Eileen

Here we are, then. My name was Dunlop, Eileen. You know me now. At that time, I was twenty-four years old, and I worked as a kind of secretary for a private juvenile detention institution for adolescent males, earning fifty-seven dollars a week. Now that I think about it, I see it for what it really was: a boy's jail. I'll refer to it as Moorehead. I had a horrible landlord named Delvin Moorehead years later, so it seems fitting to use his name for this kind of establishment. I would leave my house in a week and never return.

This is the account of my disappearance.

Eileen Dunlop is an ordinary but troubled young woman whose day job as a secretary at the boys' prison, complete with its own everyday horrors, and her role as her alcoholic father's carer in a home whose squalor is the talk of the neighbourhood, provide little joy for her during the Christmas season. Eileen, overcome with bitterness and self-loathing, escapes to the big metropolis in her bizarre hallucinations to escape her gloomy days. She spends her evenings and weekends stealing, pursuing a muscular prison guard called Randy, and cleaning up the mess her increasingly insane father has made. Eileen is enthralled with Rebecca Saint John when she shows up as the new counsellor at Moorehead; at first, it seems as if a miracle relationship is developing, and she is unable to resist her charms. In a Hitchcockian turn of events, her love for Rebecca finally leads her to get involved in a crime that is beyond anything she could have imagined.

Told from the gimlet-eyed viewpoint of the now much older narrator, young Eileen's narrative is set against the wintry scenery of coastal New England in the days before Christmas. Creepy, mesmerizing, and sublimely funny, in the tradition of Shirley Jackson and early Vladimir Nabokov, this powerful debut novel enthralls and shocks, and introduces one of the most original new voices in contemporary literature. In addition, Ottessa Moshfegh is the writer of McGlue, Homesick for Another World: Stories, and My Year of Rest and Relaxation.