Inside the Mind of Ottessa Moshfegh: Alienation, Obsession, and Writing the Unlikeable
A conversation about writing outsiders, confronting taboos, and storytelling as liberation.
Ottessa Moshfegh has built her literary career on writing the characters we’re often told to look away from: the outsiders, the unlikable, the ones whose obsessions curdle into grotesque truths about who we are.
In this episode of Sick Sad Lit, I sit down with Ottessa to talk about her writing process, the themes that have haunted her from McGlue and Eileen through My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Death in Her Hands, and Lapvona. We dig into the pandemic’s impact on Lapvona, her fascination with confinement—physical, psychological, and societal—and her insistence on writing what scares her most.
She opens up about aging, self-discovery, and what it means to measure a life in books while navigating the contradictions of private creation and public literary identity.
Whether you’re drawn to her unflinching portraits of alienation, her ability to find beauty in the grotesque, or her sharp insights into being human, this conversation offers a rare glimpse into the mind of one of today’s most compelling writers.
🎧 Listen now wherever you get your podcasts.
Watch our interview on YouTube:
