Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize
“Eileen is a remarkable piece of writing, always dark and surprising, sometimes ugly and occasionally hilarious. Its first-person narrator is one of the strangest, most messed-up, most pathetic—and yet, in her own inimitable way, endearing—misfits I’ve encountered in fiction. Trust me, you have never read anything remotely like Eileen.” —Washington Post
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. Ottessa Moshfegh is also the author of My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Homesick for Another World: Stories, and McGlue.
Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize
“Eileen is a remarkable piece of writing, always dark and surprising, sometimes ugly and occasionally hilarious. Its first-person narrator is one of the strangest, most messed-up, most pathetic—and yet, in her own inimitable way, endearing—misfits I’ve encountered in fiction. Trust me, you have never read anything remotely like Eileen.” —Washington Post
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. Ottessa Moshfegh is also the author of My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Homesick for Another World: Stories, and McGlue.
Critiques-
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May 11, 2015
Winner of both the Paris Review’s Plimpton Prize and a Stegner Fellowship, Moshfegh moves beyond her previous short fiction achievements with this dark and unnerving debut novel. In 1964, Eileen Dunlop is 24 years old, living with her cruel, alcoholic father, and working at Moorehead, a juvenile detention center for boys. She also spends a lot of time hating herself (“I looked like nothing special”) and plotting her exodus from the small New England town where she’s been trapped. Eileen’s perspective is one of hindsight, some 50 years later, looking back on her final days of quiet, isolated misery before the rest of her life begins, a very different life we know will happen without knowing much more. The book’s opening evokes a stark kind of empathy for Eileen, who is extreme in her oddness and aversion to personal hygiene, but still quite likable. Unfortunately, some 100 pages in, she is still announcing her imminent departure. As the claustrophobia and filth of her circumstances become more suffocating over the course of the novel, they seem more redundant than effective. With the arrival of the mysterious Rebecca, an alleged education specialist at Moorehead, Eileen’s momentum (and the narrative’s) finally picks up somewhat, although it will still feel stagnant to some readers. -
Starred review from June 15, 2015
A woman recalls her mysterious escape from home in this taut, controlled noir about broken families and their proximity to violence. Moshfegh's second novel (McGlue, 2014) is set in 1964 in a scruffy Northeastern town that's a close neighbor to Joyce Carol Oates-land and Russell Banks-ville. The title character is a plain-Jane type stuck in a miserable job (secretary at a boys' prison) and an even worse home life (she minds her desperately alcoholic father in an unkempt house). And though the story takes place in the days before Christmas, holiday cheer is in short supply; Eileen Dunlop describes the imprisoned boys and her contemplation of suicide with a casual, implacable cool. "People died all the time? Why couldn't I?" The sole shaft of light arrives in the form of Rebecca Saint John, a new education director at the prison who rapidly becomes an unhealthy source of emotional solace-at one of their first meetings, Eileen is so desperate to impress she winds up a drunken mess, and there's worse to come. Moshfegh has Eileen constantly drop hints about a climactic incident that prompts her escape from "X-ville," but she withholds details until very near the novel's end. But instead of testing the reader's patience, the narrative masterfully taunts-eschewing the typical dips and rises of a novel, Moshfegh manages a slow, steady build so that the release, when it comes, registers a genuine shock. And Moshfegh has such a fine command of language and her character that you can miss just how inside out Eileen's life becomes in the course of the novel, the way the "loud, rabid inner circuitry of my mind" overtakes her. Is she inhumane or self-empowered? Deeply unreliable or justifiably jaded? Moshfegh keeps all options on the table while keeping her heroine coherent. A shadowy and superbly told story of how inner turmoil morphs into outer chaos.COPYRIGHT(2015) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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Starred review from June 1, 2015
Eileen, perhaps one of the most damaged characters in recent fiction, is the narrator of this dark look back at her life during a 1960s Christmas week. Eileen lost her mother when she was in high school; her sister is the pride of the family, but the two women have no relationship; Eileen's father is an alcoholic, a cop forced into retirement and now heading toward dementia, a man who has mentally abused Eileen her whole life. Her life is a horror: living in squalor, taking care of her abusive father, driving an old car with an exhaust problem that forces her to leave the windows open, even during those frigid New England winters. She works as a secretary at a boy's prison, a discouraging job at best. She obsesses about her bodily functions, has strange sexual fantasies (although at 24, she is still a virgin), and is stalking one of the prison guards. There is no respite from the darkness here, until Rebecca shows up at the prison, ostensibly to create an education program for the boys. Eileen is enamored of the beautiful Harvard graduate and desperate for a friend. That friendship turns into something truly ugly, which leads to a shocking ending. Dark as night, but literary psychological suspense at its best.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.) -
June 1, 2015
Initially, this novel reads like a memoir of a drab, friendless young woman, Eileen Dunlop, a 24-year-old clerical worker in a young men's prison near Boston. Her actions and innermost thoughts in the days leading up to Christmas 1964 are recounted in Karl Ove Knausgaard-like detail describing intense self-loathing, a miserable codependent relationship with her demented, alcoholic father, and even her bowel movements. As her father's grudging caretaker, Eileen suffers drinking bouts of her own, and their house is filthy and in disrepair. When a beautiful, educated woman joins the prison's staff as a new counselor, Eileen becomes her clinging friend. But we know Eileen is now an independent, older woman, so the reader is drawn along, wondering how she frees herself from her bleak existence. VERDICT Those familiar with Moshfegh's earlier award-winning novel McGlue may not be as surprised when this tale shapeshifts into a crime thriller, but readers of all kinds will relish this well-crafted fiction. Moshfegh's ability to render Eileen's dreary tale so compelling is testament to her narrative skills. [See Prepub Alert, 2/9/15.]--Reba Leiding, emeritus, James Madison Univ. Lib., Harrisonburg, VA
Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
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March 1, 2015
A Plimpton Prize winner whose McGlue was chosen for the inaugural Fence Modern Prize in Prose and by Vanity Fair as one of 2014's best books, Moshfegh was all the rage on book blogs and websites last fall. In "Top Indie Fiction: 15 Key Titles Beyond the Best Sellers List for Fall 2014," I said, "it would have been no surprise to see [McGlue] coming from a major literary house, so look there for Moshfegh's next." And here it is, a quietly tense tale starring nondescript Eileen Dunlop, who tends to an alcoholic father while working at a boys' correctional facility. She does a little shoplifting but nothing really bad until brightly lit Rebecca Saint John lands at the facility and turns her head with the promise of friendship.
Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
