Ottessa Moshfegh

DC

Emmanuel mentioned that when you spoke at Jack Bankowsky’s ArtCenter lecture series, you opened with an introduction written by ChatGPT. With this November issue, On Postmodernism, I’ve been thinking about how closely these predictive text models echo concerns raised by postmodernist theorists.

There’s no mind, no subjectivity, no authorial agency behind the text—yet it reads coherently and resonates with people. That dissonance feels unsettling, or at the very least, generative. What does it mean to find meaning in something built from collective fragments?

EO

[Laughs.] Like humor? But yes, Ottessa, I was telling Dawn about your conversation with Jill Mulleady at ArtCenter. You opened with a ChatGPT-written intro and spoke so intimately about writing and thinking through painting. That, along with everything we’ve been circling more broadly, made it feel like the right moment to bring you into the fold.

DC

Yeah. And I feel like postmodernism itself raised these issues sixty years ago.

EO

What would those issues be?

DC

Well in this case, when a machine, taught on a million sources and fragments, seems to spell the end of authorial intent. It’s surprising to me that people are freaking out now, because versions of this conversation were taking place decades ago.

EO

I’ve been thinking about this problem in terms of language and the performance of language—though it’s now been taken on by technology itself.

OM

Thanks for having me guys. But what is postmodernism, even...? Can we define the term, and what it means in 2023 in particular?

EO

[Laughs.] The question you’re asking is kind of the point. I’m not sure we’re standing on solid ground anymore—if we ever were. At the magazine, and especially in this issue, we’re leaning into the idea that postmodernism isn’t fixed. We’re interested in how it keeps shifting, and how it still shapes the moment we’re in. Culture feels stuck—across art, film, literature. As producers, we’ve fallen into patterns of thought where we’ve lost the plot. We’re being asked to repeat the same prompts, respond to the same cues, recreate the same stories. What did you want from writing when you first started?

OM

I wanted a lot of things. At the time, I wanted writing to take me to a different world. I wanted to be someone else and see what would happen—like an actor on a set. I do think of language as a performance in its final draft. Even though I’ve moved out of first-person narrative and more into third person in my last novel and the novel I’m working on now, I still feel I’m writing for the theater in a lot of ways.

In my past, I felt that my writing was meant to be read aloud—to carry on as verbal storytelling, just like a piece of music that gets played and replayed by different musicians. The writing transforms in each reader. But now I’m actually actively trying to resist this impulse and see what the result would be if I were less musical and more literary. It’s an exercise where I’m working against my fundamental belief, and my hope is that it results in a new kind of writing—a new approach to fiction with different stories and tendencies.

DC

It also makes me curious what you're thinking when you talk about the difference between the musical and literary. Who is an example of more musical versus literary writing?

EO

And what’s your point of reference when you’re embodying that mode of writing?

OM

I am thinking about my beginnings as a writer and musician. When I first started writing, I had exposure to a very specific school of writing which was whatever Gordon Lish was publishing in The Quarterly in the early 1990s. It was a tactile style of writing based on the tale of someone whose entire composition came out of reduced theory, which was writing through consecution and swerve. I didn’t study with Lish, but I’ve met him several times and he gave me summarized notes on what he taught in his big classes. What translated to me as a youth was that this method of consecution and swerve is a technique where you take one sentence and the next is either a continuation or it swerves away from that, creating a binary. That’s one way of writing. The kind of writing that comes out of that technique is not necessarily, for example, plot-based or character driven. It’s none of those things. It's more like poetry. It can have a story in it but it’s more the language that it’s composing itself with. Would that be postmodern?

I also studied music intimately. My parents would leave me alone at the New England Conservatory every Saturday because they taught violin there all day. And so, I took as many classes as would keep me busy. I took theory, chorus, solfège, composition, piano, violin, orchestra, and chamber music. I lived in a family of musicians where I didn’t participate in a lot of conversation, and my parents mostly talked about their students. So I think the focus on musical development was inescapable. I saw that the better I got at playing the piano, the more expressive I could be. I brought this philosophy into my discipline as a writer. I wrote a lot when I was really young and would use the material of certain words to write in a specific style for six months. And then I would reorganize the language and write another way for the next six months. I was making things complicated for myself, but it was musical—the focus was on the composition, being a story that could be delivered as a song. But the result of that writing was more like a painting rather than a story. More tableau than narrative. That’s the natural thing that happened, and I found how I was able to conjure up paintings in different ways. I would say Death in Her Hands is the evolution of that way of working. It takes language as a substance and bends it. It’s also the last book I wrote in the first-person.

DC

And Lapvona came after that? Which to me feels, if I get your terminology, more literary than musical. Like a kind of plot stream outside of what each sentence is responding to in the previous sentence that's shaping where you're going.

OM

Well, weirdly, although I published Death in Her Hands after My Year of Rest and Relaxation, I wrote it before. For me, the bridge from the musical material to the literary was My Year of Rest and Relaxation.

EO

In reading Rest and Relaxation, it feels like it actually does dance between the musical and literary. I didn’t read it until now, and the question that was picking at me was why did you set it in the early 2000s? It got me thinking of the prompts we give ourselves, right? I know it ends with the bit about 9/11 but it’s really a painting or portrait of that time in a way. How did you level the ground then?

OM

That’s a good question. I can tell you the story of how I got there, although I’m unsure if it’s interesting. On one level, that book is a portrait of time. I started that book when I was in an extremely monastic phase of my life. I remember the week that I started writing it. I was staying with my friend on the Upper East Side, and it was Pride Day in June. That morning I didn’t eat breakfast and I walked from East 84th Street to Greenwich Village and saw the parade. I went to a party with an old friend and had a glass of tap water and I left. I walked back to 84th Street. That was my life, constantly doing that to myself. I know now I was trying to exhaust myself of my own anxiety, and it was not working. That is what inspired me to write My Year of Rest and Relaxation, in a personal sense. It was the first novel that I wrote in order to exhaust myself, and about exhausting oneself.

EO

Right. It seems like a meta pairing of structure and a format to exercise these different variables in. It doesn’t seem like it was about finding some resolve but processing the motions of those kinds of circumstances.

OM

Something like that. I wouldn't have been able to explain that at the time because I was so much in the process. I didn't have that kind of awareness. I got lucky in realizing that I had given my protagonist this job at a gallery. The only time I’ve regularly visited a gallery in Chelsea was in the year 2000. I was a junior at Barnard College and taking a course at Columbia with Rachel Harrison, who was teaching sculpture. One of her assignments was that every week we go to a gallery. So, I went downtown and saw Damien Hirst, abstract paintings, and shit that looked like it was drawn by a computer and other stuff, I don’t remember who made it. I remember walking around some kind of janky gallery, and someone had taken a CD player and other random objects that looked like they were picked up off the floor, and just duct taped it together. It sat on a dusty plinth, and I don’t think it was dusty on purpose. That sort of art had just been shelved in my brain. So remembering that, I was inspired to write about art. But I had no idea about the “art world” at the time.

EO

How old were you?

OM

I was in my mid-thirties. I got a residency at MacDowell, which was really lucky. Even though at the time I was the grouchiest, most antisocial person, I kept going to the dinners, even though I was about to lose it being around so many people talking. I met these amazing visual artists, and they were like, “What are you writing about?” And I remember I was so naive; I really didn't know anything about the art world. And I was like, “It's about this girl who works in a gallery.” And they were like, “What kind of gallery?” And I was like... “It's kind of like a boutique.” I think that's what I said. That was how I was thinking of it, which isn't that far off, but they were like, “You should read these books about the art world.” And so, I did. And then I took a couple trips to New York and walked around and it just jogged my memory.

EO

What did you read?

OM

I think it’s called Seven Days in the Art World.

DC

Yeah, Sarah Thornton.

OM

So fun.

DC

Your description of working in those gallery spaces was so good. I thought you really nailed it. There's that one point where the main character goes in and knows not to wear a dress or something that's too feminine. When I was trying to dig out your email to contact you for this interview, I found an old email you sent me around that time where you must have been thinking about writing it. Because in the email you mentioned something that you were working on that was set in a gallery. You were like tell me about the world. [Laughs.] I don't know if it was My Year of Rest and Relaxation that you were mulling over then…

OM

Really? In 2007, I didn’t think I’d ever write a novel.

EO

What specifically about the book resonated with you? You had music, found art, and then writing. It seems like you were searching for a new format to give that rhythm to.

OM

The takeaway from the book was, “Oh, I’m right. The art world is absurd.” I knew that so much of the world that I was conjuring had to do with money. And how depressing it is that art can’t exist without it. It’s an industry and a trade that’s really about rich people and their investments. And to me that's kind of the heartbreaking sadness of capitalism in general, that we're all these souls, but our identities are listed as social security numbers, tax IDs. Now that I’m working in film too, it's all about the in-between. It's fully capitalizing on the experience of human emotion.

EO

How do you feel now that Eileen has been made into a film? What kind of compromise was required to evolve the form of that work?

OM

I never felt like Eileen was a sacred object. I just didn't, and I think I had prepared myself for that because the reason I wrote Eileen was to have a career as a published author. I had identified as a short story writer for my entire writing life until then. And when I finished graduate school, I asked an agent, “How do you think I could publish a book of these short stories?” And he said, “Well, no one is ever going to publish a book of your short stories until you have a novel out.” I was like, "Oh shit." So, writing a novel was this very deliberate step toward figuring out how I could make a living. And I thought, “Well, this either will or won’t work.”

EO

And what were your options?

OM

[Laughs.] That was my only option. What else was I going to do? If I didn’t have a career as a published writer, I’d be dead. I am so self-destructive. I really needed my life to feel like it had a deep and fated purpose. And so, the luck of Eileen being kind of good and people going for it was a clarifying moment for me where I thought, “Oh, I can survive.” I didn’t feel precious about it. And writing the screenplay was actually really fun. I did it with my husband [Luke B. Goebel] who’s really smart in a different way than I am. We worked closely with Will Oldroyd, our director, as we were drafting. We wrote the movie on spec. And it ended up being my first full meal in making a movie, where the movie-making was demystified because I wasn’t being intimidated by a contract, and there was no studio. We were just living off of our own excitement about our collaboration because the three of us, Luke—my husband—Will, and I had amazing creative chemistry. It was just so fun. And I was happy that I didn’t have to carry the whole spiritual burden alone.

DC

Can I go back and ask you about solfège—which, for those lucky enough not to know about it, is the do-re-mi Julie Andrews famously hammers away at in the Sound of Music soundtrack? Did you study this at NEC, where your parents were teaching?

OM

I actually didn't study solfège at NEC. [Laughs.] This is how nerdy I am: I had a private solfège teacher. He was the first guy that I ever met who I thought was gay. I'm sure I had met other men that were gay, but he seemed different to me. He was a very important figure in my understanding that there were different kinds of people in the world. I had private lessons with him. He was very strange teacher. I mean, he was a fucking solfège teacher. [Laughs.] I probably started solfège when I was like six. And I learned from him until the end of high school.

DC

That is so wild. Were your parents encouraging you to do this? Or were you interested in solfège, or a mix?

OM

I don't know, maybe an unspoken combination of those two. But when I was little, he would count my mistakes during a lesson, and after three mistakes, I had to stand up and he would kick me in the butt. I’m sure he knew at a certain point that I did not want to be a composer because I wasn't all that into theory, but I was really into singing. The last four or five years of our lessons together, we would just sing together. I remember we had this huge book of Mozart quintets and we would study and sing the different parts.

DC

It sounds like when you're talking about music being part of your practice, it feels like not just any music, but like the traditions of classical music and theory. Maybe the tradition of treating  music almost as a systematic endeavor—there's this idea of discipline, where you talk about writing in a certain way for six months. Is that connected to classical traditions of practice?

OM

I think so. I mean, I never think that what I'm writing says anything about myself that isn't totally obvious to me while I’m writing it. Then ten years later I'll be like, “Oh, that's what was going on with me.” Like, I can see very deep in the text because I'm very technical but I’m not very thoughtful when I'm writing. I resist intellectualizing things, I like to think. But what I really mean is that I resist self-analysis.

EO

How did your time in graduate school reshape how you thought about writing? In terms of the expectations you had of the institution and of yourself?

OM

Well, that's a really good question. I went to Brown to do my MFA based on the recommendation of Ben Marcus, who I think of as an experimental writer. I had taken a course with him at Columbia and I was an undergraduate at Barnard. He was editing Fence Magazine at the time and actually took a story of mine. The first story that I ever published was in Fence because Ben had read it in workshop when he was my teacher and needed a story to publish in an issue. Ben was not at Brown anymore but I remembered him saying, “If you go to grad school, you should go to Brown.”

EO

Why?

OM

Because they're the most experimental and open-minded. [Laughs.] And they give you a stipend. I think he wrote me a recommendation. Anyway, years later I applied to one school and it was Brown. And I got in, which was amazing. And then I went and I thought, “Okay this is good because I'm with people who also have alternative relationships to fiction beyond the mainstream one.” And then…

EO

What was the mainstream at the time?

OM

Hmm, I don’t actually know, but I know what it was not. [Laughs.] Everyone at Brown was doing something totally different. And I rarely understood what they were doing, which was interesting. But then I kind of had an epiphany. It was while I was writing McGlue and I was like, “Oh shit.” I think it had to do with being exposed to what everyone else was writing. I was like, “The things that I'm writing have no meaning. I think that I need to be telling more deliberate stories with characters that feel like real people.” My writing shifted a little bit toward that thinking. In workshop, I submitted work that I was writing as a way of teaching myself what that might be, and everybody hated it. [Laughs.] Because they were reaching beyond the comprehensible. Some of them. And the new writing I was practicing probably felt, to them, like John Cheever mixed with television. And I remember having fights in my workshops to the point where in second year in grad school I refused to go. I almost dropped out of school altogether. I may have just been fighting with them in my own mind. That’s probably what was happening.

DC

Wow.

OM

I was so hypersensitive it was ridiculous. I said something once about how writing should be about transformation. I like stories in which characters change. Why should I be reading something that isn’t going to change or influence me to have a new feeling? And people were like, “That’s so conservative.” Basically, I felt like they were calling me a fascist because I had that old idea about what fiction is. And I was like, “Okay.” [Laughs.]

EO

But is it an old idea?

OM

Yeah, I think so.

EO

It makes me think about Roland Barthes “Death of the Author” essay. In that instance, who’s transforming whom? Are you transforming yourself by virtue of writing to this imagined audience or do you think of yourself as the person who’s enacting this change through these various observations?

OM

Definitely the latter. If you’re successful in doing the latter then the former will also be true and good for everyone. Everything that I write, I don’t know what I need to learn yet in order to finish it—I don’t know what the breakthrough is. Sometimes it’s already happened and I didn’t realize it. That happens a lot to me.

EO

In what sense?

OM

Sometimes I’ll be writing a story and I just don’t know how it ends; then I realize that it ended three pages ago... The first third of a novel is totally fun. There’s no stress. But once you get to the one third point, you have to make commitments, and then it gets to be work. And then in the last third there’s a gun to your head and you’re like, “If I don’t have an epiphany, I’m going to die.” [Laughs.] It’s always something I need to figure out.

DC

Do you feel that kind of arc, where there is an epiphany by the last third, was the thing these other people in workshops were attacking you for?

OM

I think they were attacking me because they didn’t like the idea of a character. They were committed to telling their stories through more experimental terms. I've never read John Cheever though. It’s just something that people say. [Laughs.]

DC

I’ve only read The Swimmer.

EO

It’s interesting that you brought traditional thinking to this experimental context. What about education liberated you?

OM

I don't really think I learned very much about writing at Barnard, maybe I learned that what I had been doing alone in high school was not what most people thought was normal.

EO

What did you study?

OM

I studied Literature and thought early on to focus on American literature which was so weird. And then my senior thesis seminar was about Black masculinity.

EO

Wait, what?

OM

I can't remember the exact title of the seminar, but yeah, it was about forms of Black masculinity in literature. And then I ended up writing my thesis about the Spike Lee movie called Girl 6, which was about a phone sex operator. It was...

EO

When was this?

OM

2002.

EO

This is a cheap question, but what was it like for you being in college on the edge of the millennium?

OM

How old are you?

EO

[Laughs.] I’m 29.

OM

Coming out of the 1990s I didn’t feel I was cool enough, but then there were a lot of nerds that weren’t cool at all. That’s how I felt. Being in college, I never felt at home in institutions, even though I have really benefited from them because they give me space to rebel in. 9/11 completely colored my college experience. I was a senior in college and everything after that just seemed meaningless. I don’t have much contact with people in universities these days, but it seems that politics is way more important now than it was in the late ’90s. No one was questioning one’s politics in an English lit course, no one was like “Oh, no, you can’t say that.” Nothing was being redefined so intensely.

DC

How did 9/11 change that? How does this connect to the moment at the end of My Year of Rest and Relaxation. Did you see that coming as this pivotal final moment when you were working on it?

OM

When I realized that I had set the book in the year 2000, I knew what was coming. Everybody was going to know. I mean, there were a couple of things that happened in my life where I told myself, I will never be the same again. 9/11 was the only time that I felt I had changed in a positive way because of being shaken that hard. I had never been so close to that much death, and the death itself felt very different from the way the grief was being processed culturally. It shook me out of what was a psychotic depression, honestly, and I don’t really think it needs unpacking. [Laughs.] I wrote a whole book about it.

DC

Is this connected in any way to the shift to third person?

OM

It’s kind of a new life that really started during COVID, another world shifter for me. I had never been interested in a bird’s eye view before there was a global pandemic. My mind shifted to a more tender and intimate relationship with the human race, very democratizing. I was totally uninterested in being trapped in the I. “I” was no longer interesting to me.

EO

How does that kind of structural thinking apply to film?

DC

I was just going to ask the same thing, Emmanuel. [Laughs.]

OM

It does and doesn’t. I’m really new at screenwriting, I’m about five years in and it’s more complicated than writing a novel and way more technical. A lot of time when you’re writing a scene, you have to think about the “I” of each character, and then you have to think of the “I” of the camera. And then you have to think of the audience. I never think about the audience when I’m writing fiction.

EO

Why is that?

OM

Because there is not an audience. There’s one consciousness that’s reading, and when I read it, I become the reader so I can be the reader and the writer in the same moment. But when I’m writing a screenplay, I’m the reader and the writer of the screenplay or the co-writer at that moment. But the audience is not reading the screenplay, the audience is watching a movie.

EO

How has exposure changed you and affected your work?

OM

Well, if I’m lucky, the exposure is interesting. In terms of the act of self-exposure, I don’t do a lot of thinking about the kinds of things I speak about in public. It’s just innate. I don’t give language to it or try to express anything about it until I’m asked to do so. And that can occasionally be sort of inspiring, to communicate about something I haven’t previously known how to, or tried. Exposure in other ways I think is really toxic. And I try unsuccessfully to shield myself from those more toxic elements. It’s not something you can avoid, the toxic bit. I feel so fortunate for so many reasons that I’m like “Okay, if there’s some poison in this cake, I’ll try to eat around it. But if I get sick for a while, it's okay too.” So, it does change you. I think exposure does change anyone’s voice. Just being heard in the slightest—there’s a lot of power in that. And you also have to know when not to be impressed by other people’s power. And when to hide and say nothing.

EO

Do you carry that person who lived in Rhode Island with you? Or where does she now live?

OM

I remember her. I’m grateful to her. And sometimes I’m glad I don’t have to do that again, go through being her again. Other times I’m like, oh, it was so much more meaningful than it was the first time I was experiencing writing a book and I didn’t know what I was getting into. It’s a lot. We have so many people that we’ve been in our lives.

EO

I was thinking about the trajectory of going from a cult writer to screenplay writer. How has it been navigating most of your written work being optioned for the screen?

OM

Yes, rights have been optioned on a lot of my books. With everything happening in the film industry, we'll see what happens. The likelihood that things get made is very low compared to what I thought.

EO

What are the indicators of your projects being made?

OM

There has to be a script, financier, director, and cast. And then it has to be the right time for all those people. And they could easily just not do it because there are so many other things they could do.

EO

Has that information shifted how you’re writing or world building in books?

OM

Yes, I think so. Screenwriting, for me, requires developing an idea, which is not something that I usually did in my novels. I just wrote and kind of found the book in the writing. Thinking ahead about what a movie ought to be is helpful in how I’m designing it. I’m a bit more aware of the project in its identity. It’s how I’m approaching writing my next book. This book is something that I thought I knew how to do and then I realized that it was way more interesting to do it a different way. For that to be successful, I really need to change what I think success is in a novel. And I’m curious about how that will go. [Laughs.]

EO

Has success changed your thinking about what a novel should be?

OM

I don't think it has. Success is kind of a vague word, but when I think about the success of a novel it’s different. For me, a novel is successful if it feels complete in its delivery and it feels intentional by the end. And that hasn't changed at all. It's just that with what I'm working on now, I am not quite sure I know what my intention is. [Laughs.]

EO

Lapvona and My Year of Rest and Relaxation take place over the course of a year. What is your relationship to time in that capacity?

OM

I think a year is a good unit because enough can change and it’s how we measure life, a year is a common unit of life. But I’m so surprised that I have a pattern like that. I do remember my mother once telling me that she liked books that took place over a certain number of days. And I think I internalized that. So, Eileen takes place over a week, the week before Christmas. I think having a container for the time of your story is helpful structurally, and it’s a very obvious structure in a lot of ways. If you know that the story is going to take place over the course of a year, and you know how a year is subdivided, and what it feels like when the seasons change, then you have one sense of how to pace the story. The seasons change, there are holidays. We live through time like that, or at least we can recall life according to these cycles. I always remember spring. The thaw. The first breeze. Of course, now that I live in Southern California, and I don’t go to school, and I work from home, I often have no idea what the date is. I get mixed up. So maybe the imposition of structured time is a way for me to formulate myself within this timelessness. Now, why am I talking about this? Because I am obsessed with the passage of time and how I spend it. I’ve asked other people, and they don’t seem to have the same experience. If I’m alone in a room, if I’m left on my own so to speak, ninety percent of my thinking sounds like, “Okay, now move your foot to the left. Look up. The bed is sweaty so get up. But first, pet each dog. Okay, now take a sip of water. Now get up and close the bedroom door. Now sit in the chair. Now move the window curtain. Now write a book. Okay, now stand up.”