Sometimes it's good to be shaken out of one's usual fare of fiction, and for that occasion, I want to recommend Ottessa Moshfegh's killer short story "Bettering Myself," available online at the Paris Review, which also awarded Ms Moshfegh the Plimpton Prize For Fiction, given to best new voices in literature. And well deserved, I might add.
Moshfegh is a remarkable author, creating a wise-cracking, tough, and damaged narrator who is at once repulsive, incredibly screwed up (an alcoholic high school teacher at a Catholic school in NYC), and yet strangely sympathetic, with a deep sadness that is expressed more often with inappropriate (but wickedly funny) humor. The story crackles with off hand lines like this to her students in the middle of math class, "Most people have had anal sex,” I told them. “Don’t look so surprised.” Or moments of unintended irony: "Around ten p.m. I’d switch to vodka and would pretend to better myself with a book or some kind of music, as though God were checking up on me." And painful self-deprecation, "I checked my reflection in my bathroom mirror before I left the house. I thought I looked pretty normal. That couldn’t be possible." She is trapped in a kind of permanent adolescence which seems the only retreat to the catastrophe she has made of her life. It's not an easy story, but it is brilliantly written, and it succeeded in making me care about this character who is trying (with uneven results) not to destroy herself.
Jeffrey Eugenides, one of the judges for the Plimpton Prize said this of Moshfegh's work:
“Bettering Myself” did what it said it would: it convinced me that Moshfegh was even better than I already thought. The voice here is ...a sharp-witted, wayward, unpredictable first-person voice, evidence that Moshfegh is a writer of significant control and range...What distinguishes her writing is that unnameable quality that makes a new writer’s voice, against all odds and the deadening surround of lyrical postures, sound unique.
I have not yet read her other two stories available online -- but in case you feel inspired to continue reading, I will link them here for future reference: Disgust and The Chaperone.
Art: Edward Hopper, "Summer Interior."
Midori Snyder is the author of nine books for children and adults, published in English, French, Dutch, and Italian. She won the Mythopoeic Award for The Innamorati, a novel inspired by early Roman myth and the Italian "Commedia dell'Arte" tradition....
