A review by miriam_mal
Eileen by Ottessa Moshfegh

Did not finish book.
I read about 70% of Eileen by Ottessa Moshfegh before DNF’ing and I just…needed to process my thoughts. (SPOILERS BELOW)

Before I get into it I guess it’s only fair to say this: I had an impression of what Ottessa Moshfegh’s books were like and stayed away for a long time bc it’s really just not my cuppa Joe. I think the only thing that compelled me to check out Eileen was that there’s a movie coming out, and I thought it was a murder mystery, or thriller maybe. Knew there was a murder involved. 
Since I am interested in how people write, like in a mechanical, technical sense, I thought I’d give it a go. Wish I hadn’t. While I think she writes vividly, going back and forth from memory to current day pretty smoothly, praising someone’s form can only go so far. 
Eileen as a character is a repressed mid-20s woman, super isolated and emotionally abused who feels trapped in her situation. She’s self destructive, body-obsessed, and I saw another review call her “psychosexual”, a term I’d never heard before but which seems apt. Like she’s repulsed by her own body, hardly showers, hardly eats, drinks with her dad, their house is in utter squalor, and then when she does encounter other people she hyper sexualizes them to the extreme, and weaponizes their appearances against herself to confirm her own shortcomings.   there are passages that say I preferred the struggle, the problem, because it emphasized her own misery to herself, sort of validated her victimhood and struggle. 
Definitely some grim descriptions not for the faint of heart or if you’re in a tough place mentally. 
Character definitely in a horrible place in life and lacks the gumption to pull herself together enough to look after herself, and is so horrified by her own physical being. Jarring read to say the least, and not a nice place to linger mentally. Again it was for that reason I expected not to like it. 
I couldn’t help but think if the character were male and the book was popular, being made into a movie with a major Hollywood actor in a leading role, the reception would be so wildly different. 

There seems to be a movement or trend currently of books written about womanhood that are just carnal, or “irreverent” is a word I come across a lot when talking about these books, but I just can’t get past how unhealthy the behaviour is. I’m not really sure what the appeal is in having characters have no boundaries or discipline and just allowing themselves to be utterly derailed by their intrusive thoughts. Its just gross. I understand that our own internal monologues are not always clean or kind but I’m of the opinion that overindulging these tendancies is more self destructive than anything (both for a reader and a writer). 


I added content warnings and put them all as graphic, not that they're all super vivid but just discussed constantly. So anyone looking to avoid these topics really should steer clear of this book.
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