In 2017, I met Ottessa Moshfegh in a San Francisco hotel room on the press tour for her third book, Homesick for Another World. At that time, she was visibly rising into the position she has now assumed: an unexpected literary star, writing in the kind of acerbic, urgent voice that rarely reaches best-seller lists.
On that day, we spoke for The Believer’s then podcast, The Organist. We mostly dissected her near-mystical writing process, in which she hears muted voices speaking a kind of glossolalia and transcribes their rhythms into her prose. Since learning this, I have not read her work the same way.
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