Ottessa 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). Hollywood insiders describe it as the next Gone Girl.
What was writing this book like?
I conceived of it as an experiment. Could I write a mainstream book a normal person could read? I thought: I’d like to do this because I am totally broke. It was a practical experiment but I also had placed a weird limitation on the project. 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. I wrote the first draft in less than two months. Then I didn’t touch it for maybe six months. Then I rewrote it three times. I’m interested in taking establishment genre and turning it on its head. I didn’t really set out to write a noir novel and I don’t know if I exactly have.
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