Ottessa Moshfegh, 41, is the author of six works of fiction, including her Booker-shortlisted noir Eileen (2016), soon to be released as a film starring Anne Hathaway, and My Year of Rest and Relaxation, which was shortlisted for the Wellcome book prize in 2019. Her latest novel, Lapvona, now out in paperback, is named after its fictitious setting, a medieval eastern European hamlet rife with rape, murder and cannibalism. Moshfegh, born in New England to Croatian and Iranian parents, spoke from her home in Pasadena, California.
Weren’t you writing a different novel, about Chinese immigrants in 20th-century San Francisco?
That project seemed less urgent. I didn’t expect to write Lapvona but Covid-19 changed things and I wanted to write about how weird everything suddenly was. It’s not like I plan to write novels; they come to me and I obey. I guess I had a thought about plagues and that moved my imagination into the middle ages. I also felt compelled to write in the third person – I’d spent so many books occupying a first-person point of view and in lockdown I didn’t want to be in my own consciousness or the consciousness of a single character.
Was it a challenging book to write?
I’m still recovering from the numbness that the ending left me with. It’s been really hard to care about a lot of stuff since.
