homesick for another world by ottessa moshfegh

She hates her boyfriend… but likes the neighborhood… but the neighborhood sucks… but she has a nice view… but there’s a nasty haze blocking the view… Reading this paragraph is like watching a stock ticker spazz out. The apartment complex rose a few stories above it all, and from our bedroom window I could look out and down into the valley, which was always covered in orange haze. It was a shadowy, crumbling collection of bungalows and auto-body shops. I hated my boyfriend but I liked the neighborhood. Before proceeding you might want to read at least the first (pre-paywall) half of the story via the Paris Review. He doesn’t mistreat her per se, but she hates herself for dating him. In “The Weirdos” the narrator is stuck in a relationship with a guy she despises. That was true before the coronavirus pandemic and it is extremely true now. Moshfegh writes a lot of these stories it’s an appropriate vibe for our present day, because we are, as a species, stuck in a bad situation-an array of bad situations, in fact-wondering how & whether we will make it out. “The Weirdos” is what I am going to call a “stuck story” in that the protagonist is stuck in a bad situation the drama revolves around how & whether she will make it out. One thing I didn’t realize until today though was how the narrative structure of Moshfegh stories like “The Weirdos” infiltrated my brain and started popping up in my own work.

I talked about that a little bit last week. (My Goodreads review: “This is my favorite short story collection since Jesus' Son !!! Ahhhh”) Moshfegh was a huge influence on the novel and everything else I’ve written since.

I mention my novel-in-progress only because I read Homesick for Another World toward the beginning of writing it, back in March 2018.

1 Or rather, I declared the manuscript complete now I get to submit 50 query letters over the course of the year to see if it actually goes anywhere.

Homesick for another world by ottessa moshfegh