The book was originally scheduled to come out this month, followed by an international publicity tour. “I hope that when people read this book,” Moshfegh said of “Death in Her Hands,” which will be published later this year, “they’re not like, ‘Oh God, it’s another Ottessa book about this woman in isolation.’” So she forced her mind into the present using a strict regimen: She’d get down 1,000 words a day, without looking back, “until I’d reached the conclusion of something.”

“My future was so terrifying,” she said, “I needed to write something to get me onto the other side of an experience.” “It was almost like someone had died when I finished that book,” Moshfegh, 38, said in early February, over lunch at her favorite hole-in-the-wall Thai restaurant in Los Angeles, where she now lives. at Brown and a fellowship at Stanford (where she never felt she belonged), the native New Englander was now living friendless across the bay from San Francisco, and on the cusp of completing a story collection, “ Homesick for Another World.” Letting go of it, though, she was afflicted by a grief so intense she could only overcome it through more writing. She had published some short stories and a novella, but it would be months before her first novel, “ Eileen,” would earn her a living, a place on the Booker Prize shortlist, a name.Īfter completing an M.F.A. LOS ANGELES - It was the spring of 2015 in Oakland, Calif., and Ottessa Moshfegh was all alone.

Eileen novel by ottessa moshfegh