It was not the first time she’d received a flurry of concerned texts and e-mails: “Are you OK?”
Ottessa Moshfegh’s friends and family were worried about her, again. A few weeks ago the Wall Street Journal published the novelist’s contribution to its food-and-drink column, which pairs a writer with a bottle of booze. She’d chosen to drink the top-shelf gin straight out of the bottle in the back of an Uber in the California desert, alone. She alludes to ruinous drinking, a desperate love, ill-fated brothers, Prozac, and Ambien.
To some of her friends, the essay seemed like an obvious cry for help, Moshfegh admits with a laugh during a recent phone call from her home in Los Angeles. She can’t deny it: Her stories are bleak.
Her career, however, seems anything but.
Moshfegh’s debut novel, “Eileen” (2015), a finalist for the Man Booker Prize and winner of the PEN/Hemingway Award, tells the grim tale of an insecure young woman working in a juvenile detention center in a desolate, wintry Massachusetts town in the mid-1960s. It is currently being adapted for film.
Her anxiously awaited, just-released collection of stories, “Homesick for Another World” (from which she’ll read on Thursday at the Harvard Book Store) brings together a ragtag assembly of troubled human beings — nihilists and sudden widowers and lonely outcasts with skin conditions — who may have little in common but share, as the title implies, a mutual sense of alienation. In the midst of describing one character’s perverse daydreams, she writes that “he could not believe his own mind.” Sometimes she can’t believe hers.
“Looking at this world, everyone is always acting as if they know what’s going on,” explains Moshfegh, who was born and raised in Newton, the child of immigrant parents — her mother from Croatia, her father from Iran. “From the age of 5, I remember thinking, ‘What is going on here? Are people living in the same reality I am?’ So much of life happens on the inside of the mind,” she says.
If some readers have found her work disturbing, that’s fine, she says. Some people, she believes, are “scared of their own darkness. What I’m hoping to do in my fiction is to push the quote-unquote darkness into a place of absurdity, so we can laugh at it. . . . Sometimes it’s really ridiculous, how seriously we take ourselves.”
Having left Newton after high school (she’s now 35), she has lived all over. She went to school in New York, earned her MFA at Brown University, lived in China for a couple of years and Los Angeles for a time. She moved to Oakland after she was awarded a Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford. Last year she returned to LA.
She was drawn back to Southern California by “the weirdness, the grit, the absurdity of people,” she says. “A lot of people move here with big dreams. There’s a lot of delusion and disillusion here, and those are huge themes in my writing. Not that I fit in, but I’m inspired by the city.”
A couple of the stories in her new collection are set in LA, such as the one narrated by a dim acting hopeful who isn’t prepared for the degradation: “The audition was held in a small room behind a lot that seemed to be a place where food deliveries were made,” he says. “The whole place smelled faintly of garbage.”
Yet New England will always figure prominently in Moshfegh’s imagination. In “Eileen,” she writes that the light in a snow-covered New England coastal town “does something funny at sunset. It seems not to wane but to recede out toward the ocean. The light just gets pulled away.”
In 1999, she says, her mother bought an abandoned Girl Scout camp in central Maine. The stories “A Dark and Winding Road” and “Slumming,” to name two, are clearly set in the piney woods of a thinly disguised, down-at-the-heels vacation state.
Moshfegh attended the progressive Commonwealth School in Back Bay after suffering through middle school in Newton, which “felt like being in prison,’’ she says.
By contrast, Commonwealth was “a haven for weird, creative, brilliant kids.” The faculty’s approach to literature was not moralistic, “which is sort of how literature gets taught,” she says, citing the typical English teacher’s query: “What is the moral of this story?” One hallmark of a Moshfegh story: There isn’t one.
Moshfegh recently returned to the school to visit with former teachers, says Judith Siporin, who has taught English and art history there for 43 years. She says Moshfegh poured much of her creative energy in high school into music.
“She was a very fine classical pianist. She was very serious about it,” Siporin recalls. That could be a key to her success as a writer, she says: “She had a musical ear, and a sense of an audience. You’re not just making something self-contained, but writing with the sense that somebody is going to read it and trying to reach that listener.”
Some critics hear it, too. Writing for the Village Voice, reviewer Sasha Frere-Jones noted that multiple readings of Moshfegh’s new story collection “reveal coils of plain language and quick narratives tight as songs.”
While working on her next novel, Moshfegh has been watching with fascination as “Eileen” makes its way through the Hollywood meat grinder. Veteran producer Scott Rudin (“Nobody’s Fool,” “Fences”) optioned the book a year ago, and Erin Cressida Wilson, screenwriter for “The Girl on the Train’’ has signed on to do the adaptation.
Moshfegh is eager to see how her story — so much of which is based on the title character’s stomach-churning interior dialogue — makes the transition to the screen.
“How do you show somebody’s thoughts on film?” she wonders.
Her flair for doing so on paper has earned her critical acclaim, prestige, and now the imprimatur of Hollywood. It feels strange, she says, to be treated like an insider. But she’s used to feeling strange.
James Sullivan can be reached at jamesgsullivan@gmail.com and on Twitter @sullivanjames.