Eileen: A Novel
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.
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.
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Community Reviews
“I didn't want anyone to think I was susceptible to bad breath, or that there were any organic processes occurring inside my body at all. Having to breathe was an embarrassment in itself. This was the kind of girl I was.”
Great book - of course, in Moshfeghian style, quite dark. I remember reading about Eileen after I read “Death in Her Hands,” they have some similarities. I only started reading it so I could finish it before seeing the movie, which is out now. I’m not entirely certain I want to see the movie now - although it is fitting because the book is set during the week leading up to Christmas. Looking forward to reading more Moshfegh.
2.25/5
Eileen is a young woman who has no future, no self esteem, no charisma. She lives in a dilapidated house with her alcoholic father and works as a secretary in a correctional facility for teenage boys. When she makes a connection with a new employee, the stunning and magnetic Rebecca, her life takes such a turn that in a week she will have to flee the town.
This book is gross. Eileen isn't a likeable character and she's obsessed with the weird and the disgusting. She's fixated on her body and bodily functions as a way to grapple with her lack of control over her life and the book doesn't shy away from any detail. This didn't actually bother me that much, in fact it kind of bored me at times. It just got repetitive. Mostly, the plot just dragged. The book supposedly is a full week yet it felt longer. We don't get to the promised plot until around 60% of the book, the first half or so it's just a character study that gets dull after a while. I didn't care for the ending at all, just no.
I was very unhappy and angry all the time. I tried to control myself, and that only made me more awkward, unhappier, and angrier.
Eileen is a young woman who has no future, no self esteem, no charisma. She lives in a dilapidated house with her alcoholic father and works as a secretary in a correctional facility for teenage boys. When she makes a connection with a new employee, the stunning and magnetic Rebecca, her life takes such a turn that in a week she will have to flee the town.
This book is gross. Eileen isn't a likeable character and she's obsessed with the weird and the disgusting. She's fixated on her body and bodily functions as a way to grapple with her lack of control over her life and the book doesn't shy away from any detail. This didn't actually bother me that much, in fact it kind of bored me at times. It just got repetitive. Mostly, the plot just dragged. The book supposedly is a full week yet it felt longer. We don't get to the promised plot until around 60% of the book, the first half or so it's just a character study that gets dull after a while. I didn't care for the ending at all, just no.
this is like a 2.5 for me - the main character is a bit absurd but sometimes she would say something that made me laugh out loud however the plot twist was so dark and gruesome for no reason i failed to see the point of why it was included
The writing is decent and you definitely can tell it’s a debut but i am disappointed bc MYORAR is so good in terms of comedic morbidity while also delivering some sort of purpose
This book lacked that too me
The writing is decent and you definitely can tell it’s a debut but i am disappointed bc MYORAR is so good in terms of comedic morbidity while also delivering some sort of purpose
This book lacked that too me
My husband heard about Eileen and thought I would like it. It wasn’t badly written. In fact, one of the problems for me is that the FMC is so well-written, I just found her to be so viscerally unlikable and gross, which made the rest of the story, which already rambles and meanders quite a bit, very hard for me to “enjoy.” I flirted with the idea of DNFing this, but it wasn’t especially long, so I finished the audiobook in a day. If I’d been reading it, I probably would not have finished. The tale and prose gave me similar vibes as some works of Chuck Palahniuck, which I’ve also wanted to DNF—crude, bleak, and brutal stylings that make you wrinkle your nose and say, eww, that’s just weird for the sake of being weird. IYKYK. The ending and the reveal about Lee, for me, was also a little predictable, since it says right there in the summary that Eileen ends up complicit in a crime that Rebecca commits, however the summary also states that “This is the story of how I disappeared.” Well, the whole story was quite literally 77% exposition. I listened and listened and listened wondering when the main conflict would reveal itself, the crime and complicity mentioned in the summary, and then the action starts at 82%, and the ending is very anti-climactic. This story is made 1000% more interesting when you consider the theory that Rebecca is Eileen’s alter-ego/imaginary friend, but none of that occurred to me until after I had already finished. Also, supposedly the author has confirmed this theory. I guess I’ll watch the film now and see what it reveals.
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