Author: Ottessa Moshfegh

My Year of Rest and Relaxation hands its narrator money, beauty, a Manhattan apartment and a plan to sleep through an entire year on prescription sedatives, then declines either to make her likeable or to punish her for it.Eileen came first, controlled and bleak, about a young woman in a Massachusetts prison town. Lapvona went medieval and considerably nastier. Moshfegh writes about bodies with a specificity most novelists step around, and treats disgust as a reasonable response to being alive. People take to this immediately or not at all, and there is not much middle ground.