Ottessa Moshfegh Is Praying for Us

The author has been hailed as a high priestess of filth. Really, she wants to purify her readers.

- ANDREA LONG CHU

IF YOU HAVE EVER worked with one, you’ll know that assholes don’t respond well to input. “Coaxing something up there, into the light, can take all day,” reports the narrator of Ottessa Moshfegh’s “Brom,” a 2017 short story about a shut-in feudal lord who spends his days easing foreign objects into his rectum. His name for this practice is illumination: “A few things I’ve managed to illuminate are worth noting: a small bottle of sherry, my sister’s confirmation crown which I snatched from its velveteen case and hammered down straight and flat, a rabbit’s foot, a brass corkscrew, an ivory penknife.” Brom, you see, believes his colon houses the light of God, safely concealed from his serfs, whom he torments. But no man who lighteth a candle hideth it under a bushel, and in the end, hoping to work a miracle on his dying mother, Brom will demand his anus be cut open with a sword.

Moshfegh has dedicated her career to writing about assholes: cruel, pathetic people who do cruel, pathetic things. But the acclaimed author has also spent the past decade writing about the anus. Her early fiction is dotted with scatological detail: a smear of bird shit, buckets for defecating in, ass-to-mouth play, sodomy with a broken bottle. Moshfegh’s 2015 debut novel, the noirish Eileen, follows a laxative-abusing secretary at a boys’ prison who stumbles into a mystery involving anal rape. The book won the pen/Hemingway Award, and critics praised it for being a Trojan horse, a study in human depravity hiding in the bowels of a commercial thriller.