This is a strange and unusual coming of age tale. I was excited to read it when I heard it was a favorite of John Waters - film king of weird perversions. Though it wasn't as weird as I thought it would be, it is a thoroughly interesting character dissection. Moshfegh has a great future ahead of her.

Thank you Netgalley for my copy for an unbiased review.

Eileen is a deeply disturbed young lady and this book takes you into her head, leaving you feeling strangely connected with her. Not a happy book, but a beautifully written one which fully deserved its Booker shortlisting

Moshfegh is an astounding literary voice. This is breathtakingly spare prose with a mastery of character and plot. Sublime writing; unforgiving yet humane. Faultless.

Review I'm reviewing this book for a radio show and that is pretty much the only reason why I finished it. I honestly wanted to stop reading after the first page.

There is now a disturbing trend of female protagonists who are unlikable and self-involved and I don't understand it.

We follow Eileen who works at a boys' prison, has deadbeat dad, a dead mother and an estranged sister. She has no life, is overly concerned with her appearance and has a crush on a prison guard who doesn't acknowledge her. In the midst of this comes manic pixie dream girl Rebecca and suddenly Eileen's world is turned upside down.

The problem with this book is that there are too many pages (not just paragraphs, but pages) dedicated to Eileen's scrutinizing of her experience. It made me want to rip the book in half. And it goes on and on in this way. Infuriating.

Unfortunately, the best part of the book is a minor plot that comes in in the last third of the book. Honestly, that should have been the entire story, not Eileen whingeing about her stupid face.

The payoff was excellent in this book but such a long setup lessened the impact. I wish I'd only read the last 50 pages!

An unforgettable character with a darkly humorous story - I absolutely loved it!

Eileen by Ottessa Moshfegh

4.75 stars

“But I deplored silence. I deplored stillness. I hated almost everything.”

NOTE: I am not spoiling any major events in the spoiler tags, but I do hint to characters' pathology and actions without mentioning what the big finale/climax is. Click at your own risk.

Eileen recounts the reason why she left X-ville at the age of twenty-four. Eileen Dunlop lives with her alcoholic father and works at the local juvenile detention center, Moorehead. When Rebecca Saint John, arrives Eillen begins to find her place that she has been searching for, but one-night leads down a dark path. A path Eileen has a morbid fascination and obsession with. In this psychological novel, Eileen’s story is brought forth in an intense character study. This study is provided by Eileen herself as she tells the story of who she was and why she left X-ville. Since Eileen is the one providing thoughts on her own demeaner, actions, and obsessions, the story itself is incredibly unreliable. We are given no information as to if everything or anything Eileen leads us to be is real or actually happened. We also don’t know if her actions weren’t altered or if her memory of events has faded as she gets older. This character study of a disturbingly morbid woman is provided by an old woman who was an avid alcoholic and thief. Moshfegh leads Eileen down a winding road of quiet stillness, drunken stupors at home, lolling moments in her life, and ends the novel with a large bang. Not everyone is going to Eileen, the story or the narrator. In fact, I think to like this novel you have to dislike Eileen. That’s what makes this psychological thriller so brilliant. It’s unlike anything I’ve read. It stands on its own for being a slow-burn introduction that hints to what is to come and leaves off with an intense unforgettable bang that alters the pace of the story and the reader’s perception of Eileen.


Whimsical Writing Scale: 4.5

“I was always furious, seething, my thoughts racing, my mind like a killer’s. It was easy to hide behind the dull face I wore.”

Eileen is a disgusting character. She says questionable things, mentions a lot of orifices, and has uncomfortable obsessions. She judges her father’s harsh and heavy drinking, but partakes in drinking just as much as he does. She has an obsession that turns into stalking with a coworker at Moorehead. She obsesses over gruesome possibilities of death or murder. Eileen is an unsettling woman and as an old lady, she pities who she was and describes in great detail how pathetic the Eileen of the past was. While, Eileen is horrible she is also fascinating and is a character that could lead to countless hours of discussion. The most interesting thing about Eileen is (tagged as spoiler in review) that she hints to obsessions with morbid and macabre acts of violence, but when faced with the ability to kill someone, she attempts to console the possible victim. It provides knowledge that Eileen is just a person who doesn’t know who she is, but when confronted with the opportunity to partake in the darkest of humanities acts, she shows kindness in multiple different ways.


Rebecca quickly becomes Eileen’s newest obsession and hope to be noticed. Eileen longs for friendship, companionship, but most of all she longs for someone to listen to her. Rebecca is a glamorous new doctor at Moorehead that offers Eileen the chance to reinvent herself. Slowly, Eileen hints that Rebecca may be more manipulative that she seems. There are subtle hints, mainly in phrasing and odd word choice. For instance, a normal conversation with Eileen has the odd phrasing of, “It’s sort of my modus vivendi, or my pathology- depending on who I’m talking to.” Rebecca immediately struck me as off and as the story progresses, it’s obvious that she is just as lost as Eileen and as morbid.(Tagged as spoiler in review) Rebecca orchestrates this big set up, but in the end, she is a coward who leaves Eileen to clean up the mess she made.


The only other large character in this novel is Eileen’s father. He is an ever-looming presence, skulking in the corners of Eileen’s mind. His character is really detestable, as all the characters in this novel are. However, I won’t say too much about him because the more I say about him, the more I’d give away about Eileen’s backstory.


Character Scale: 5

Villain Scale: 5

This is a character driven story and the opening 20% relies completely upon characters. There isn’t much plot in this story, but I feel that is what makes this such a successful psychological thriller. The problem with most psychological thrillers today is that they want to be the next Gone Girl or want to have the novel with the most shocking, groundbreaking twists. However, the problem with having shocking, crazy twists is that they leave plot holes in a character study. It’s why The Girl on the Train didn’t work for me. I found it to be cheap, but Eileen works for me because all the signs pointed to where this was going to build up. The question was the ending and how everything played out.


I only recommend this novel to those who love character studies, unreliable narrators, psychology, and slow pacing. I think this is the perfect read for the winter. The story’s setting is cold, emotionless, and bone-chilling. While this story isn’t for everyone, I am so happy to have picked this up. I wouldn’t have ever picked this novel up, if I hadn’t heard about it from someone who has similar tastes in psychological thrillers as me.
Tagged as spoiler in review“I’m not a criminal. She deserves far worse, but I’m no villain.”

Plotastic Scale: 4.5

Cover Thoughts: I don’t feel like the cover is striking, but it has an audience who will be pulled to pick it up.

Thank you, Netgalley and Penguin Press, for sending me a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

The book was disturbing, intriguing, disgusting and twisted -all in a good way. The writing style is gripping and makes you want to finish the whole thing in one sitting.
But why 2.5 stars, then? you might be asking. I don't like when authors o publishers think they are better than the reader/consumer, that they know what we like and would buy; them trying to play puppet master.

Moshfegh's newest novel brought to mind Wally Lamb's "She's Come Undone" with an unlikable yet brutally honest protagonist. Eileen is an extrememly neurotic young woman whose low self-esteem allows her to be coralled into a crime that ultimately changes her life. Highly recommended.

What I quickly realized while reading this novel is that it is nothing like it’s advertised. I thought this was going to be centered around a mystery, or a tragic event that occurred, but that was not the case. This book is not the least bit plot driven. In fact, the main plot point doesn’t happen until two-thirds of the way through the book. Instead, this book is a character study centered around Eileen.

I have never despised a character more than I did Eileen. She is self-obsessed, unhygienic, insecure, a borderline alcoholic, a stalker, and utterly despicable. Reading about her day to day life and her thoughts was so upsetting and frankly, a little boring. I understand that there are some characters that are going to be hard to like, but it was impossible to like Eileen. It was impossible to like any of the characters. I felt no empathy or connection to any of them.

The plot was so slow that I found it a chore to keep reading. I was interested in the big event that happened, but once it did, it was a major let down because it was so boring and unoriginal.

The only tolerable thing about this novel was the fact that the writing was very graphic and caused me to have a physical reaction (even if the reaction was mostly disgust). I applaud Ottessa Moshfegh for being able to elicit such a response from the reader, but the writing was unable to make up for how dull the story was and how unlikeable Eileen was. I don’t recommend this novel unless you’re really in the mood for a character study.

My review is up on Amazon under my name Kimberly-Aisha Hashmi. Gripping, touching, horrible, funny, all shows aced in this touching novel.

I honestly couldn't bring myself to finish this. This is only 272 pages but I couldn't even get past page 35. It had so much disgusting imagery and descriptions. Eileen was a flat character. And no I'm not talking about her breasts which she did like 10 times in 5 pages. Like calm down girl.

There was something quite compelling about this but ultimately I felt it didn't quite match my expectations from what I'd heard about this. The blurb seemed somewhat misleading in that the "strange crime" that is alluded to doesn't occur until the very end and then it feels like an afterthought rather than an important plot point . Nonetheless it was an interesting read and I would certainly read more of Ottessa Moshfegh's work

This excerpt was exactly what I needed in order to go ahead and by the book.

This is a unique read; dark, lonely and unpredictable. The person talking to us, Eileen could easily exist in so many quiet dark dens in this world. She’s in her 70’s and rehashing from memory the events that unfolded when she was 24 and working at a boys’ prison. She had lost her mother four years earlier and is caretaker (reluctantly) for her father, who is slowly killing himself with alcohol. Eileen wasn’t beaten or sexually assaulted as a child, but she was unloved and mentally abused. The end result is an unstable young lady, starving for love and acceptance.
A new employee arrives at work and Eileen is immediately smitten. The young lady, Rebecca is tall, dressed nicely, classy, and beautiful. Eileen immediately forgets about all her other imaginary loves. As their friendship develops, we finally get to see glimpses of sunlight thru Eileen’s normally ironclad shell, and can’t help but hope that this is the beginning of a new, positive and happy Eileen. That is not what unfolds.
This is a good, quick read and the writing is refreshing, if not a bit alarming at times. I wouldn’t place it among my most favorite reads, but I would recommend it for someone willing to step outside of their comfort zone.
(I received an advance copy of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an unbiased review. Thank you to The Penguin Press and NetGalley for making it available.)

This was such a disgusting book. I really liked it.

I really have no idea why this was marketed as a psychological thriller and please don't go into it thinking it would be one, because you'd be disappointed. Eileen was pretty much a character study, because not much happened in this book. All I can say is that this was the story of Eileen and of how she left X-ville.

Eileen was and is an awful character: she's truly disgusting (doesn't clean herself or her house, has awful habits, terrible relationship with food) yet all she can think about is her appearance.
She lives with her alcoholic father and drinks just like him, wears her dead mother's clothes and drives a busted car. She has stalking tendencies.
She is and was a freaking mess for the entire book, yet I couldn't look away from her. Such a fascinating and complex character.

Even if I really "enjoyed" my time reading this, I thought it was way too long and that the big reveal was kind of disappointing. This was barely 300 pages but it was still too long, in my opinion.

Because of how interesting and fascinating this book was for me, I'd definitely recommend it. It's not for everyone, though, so if you end up not liking the first couple of pages maybe try something else, because it gets worse and worse the more the author explores Eileen's character.
Now I can't wait to read Homesick for Another World by her.

Eileen captivated me. A complete vision of a world, fully encapsulated. Moshfegh is known for her short fiction and this really shows here. I always think that short stories are novels distilled into perfect capsules and Eileen read like this. You were drawn entirely into this world and almost forgot that you were reading at all. This novel held me as tightly in its fictional world as The Loney and I utterly recommend it. You believe utterly in Eileen as a character and Ioved the slow inexorable way we are drawn into her dark tale. Not for the squeamish, perhaps but all the more potent for this fact. I totally loved it and I'll be recommending it to everyone. A dark, delicious five star read!

This is a hard book to pigeonhole. On the one hand, it is wonderfully written, poetic, looping, well observed and fascinating and on the other seems full of mistakes, repetitive language and missed opportunities with a rather flat climax.

To start with the good bits - I was hooked from the very beginning. I was mesmerized by Moshfegh’s prose and I love an anti-hero. With set ups such as ‘this would be the last time I left the office,’ I was fully on board to hear about Eileen’s adventures. As the character study deepened, I had a feeling reminiscing of reading Dostoevsky. When the Rebecca character came along, I was excited too. She was drawn so well, I was convinced she might have been someone I knew. Their developing relationship sounded exactly like an experience I’d had with a beautiful, confident redhead at about that age. And Rebecca’s unhinged actions, which bring about the catalyst for Eileen’s change, were totally unpredictable from my POV. So if I could have just had these parts I would have been thrilled by Eileen.

However... there were too many issues for me in this book to make it enjoyable. The first 20 pages of exposition soon turned into 80 pages of the same information told from another experience. We learn early on that her father is a drunk, that she has body issues, that she steals, that she’s ambivalent about a range of elements in her life, but these get revisited time and time again with no further effect. The only outcome is that things we are told – that the author tells us are so for Eileen – get confused. Yes, Eileen is an unreliable character regarding her body and feelings about sex, but in one passage she tells us she has an idea of what a penis looks like from her father’s porno mags and 20 pages later she tells us as her father’s mags don’t include penises, she relies on a text book. There’s also some details about her mother which don’t seem to mesh. At the beginning, she bitterly complains that the house is dirty because her mother isn’t there to clean up anymore and later on gives us the impression that her mother was a poor housekeeper. This feels like the subject has been over written to the point where the author has lost hold of the threads. However, if it is meant to be further evidence of unreliability, it goes so far as to make anything she says dismissible.

I was really looking forward to reading Eileen, so much so that I didn’t even read all of the Guardian review before searching it out. If I had, I would have read that the book fails as a thriller. It was only after I finished Eileen that I went back to the review, curious what Sandra Newman had said of it and why. That’s when I read the last line ....

“Eileen is original, courageous and masterful...however, the plot machinery simply stands immobile until it’s cranked into life at the very end, whereupon it unceremoniously malfunctions and falls apart...”

I hate to end a review with a review, but that sums it up. Eileen is beautifully written prose, but the plot is not great thriller or suspense fiction material.

Wow! Strange, funny, has all the elements you need in a great read!