The Unbearable Biology of Being
or: Ottessa Bodies Moshfegh’s Body of Bodies Work
“One of the most incomprehensible mysteries is how we are, for lack of a better word, trapped inside of our own bodies.”
While reading Ottessa Moshfegh’s short story collection, Homesick for Another World, I googled “the horror of having a body” and found that quote.
Every single thing Moshfegh has written, that I’ve read, is about how different people behave when faced with the reality of our biological trap.
I love reading and rereading Moshfegh’s work, and I believe the way she describes the factual grotesqueness of being a biological entity is what resonates most with me. Both as a reader and writer of fiction myself. It’s not clean or pretty or nice to say, but I’m fucking jealous!
In Moshfegh’s second novel, Eileen, the main character is a 24-year-old woman who is deeply embarrassed at having a body — no, worse — a female body. She wears high-neck tops and shapeless bottoms. The makeup she wears is the wrong colour, and although it’s never made explicit in the text, I suspect she does that on purpose to appear even less properly feminine. Her self-mortification goes so far that she barely eats to avoid the inevitable bowel movement results.
The book is narrated by Eileen as an older, wiser, deliciously experienced woman looking back on her “last days as that angry little Eileen.” A perspective which lends itself well in highlighting just how fearful she used to be; afraid of her both her human body but also living a life in which that body is perceived.
In an interview with Hazlitt Magazine in 2018, Moshfegh was asked about the controversy surrounding Eileen because of how the character was so miserable and thought herself so gross. Moshfegh’s response is too sharp to paraphrase:
“I think people don’t want to talk about how big a role beauty plays in every single person’s life. If I’m going to have a woman narrating her inner monologue, [she] is going to be thinking about the way she looks and picking herself apart at times if she’s remotely normal. Maybe Eileen was an extreme version of that, but I was so annoyed at the response to Eileen. People were so shocked that a young woman could have these kinds of issues when actually this feels like everyone I’ve ever known [who] at some point in high school has gone through an intense period of self-scrutiny and insecurity.”
The interview is not actually about Eileen, but about another book she wrote, My Year of Rest and Relaxation. The main character of My Year is no less disgusted by herself than Eileen, but she is tall, blonde, and sample size thin. She comes from money and is a recent graduate of Columbia University. She couldn’t be more privileged than Eileen. That quote above continues:
“So it’s like, I’m going to write an equally complicated female character but make her look like Claudia Schiffer so nobody could make a big deal about the way that she looks as though it’s part of her value. I guess the truth is that it’s always a part of someone’s value. I’m talking as much about this character being beautiful as I did talk about Eileen being disgusting.”
Before the narrator of My Year retires to her Upper East Side Manhattan apartment to sleep for a year, she defecates on the floor amongst dog sculptures in the art gallery from which she’d just been fired. She is dealing with the deaths of her parents and deep self-loathing; to deal with this she drugs herself in an attempt to sleep through an entire year, hoping to be a new person when she wakes. Towards the end of the novel, she lets the dog sculpture artist use her unconscious body for his next project.
The narrator knows that to everyone she meets she is her well-dressed, thin, beautiful body, and I think she also isn’t sure of who she is outside of her physical aesthetics. Rather than go through the messy work of finding out, she attempts to leave the physical plane altogether.
“I didn't talk to myself in my head. There wasn't much to say. This was how I knew the sleep was having an effect: I was growing less and less attached to life. If I kept going, I thought, I'd disappear completely, then reappear in some new form. This was my hope. This was my dream.”
We as readers get to be present for the moments she is mostly lucid. Regular trips down to her neighbourhood bodega, check-ins with her neglectful prescribing psychiatrist, the movies she watches on VHS, how she manipulates her toxic ex boyfriend to buy her a new VCR when that one breaks, and the funeral of her best friends’ mother. Moments and events in which she is still only thinking about herself and her own pain in a way that is true to life but taboo to admit out loud. Self-centred to the degree that is, shall we say, disgusting?
What if there was a character just as egocentric, but didn’t have the physical beauty that excuses such a flaw? What if there was a whole medieval village and a lord in his castle who were all abjectly disgusting and selfish?
Moshfegh’s latest novel, Lapvona, happens to be about that very situation. It’s a dark fairytale and the first novel she’s written from different character’s points of view, all of whom are just as grotesque as the next. The story begins with our physically malformed teenage boy main character, Marek, murdering his friend and the lord’s son. Then there is a summer drought down in the village while the lord in his castle hoards fresh water for himself, and rather than revolt, the villagers turn to cannibalism before the drought ends. There is an unnaturally old wise-woman who swaps eye balls with a horse, and servants who are only permitted cabbage to eat.
When I finished reading Lapvona and made the mistake of looking up reviews, I realised something crucial about Moshfegh’s writing and Moshfegh herself: she’s a beautiful woman who writes, beautifully, ugly stories about ugly people. And for some reason (misogyny, but that’s not what this piece is about) that makes people very uncomfortable.
Like I said, I just love it. The contrarian part of me loves that it makes people squeamish. The writer part of me wants to have the courage to be so honest. And the human part feels affirmed and reassured that someone else understands how fucking weird it is to live inside a biological human body.
Here are a few more quotes from an interview with Moshfegh, from The White Review in 2017, that I pulled for this piece but didn’t end up using. Good thing this is my newsletter and I can tack them on the end like this:
“At least in the culture that I’ve known, we’re meant to feel like there’s something really wrong with us if we don’t look healthy and beautiful all the time, and if we’re having negative thoughts, then we’re not good people and that has to be corrected.”
“Feeling ashamed of having a mortal body, and feeling like, ‘I must be crazy.’ Like, either I’m crazy, or everybody else is crazy, because what the fuck is going on here, you know?”
“Some people come to me and they’re like, ‘Wow, your characters are really fucked up. Like, why are they so fucked up?’ and I’m like, ‘Because you’re fucked up. Because we’re all fucked up.’ How do you not be fucked up?”
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See you next week!