![]() These things are things that just exist in our minds. My characters do tend to be interested in self-delusion, and I think that’s because so much of our reality is delusional. What is that link for you between delusion and humanity? ![]() So many of your books show people behaving in absurd, aberrant, or seemingly deluded ways-and this, to me, is why your characters always feel so human. ![]() One balmy afternoon in Pasadena, I sat down with Moshfegh a world away from such ruin to talk about what turned her on to conniving Dark Age villagers-and her fascination with any situation where the offbeat and the earnest collide. Lapvona’s setting is its fictional titular village, in which a medieval shepherd boy, scheming priest, mystical midwife, and depraved governor pursue their separate peaces in conditions conducive to anything but. In Moshfegh’s new novel, Lapvona (out June 21 from Penguin Press), that singular melding of nihilism and desire is on full display. ![]() ![]() Her misanthropes feel so terrible precisely because a sense of belonging, meaning, and home perpetually eludes them. But there is another quality that suffuses Moshfegh’s writing too, and that’s yearning. Ottessa Moshfegh is known to many as the writer who best describes what it’s like “being alive when being alive feels terrible,” according to The New Yorker-and with a cast of characters including hyper-alcoholic divorcees, catatonic orphan party girls, and the clients of a what she calls a “disreputable talent agency,” it isn’t hard to see why. ![]()
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