It genuinely got under my skin, and even though the story was told retrospectively, it was hard not to feel present with her in her bleak existence. I’ve been fortunate enough not to be a situation such as hers, but the reader is put so much in her head that it was easy to feel it vicariously. Nothing came across as melodramatic or sensationalized. What struck me most was just how raw her misery felt. Early on a lot of it reads as a day in the life of Eileen.Įnveloping these drab routines was a deeply intimate look into how she feels about herself, her environment, everyone around her, and the often absurd/naïve fantasies she has.

We learn of her banal routines at the prison, her nonexistent relationship with the other ladies in the office, her fixation on a certain guard whom she stalks, as well as her dreary, broken home life in a rundown house with her father, pacifying him with gin while receiving all of his verbal abuse and contempt. Eileen the narrator, in the present an old woman, reflects on the fateful days leading up to Christmas Eve 1964.

With such hyper-focus on Eileen as a character, a great bulk of the novel doesn’t really have a plot. With all said and done, I can now characterize the novel as a meticulous dissection of the lead character and her life, performed in retrospect by the narrator herself. While I could recall some details of the summary from when I first purchased my digital copy, as well as people tacking “mystery” and “thriller” to it on Goodreads, I had only a vague notion of what was in store for me.

While at this point I’m no stranger to how Moshfegh’s fiction plumbs the depths of human suffering, I was surprised with just how much of a slow burn this novel was. The story follows her life over the course of several days, leading up to the fateful Christmas Eve when her life changes forever. Between working as a secretary in a youth prison and caring for her callous, alcoholic father at home, Eileen lives a life of misery and self-loathing, fantasizing about leaving her hometown forever. Set during a bitter winter in 1964, the story follows Eileen Dunlop, a disturbed 24-year-old woman living in a nowhere town in Massachusetts. Eileen is a 2015 novel by Ottessa Moshfegh, the author’s first full-length book of fiction, which won her the PEN/Hemingway Foundation award in 2016.

Book eileen by ottessa moshfegh