We support women’s rights, but do we always support women’s wrongs?
I read Eileen at the recommendation of Olivia Rodrigo, who praised it in an interview. Eileen was Moshfegh’s debut novel, for which she won the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. In short, I started reading expecting masterful writing but otherwise had no idea what to anticipate. To say I was unnerved is the understatement of the goddamn century.
*Spoilers for Eileen ahead*
overview
Narrated by an older Eileen, the novel takes place in 1964 in a town she calls X-ville. Eileen is a diffident and self-aggrandizing twenty-four-year-old living with her paranoid, alcoholic father and working as a secretary at a correctional center for teenage boys. With her mother dead and her older sister living in a different town, Eileen is confined to a dismal life of being verbally abused by her older coworkers and keeping the liquor cabinet stocked for her father. She fantasizes about moving to New York City, and these dreams appear closer than ever when the beautiful and stylish Rebecca begins working at the correctional facility as the Director of Education. Rebecca takes an interest in Eileen, who is both gratified by the attention and desperate to please her, and their friendship unravels a dark tale of murder, sexual perversion, and an ending that is both unsatisfying and profoundly real.
Eileen’s most glaring quality is how bizarre she is. She is repulsed by sexuality: “Sexual excitement nearly always made me feel sick,” yet is obsessed with her male coworker, Randy. She keeps a dead mouse in the glovebox of her car. But what perturbed me the most about Eileen was her passivity. Her father was verbally abusive and she loathed him so much she “wished him dead,” yet largely takes his insults and commands without protest. She recollects that she was entrenched in her own unhappiness and “concerned with my own wants and needs,” yet makes no attempt to improve her situation. That is, until the end of the novel when she is forced to flee her town. I find that Eileen subverts conventional understandings of female protagonists. She is not a morally-pure damsel in distress, nor a plucky heroine with a heart of gold. She is unlikeable, something female heroines are seldom allowed to be in popular literature.
moshfegh’s writing style
Moshfegh’s literary talent emerges in Eileen’s clear voice and conversational tone, giving the reader the impression that they are not reading a novel, but having a slightly disturbing conversation with their friend, Eileen. I did not emerge from the novel liking Eileen, but I understood her. The reader is offered insight into her negligent upbringing and the consistent ridicule she endured from her parents, whom she was forced to leave college to take care of, and the reader partially understands how she became this way.
Through this clear voice, I find myself shamefacedly relating to Eileen at times. Very few of us can swear that they’ve never “wallowed in a problem” instead of solving it, even temporarily. As a chronic overthinker who tends to dwell on my past faults, I echoed Eileen’s comfort in the thought that “my brains could be untangled, straightened out, and thus refashioned into a state of peace and sanity.”
conclusion
Through Moshfegh’s usage of “ugly” metaphors and imagery, she offers us deep insight into Eileen’s deepest urges, even ones as unsettling as her being “easily roused by the grosser habits of the human body,” a literary choice that both repulsed me and glued me to the pages. While I did not enjoy the book as much as I expected, Moshfegh has constructed a story that skillfully holds a mirror to the reader, forcing them to both shrink from the “loud, rabid inner circuitry of [Eileen’s] mind” and confront their own shortcomings. I was left asking myself, “What the f*ck did I just read?” but I also accepted the bitter reality that maybe, just maybe, there is a bit of Eileen in all of us.