Eileen
A Novel
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3.7 • 37 Ratings
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- $8.99
Publisher Description
Now a major motion picture streaming on Hulu, starring Anne Hathaway and Thomasin McKenzie
Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize
“Eileen is a remarkable piece of writing, always dark and surprising, sometimes ugly and occasionally hilarious. Its first-person narrator is one of the strangest, most messed-up, most pathetic—and yet, in her own inimitable way, endearing—misfits I’ve encountered in fiction. Trust me, you have never read anything remotely like Eileen.” —Washington Post
So here we are. My name was Eileen Dunlop. Now you know me. I was twenty-four years old then, and had a job that paid fifty-seven dollars a week as a kind of secretary at a private juvenile correctional facility for teenage boys. I think of it now as what it really was for all intents and purposes—a prison for boys. I will call it Moorehead. Delvin Moorehead was a terrible landlord I had years later, and so to use his name for such a place feels appropriate. In a week, I would run away from home and never go back.
This is the story of how I disappeared.
The Christmas season offers little cheer for Eileen Dunlop, an unassuming yet disturbed young woman trapped between her role as her alcoholic father’s caretaker in a home whose squalor is the talk of the neighborhood and a day job as a secretary at the boys’ prison, filled with its own quotidian horrors. Consumed by resentment and self-loathing, Eileen tempers her dreary days with perverse fantasies and dreams of escaping to the big city. In the meantime, she fills her nights and weekends with shoplifting, stalking a buff prison guard named Randy, and cleaning up her increasingly deranged father’s messes. When the bright, beautiful, and cheery Rebecca Saint John arrives on the scene as the new counselor at Moorehead, Eileen is enchanted and proves unable to resist what appears at first to be a miraculously budding friendship. In a Hitchcockian twist, her affection for Rebecca ultimately pulls her into complicity in a crime that surpasses her wildest imaginings.
Played out against the snowy landscape of coastal New England in the days leading up to Christmas, young Eileen’s story is told from the gimlet-eyed perspective of the now much older narrator. 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. Ottessa Moshfegh is also the author of My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Homesick for Another World: Stories, and McGlue.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Ottessa Moshfegh’s Eileen is one of the most fascinating literary characters we’ve encountered. A secretary at a young offenders’ institute in the '60s, she is herself imprisoned by her alcoholic father. You’d think she’d be a sympathetic figure, but Eileen contends she’s a “monster.” Her obsession with an effervescent stranger named Rebecca—and her involvement in a catastrophic crime—help build that case. A 2016 Man Booker Prize finalist, Eileen is a wildly seductive, wickedly sinister book.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Winner of both the Paris Review's Plimpton Prize and a Stegner Fellowship, Moshfegh moves beyond her previous short fiction achievements with this dark and unnerving debut novel. In 1964, Eileen Dunlop is 24 years old, living with her cruel, alcoholic father, and working at Moorehead, a juvenile detention center for boys. She also spends a lot of time hating herself ("I looked like nothing special") and plotting her exodus from the small New England town where she's been trapped. Eileen's perspective is one of hindsight, some 50 years later, looking back on her final days of quiet, isolated misery before the rest of her life begins, a very different life we know will happen without knowing much more. The book's opening evokes a stark kind of empathy for Eileen, who is extreme in her oddness and aversion to personal hygiene, but still quite likable. Unfortunately, some 100 pages in, she is still announcing her imminent departure. As the claustrophobia and filth of her circumstances become more suffocating over the course of the novel, they seem more redundant than effective. With the arrival of the mysterious Rebecca, an alleged education specialist at Moorehead, Eileen's momentum (and the narrative's) finally picks up somewhat, although it will still feel stagnant to some readers.
Customer Reviews
Moshfegh’s writing is good
The author keeps your attention throughout. The storyline itself felt like it was missing something - the end felt abrupt. Good read overall.
I just like Moshfeg’s writing
This is a really intimate glance into the mind of a very unhappy person. The narrator describes smells and sensations that maybe you’d rather not hear. As an old woman, she describes five days of her wretched life at 24 as a juvenile prison secretary and her father’s only caretaker. There are no filters or embellishments, she describes every thought of a person that has conformed to their misery but still thinks they are above it. She has many moments where her convictions are hypocritical even though she seems to think she is self aware.
We are told about how she plans to escape her current life many times. It is one of her fantasies, she has many fantasies though and for most of the book escaping feels as unlikely as the rest of them. She daydreams about her crush —a security guy at the prison— loving her, about her father crying to her about how bad he has treated her, an icicle falling on her head, the secretaries at her work having lesbian sex. It’s a lot.
I like that when the moment comes that she must run away from x-ville all of the pieces fall into place unexpectedly: her father’s gun, her dead mother’s last remaining tranquilizers, her car with a broken exhaust pipe, and the money that she had been saving for her escape.
Her accomplice, Rebecca, is the reason that she’s forced to leave the city after assaulting and killing one of the prison inmate’s abusive mother (that abuse was horrible). Rebecca only really is a part of the narrators life for 2-3 days. The narrator describes her as she esteemed her as a young woman and as she truly sees her now at old age. I think the author captures the dynamic of a girl crush really well. Rebecca is friendly and beautiful, and to the narrator who doesn’t have any friends she feels like a true platonic love. In the end she doesn’t come through though. I’m not quite sure what I think of Rebecca yet.
Bad story from a clearly skilled writer
A dreary and long winded tale, with basically no plot throughout it’s bloated middle, and an ending that feels cheap after the marathon of bleakness it takes you through to get there.