But the end of Lapvona felt like I was trying out a different kind of self-destructive innocence. That ends with the character in a very special kind of self-destructive denial, which is about embracing one’s own innocence. The ending of that book felt safe for me. Had you felt the same way after My Year of Rest and Relaxation ? It’s been really hard to care about a lot of stuff since. I’m still recovering from the numbness that the ending left me with. I also felt compelled to write in the third person – I’d spent so many books occupying a first-person point of view and in lockdown I didn’t want to be in my own consciousness or the consciousness of a single character. I guess I had a thought about plagues and that moved my imagination into the middle ages. It’s not like I plan to write novels they come to me and I obey. I didn’t expect to write Lapvona but Covid-19 changed things and I wanted to write about how weird everything suddenly was. Weren’t you writing a different novel, about Chinese immigrants in 20th-century San Francisco? Moshfegh, born in New England to Croatian and Iranian parents, spoke from her home in Pasadena, California. Her latest novel, Lapvona, now out in paperback, is named after its fictitious setting, a medieval eastern European hamlet rife with rape, murder and cannibalism. O ttessa Moshfegh, 41, is the author of six works of fiction, including her Booker-shortlisted noir Eileen (2016), soon to be released as a film starring Anne Hathaway, and My Year of Rest and Relaxation, which was shortlisted for the Wellcome book prize in 2019.

Eileen ottessa