She suffers from existential dissonance, the idea you should be happy because you are an American. Her character and her obsessions are familiar to me although my family is nothing like hers. How and where did Eileen draw her first breath?Įileen was born, as I was, in New England. When I sat down to write this novel, I thought: this is going to be the terror that keeps me grounded and the drama developed around that. His father had abused him and his mother had been complicit in the abuse.

He was based on the true story of a young man who had murdered his father and was serving life without parole. It wasn’t Eileen, it was the boy: Lee Polk. I didn’t really set out to write a noir novel and I don’t know if I exactly have. I’m interested in taking establishment genre and turning it on its head. Then I didn’t touch it for maybe six months. I wrote the first draft in less than two months. I had to ask: what is the essence of a novel? OK, it changes every day but at that moment it was a good story in which the reader could attach herself to the psychology of the narrator and in which something insanely interesting would happen. It was a practical experiment but I also had placed a weird limitation on the project. Could I write a mainstream book a normal person could read? I thought: I’d like to do this because I am totally broke.

Hollywood insiders describe it as the next Gone Girl. O ttessa Moshfegh is a novelist from Boston whose thriller, Eileen, has had rave reviews in the US and been optioned by film producer Scott Rudin ( The Grand Budapest Hotel, The Social Network).

Eileen ottessa