When my 2015 debut novel Eileen made it on to the shortlist for the Man Booker prize, I knew I was in trouble. Up until that point, I had skirted by the mainstream as a writer of experimental literary short fiction. Writing a full-length novel that resembled something I thought a “normal” person might read felt like an outlandish endeavour at the time, but one I undertook with the seriousness of a young writer desperate to make a living doing what she loves.
I have since published three other novels and a collection of short stories, and at 42 I have been mostly disabused of my innocence. But a decade earlier, writing a novel that followed the conventions of the traditional form was an act of underhanded rebellion. I felt that I was feeding the beast of a capitalist book industry while using my artistic sensibilities to sneak in some subversive ideas in order to feed myself and maintain my creative integrity. Maybe you would call this my Trojan horse. As hopeful as I was that I would get past the gates, I wasn’t prepared for what would happen once I was there.
For the uninitiated, Eileen is a revisionary take on a wintry noir drama, named after its protagonist, an elderly woman narrating the story of how she escaped the doldrum trap of working-class small town life in the 1960s. I’d always been a fan of noir film, and I wanted to take what was peculiar, psychological and darkly playful about that genre of cinema but focus the story around a character foreign to that world of shadowy enchantment, someone utterly real, visceral, honest and even unattractive. I pit this character, Eileen, against one who felt wholly fictional, a creature that might have stepped straight out of a Hitchcock film. I chose to call her Rebecca for this very reason, a nod to Daphne du Maurier’s 1938 gothic novel – and his 1940 screen adaptation – about a dead, unseen woman whose very name intimidates and controls the protagonist’s psyche.
Eileen’s story grapples with derangement and desire, using at its core her new friendship with Rebecca, the femme fatale figure and new psychologist at the boys’ prison where Eileen works as a secretary. Cantilevered to Rebecca’s seductive charm, progressive ideas, beauty, self-mastery and an agenda of her own, are the disgust, repulsion and negative projections of Eileen’s own mind and her relationship with herself and her body. At 24, no stranger to heartache and trauma, she is still an adolescent. In modern pathology, she has an eating disorder, depression and is prone to fantasy, obsession and addiction; perhaps her personality could be called borderline. To me, however, Eileen was a typical intelligent young woman living in a misogynistic, classist, shut down mid-century blue collar New England town, trapped by happenstance. The negativity she felt towards herself and everyone else seemed justified.
Du Maurier and Hitchcock conjured a very high target for which a film adaptation of Eileen might aim. And this was on my mind when I sat down with the director William Oldroyd and my co-writer Luke Goebel, to whom I am married. We all agreed that Eileen as a movie would need to employ the same genre-bending peculiarity as the book. And we understood what the movie was up against. It wasn’t a typical commercial chick flick or an easy Halloween horror. It demanded a great deal from people. Even if we pulled it off perfectly, there would always be detractors who found it too disturbing.
It had been a rude awakening when the book came out; I expected to be judged on the artistic merit of my work, not on its central character. In interviews, reviews and profiles, journalists focused so much on Eileen’s personality, her habits and hang-ups, her strange proclivities – far more than the craft of the book, its shocking conclusion, or troubling themes. Eileen’s obsession with her own body odour, for example, seemed to be particularly upsetting and titillating for the public. Back in 2015, it was an avant-garde notion that a protagonist could be a complicated female character struggling with her own sense of self, delivering frank descriptions of her indignities and the means by which she strives for self-knowledge and power. Everyone wanted to ask me why on earth I had written such a “disgusting” female character.
I answered quite honestly: why did I want to write about a woman who is imperfect? For the same reason that you can’t stop talking about how imperfect she is. From the dawn of contemporary thought, a self-loathing woman has been the ultimate taboo. Not only did my novel focus on how Eileen felt about herself, she was brutally judgmental. As a self-possessed narrator, she aggressively employed the female gaze as a lens on female desire, angling away from any expectation about the outdated concept of a “happy ending”, that is a heteronormative romantic relationship.
I never thought of Eileen as a queer novel, but I welcome that interpretation as it allows its female characters to be seductive and seduced by one another. Perhaps this was why Eileen’s character was so unlikable to some people, because she seemed to be a pawn in a grumpy feminist novelist’s project, someone used to point out the injustice and ugliness of a misogynistic time and place that some would prefer to look back on with nostalgia. Perhaps, too, this was why the establishment found it so distasteful when I defended my work and boasted of my talent. God forbid a woman should speak freely about the way she feels about herself. If we all started doing that, being shameless, we’d have to question everything our society has been built on. A self-confident female artist is just as shocking to the public as a girl who sniffs her armpits, and just as distasteful.
When you publish a book, nobody explains that, as a young woman, you will be scrutinised in ways you can’t imagine. When a journalist asked me whether I was surprised that Eileen had made it on to the Booker shortlist, I scoffed and did what I was raised to do: I spoke with certainty and confidence about myself and my work. I told him I felt deserving of the honour. Because I did. I had written an excellent book. Nobody had helped me. Nobody had told me to do it. I didn’t owe a debt. I had made something I was proud of. The blowback from this interview was amazing. Is it really so audacious for a debut author to be self-assured, even arrogant, about her work? It was.
It was easy for readers to point to Eileen in the book and pick her apart. But seeing her appear on screen is a wholly different experience. No one will talk about Eileen as “disgusting” once they’ve seen her portrayed by the brilliant Thomasin McKenzie. The main element in adaptation from book to film is the externalisation of the imagination. In the book, we see Eileen in our mind. Her voice is our own. But you can look at Eileen in the film. You can see the separation between yourself and the character in a way that the book didn’t allow.
When Eileen debuted at Sundance, Anne Hathaway, who portrays Rebecca in the film with outrageous charisma, shared something profound during the onstage Q&A. She said, “I just remembered one of the very first questions I ever got asked when I started acting work: ‘Are you a good girl or a bad girl?’ I was 16, and my 16-year-old self wanted to respond with this film.” I felt I knew exactly what Hathaway meant. The film is a beautiful middle-finger to patronising stupidity and a love letter to freedom. Thanks to this film, I no longer need to defend Eileen against her detractors, to explain over and over again that women, too, can be immoral and selfish, that we can have conflicted feelings, that we can be brutal and power hungry just as much as we can be sensitive and gracious and funny and noble.
• Eileen is in cinemas in the UK and US from 1 December. The novel by Ottessa Moshfegh is published by Vintage Classics (£9.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
