Ottessa Moshfegh, 41, is the author of six works of fiction, including her Booker-shortlisted noir Eileen (2016), soon to be released as a film starring Anne Hathaway, and My Year of Rest and Relaxation, which was shortlisted for the Wellcome book prize in 2019. Her latest novel, Lapvona, now out in paperback, is named after its fictitious setting, a medieval eastern European hamlet rife with rape, murder and cannibalism. Moshfegh, born in New England to Croatian and Iranian parents, spoke from her home in Pasadena, California.
Weren’t you writing a different novel, about Chinese immigrants in 20th-century San Francisco?
That project seemed less urgent. I didn’t expect to write Lapvona but Covid-19 changed things and I wanted to write about how weird everything suddenly was. It’s not like I plan to write novels; they come to me and I obey. I guess I had a thought about plagues and that moved my imagination into the middle ages. I also felt compelled to write in the third person – I’d spent so many books occupying a first-person point of view and in lockdown I didn’t want to be in my own consciousness or the consciousness of a single character.
Was it a challenging book to write?
I’m still recovering from the numbness that the ending left me with. It’s been really hard to care about a lot of stuff since.
Had you felt the same way after My Year of Rest and Relaxation?
The ending of that book felt safe for me. That ends with the character in a very special kind of self-destructive denial, which is about embracing one’s own innocence. But the end of Lapvona felt like I was trying out a different kind of self-destructive innocence. What its central character has witnessed and experienced is insane; we expect that he’s been doing some soul-searching, which can be scary when you’re a traumatised teenager. The conclusion he comes to is one that I would not have the courage to face. It scared me. You know, I’ve lost a little brother [to an overdose in 2017]. I really wish I hadn’t. When you’re justifying that kind of loss, you think all kinds of things. To reverse-engineer a worldview that would give good reason for that tragedy was a terrifying lake to step through.
Some critics say you’re just out to shock.
Why is that considered so cheap? It’s really hard to shock people; every human emotion has been exploited by media. Yeah, I use elements of horror. But I’m not brainstorming ways to freak people out. If I wanted to shock, I wouldn’t write Lapvona. It’s my most personal book. Eileen was manipulative, because I was working in a genre where I could put people to sleep with the music of this writing and then try to deliver the excitement [of a twist]. But Lapvona was not ... like, my God, the world is violent. Why should fiction pretend it’s not?
What were Lapvona’s influences?
The Brothers Grimm. The strange and limitless landscape of the childhood imagination, when terror truly feels like a force. The atmosphere of danger and beauty in Ingmar Bergman’s The Virgin Spring, a very violent film about a young girl in medieval Sweden.
Can you set the record straight about whether your existential murder mystery Death in Her Hands was influenced by Olga Tokarczuk’s novel Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead?
When I published it [in 2020], people were saying on the internet that I had ripped her off. I’ve never read her books. I wrote it in 2015 [three years before Drive Your Plow was translated]. Any similarity is probably just because we’re living in the same world and maybe overlapping clouds of influence.
Is there anything Iranian or Croatian in your writing?
I’m really super-American and anglo in my literary education and tastes. I think the influence of that [heritage] is in the way I learned to listen and speak. I’d hear my parents on the phone saying things in Persian and Croatian and I had no idea what they were saying, but part of me was like, oh, that must be the truth; English was always this sort of more fictional language. Croatian, to me, is the peculiarity of my mother’s mind; Croatia itself is a memory of my grandmother’s bed. I’ve never been to Iran. Everything about Iran that feels personal to me is this horrific story of my family having to leave under such dangerous circumstances [in 1978 in the Islamic Revolution] when my big sister was a toddler. My family were from there for many generations, then never again.
What are you writing now?
I’m not excited about the future and I haven’t wanted to set a book in the US, which is just scary [as a place]. The novel I’m working on is set in 90s England. On my book tour last summer I did a reading in a nightclub [in the UK] and it really felt like the 90s: it smelled like the 90s, this sort of unfinished cement floor and puke and beer. And people: it smelled like people. I’d started dreaming a lot about Kurt Cobain. I decided to invent a character and found that the best way to write him was not quite in an American dialect; his world was like the southern coast of England, near Brighton, where I’d never been. I decided to go and I was like, this is exactly the place I’m imagining.
You’ve also co-written the screenplay of Eileen and are now adapting Rachel Kushner’s The Mars Room...
Film was a side interest that has become centre stage for me. I’m sure I’ll write eventually about the industry: the people, the way they communicate, the cynicism. If I came from that world, I’d never have believed I could have success as a novelist; anything that isn’t Marvel is deadly. Maybe that’s also why I’m thinking about the 90s – this era of incredible independent cinema I got to experience as a teenager.
Name a writer who first inspired you.
Something in Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast, about it being best to go to museums when you’re really hungry, might be the first time a book resonated with me as a kid. I was like, oh, I get that, I totally get that; I want to be alive like that and try to get the most out of art.
Lapvona by Ottessa Moshfegh is published in paperback by Vintage (£9.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
