“Ottessa Moshfegh’s ‘Lapvona’ Reflects the Darkest Ills of Human Nature” - shondaland
Published: Jun 22, 2022The critically acclaimed writer discusses the new, twisted, deeply unsettling world of Lapvona.
Ottessa Moshfegh doesn’t read her books after they’ve gone to print. When she’s working on a story, she’s deep inside the flow of it, focused on getting things right. Once she can’t make any more changes, it’s on to the next project. What we feel when we read her unsettling work is between us and God; she’s done with it.
Moshfegh was born and raised in Boston, Massachusetts, and a career in the arts was all but destined as the daughter of two musicians who taught at the New England Conservatory of Music. Her first novella, McGlue (2014), was well received, but it was Moshfegh's first full novel, the Man Booker Prize-shortlisted Eileen (2015), that earned her a name in the literary world associated with gruesome scenes and uncomfortable characters. She writes about people who are trapped in isolated routines but who are on the edge of something, usually some kind of psychological break. The protagonists of both Eileen and her following novel, the New York Times best-seller My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018), share an often-grotesque fascination with the physicality of being a person. Bodily functions are described in depth, alternately reviled and sexualized. And yet, there’s a tenderness and truth to Moshfegh’s writing that keep the discomfort from becoming unbearable. She’s one of those rare writers who has enchanted both the general public and serious critics.
It seems like Moshfegh’s default setting is creator, not consumer. She isn’t on social media, and she doesn’t own a TV, though she often falls asleep to raw police-interrogation footage on YouTube. That lack of distraction might explain how she’s released a novella, a short-story collection, and now four novels in the last eight years, but she also just loves the work. “I’ve had to fill my life with a lot of other things to keep from releasing three books a year,” Moshfegh says.
When she’s working on a piece, Moshfegh does her best not to consider the market implications or audience reactions, even though it can be hard not to think about her place in the literary machine. “I just feel so fortunate that I still have a place on the shelf,” Moshfegh says. “I would be writing no matter what; I just would probably be writing more in a cabin in the woods rather than a house in Pasadena.”
And with her newest book, Lapvona, Moshfegh is claiming her place in the so-called literary machine once again. Though it wasn’t the book she initially imagined. If you read interviews with Moshfegh from around the time of her previous book, Death in Her Hands, which came out in early 2020, she mentions working on a completely different novel, one set in San Francisco and Shanghai at the turn of the century. When I ask her what happened to that project, Moshfegh has the same answer most of us have about our best-laid plans for the beginning of the decade: “Covid happened.”
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