.
Her novel, Eileen, was published in 2015 to positive reviews, while a forthcoming collection of short stories is set to be published, although the date has not been announced.
Moshfegh was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University from 2013 to 2015. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 8/24/2015.)
Book Reviews
[D]ark and unnerving.... As the claustrophobia and filth of [Eileen's] circumstances become more suffocating...they seem more redundant than effective. With the arrival of the mysterious Rebecca...the narrative’s [momentum] finally picks up somewhat, although it will still feel stagnant to some.
Publishers Weekly
Initially, this novel reads like a memoir of a drab, friendless young woman.... [Then] the tale shapeshifts into a crime thriller.... Moshfegh's ability to render Eileen's dreary tale so compelling is testament to her narrative skills. —Reba Leiding, emeritus, James Madison Univ. Lib., Harrisonburg, VA
Library Journal
(Starred review.) Literary psychological suspense at its best.
Booklist
(Starred review.) A woman recalls her mysterious escape from home in this taut, controlled noir about broken families and their proximity to violence.... A shadowy and superbly told story of how inner turmoil morphs into outer chaos.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
(We'll add specific questions if and when they're made available by the publisher.)