Writing the Mad Self: On Ottessa Moshfegh's "Death in Her Hands"

Ottessa Moshfegh | Death in Her Hands | Penguin Press | June 2020 (Forthcoming) | 272 Pages

A prophetess of dispassion, Ottessa Moshfegh has rapidly built a reputation over the past few years for acidly satirical works of fiction, combining black humor with a shrewd eye for the profound glumness of life. Her most recent book, My Year of Rest and Relaxation, follows the story of a beautiful woman who opts out of life in the fall of 2000 and lurches, under chemical hibernation, towards a looming September 2001. The novel does away with the type of genre fiction that supported Moshfegh's previous work, instead relying on a very specific timeline as its main drama source, while anchoring itself in moments of pain and private expressions of that pain.

Moshfegh’s portraits of the dark underbelly of human emotion are often grotesque. Along with the protagonist of My Year of Rest and Relaxation—uglifying herself through a gradual process of wasting away—the eponymous hero of her first remarkable debut, Eileen, seems an inverted study of the ways female desire and sexuality are so often perceived as gross and dangerous. The painful contortions both characters go through as they seek to relate to their bodies are a reminder of the heavy load of consciousness women bear as they move through the world. Eileen as a novel is structured around its protagonist’s longing to leave X-Ville—each chapter follows a single day in the week leading up to her departure—and is, in its bones, about the desire to escape not just a town, but the grotesque visions and ideals that cloak the self.

Moshfegh’s latest novel, Death in Her Hands, plays with many of these same themes, while transitioning back from the deliberately muted action of My Year of Rest and Relaxation to the propulsive style that brought her fame with Eileen. The book is an extension of what Moshfegh has always so brilliantly done: a darkly comic, brutal examination of the mucky corners of the human condition with electric prose that chills—like a smile with blood-stained teeth. The action begins as the endearing seventy-two-year-old protagonist, Vesta Gul, finds a note in the woods that stuns her. “Her name was Magda,” the note reads. “Nobody will ever know who killed her. It wasn’t me. Here is her dead body.” With no body in sight, the book charts Vesta’s feverish imaginings as she gradually becomes obsessed with making sense of the note. It’s only fitting; the name “Vesta,” after all, means to “dwell,” and that’s exactly what she does, spinning out hypothetical scenarios and creating a fully fleshed-out narrative from thin air to explain the mystery.

As the book progresses, however, the line between what’s real and what’s imagined becomes unclear, and Vesta morphs into an increasingly unreliable narrator who begins to believe her own fantasies. In her search for signs to make sense of the note, she sees clues that only validate her own narrative, even when the connections seem tenuous. As the line blurs further, she names the author of the note “Blake” on a whim, constructing a world around him so specific and intricate that she—and by extension the reader—easily believes it. Vesta inspects an abandoned stack of books at the town library and finds one volume opened to a poem by William Blake: “It was clearly a message to me, from young Blake, my Blake,” she thinks.  After writing him a response, she returns to where she found his note and sees a collection of rocks formed in the shape of a “B”—surely a sign that she’s on the right track, she thinks. In these moments, we’re reminded of Moshfegh’s skill in blending a character’s inner consciousness with their perceived reality, an act so seamless that it nearly deceives the reader into believing it’s all true.      

Moshfegh’s interest in the mechanics of obsession points to her larger concern with the conflict between reality and imagination. We see Vesta create a cast of characters for the story she writes about the note, detailing who Magda is—a Belarusian teen on a work visa, escaping an abusive father and sounding very much in the process, like one of Moshfegh’s own aberrant characters from her collection Homesick for Another World. But Vesta grounds her imagination in a manufactured reality to such an extent that she begins to conflate the real and the made up. There are moments when she acknowledges her imagination and its runaway tendencies, but these flashes of self-awareness become increasingly rare as her obsession progresses. “From the little I knew of [Magda],” she thinks to herself at one point, “I already liked her.”

It’s this conflation between “knowing” and her own conjuring that gives Vesta agency. Magda’s story becomes a way of obliquely processing her own buried traumas, and as she writes Magda’s history, she rewrites herself.  This preoccupation with and imprudent dependency towards others often threads its way through Mosfegh’s other works: Eileen, overcome with lust, begins stalking her co-worker Randy and grows captivated by Rebecca Saint John, and the protagonist of My Year of Rest and Relaxation fosters a codependency with both her yuppie beau Trevor and the devoted, vapid Reva.  In Death in Her Hands, Vesta’s dependency is towards the mysterious note, the blurring of fact and fiction which only furthers that reliance. And that dependency is incentive to continue “solving,” or writing, the mystery: the more she can fictionalize reality, the more her own story can consume her.

Vesta’s growing control over her own narrative is exemplified by an interesting structural conceit. While looking for answers, Vesta finds herself at her local library, searching for any materials that might be helpful, and stumbles upon a guide for writing mystery books: Top Tips for Mystery Writers. A tool designed to help novice writers construct their own detective stories, the book resembles a mad lib, offering up sections for the writer to fill in. To the extent that writing Magda’s story allows Vesta to process her own past, this formulaic structure becomes the skeleton key to her own self-analysis. It’s an obvious bit of metacommentary on Moshfegh’s own use of genre, and her repurposing of plot-driven fiction for darkly psychological purposes. This type of re-writing, or reinventing one's self, is something Moshfegh tends to incorporate into her other works: Eileen’s desperate attempts to evolve into someone else coalesce into her final, exuberant act of flight, and My Year of Rest and Relaxation relies on the notion of forgetting oneself in order to emerge reborn.

As Vesta writes the story of Magda, she starts to live it as well. But different from the grotesque obsessive narrative present in her other works, Moshfegh frames this interest as somehow liberating for Vesta—it’s an endeavor that’s given her purpose, drawing her out of the well of numbness that tends to afflict Moshfegh’s protagonists. In My Year of Rest and Relaxation and in Eileen, the grotesque comes from the protagonists’ relationship with their often deteriorating bodies as they search for new identities, bending themselves to fit the world in which they live. But in Death in Her Hands, Moshfegh gives us a more abstract contortion that diverges from the physical towards the non-existent body. While we’ve seen Moshfegh’s characters obsess over their own physicality, this time that obsession is with someone else’s darkness: a festering fixation with a fictional person.

Moshfegh’s earlier protagonists contort their own bodies as a way to cope with their realities, but Death in Her Hands is a bend towards the metaphysical – Vesta contorting Magda’s external narrative instead of herself. Magda’s death acts as the creation of her new, unreal life, which she uses to obliquely relate to her own darkness and buried traumas. She bends her reality, using library books to investigate, and create a story for, a dead and absent woman, literally creating a world from fiction. The mystery becomes a loop, bending backward on itself as Vesta looks for increasingly untrustworthy signs the farther she delves in. At the book’s close, it remains unclear how much of the final scenes are real at all.

Death is what gives Vesta life. At one point, she receives a self-help book titled Death, another clue that sets her on her way, and thinks how she must appear: “It would be a very strange thing to see, some old woman in her dusty coat grasping Death in her hands and whistling into the forest.” This image of Vesta blithely strolling through the woods actively holding “Death” is a reflection of how the death that she’s encountered has given her agency. Just as filling in the mystery has given her a sense of purpose, when she imagines herself holding the book titled Death and walking through the woods, it’s a reflection of that same image: a death that has disclosed meaning. And just as Death is a self-help book, Vesta’s own mystery is, quite literally, a self-help text. In simplest terms, the book Death is the one we’re reading.

But despite all its darkness and postmodern cynicism, Mosfegh’s fiction is often about living. In Eileen, death gives Eileen purpose: to cope with her hateful life in X-ville, she dons a “death mask,” a numb psychological front of dealing with the world in order to survive, and ultimately flees towards a better life. And in My Year of Rest and Relaxation, the protagonist drugs herself into a year of sleep in order to be remade as someone else, new and full of life. For Vesta, her numbness is replaced by a fictitious world: death is both the beginning and end of the book and also the reason for it, giving Vesta a way to reckon with her past. It’s the brush with death that makes her feel alive.