Eileen: A NovelShortlisted for the 2016 Man Booker Prize and chosen by David Sedaris as his recommended book for his Fall 2016 tour. So here we are. My name was Eileen Dunlop. Now you know me. I was twenty-four years old then, and had a job that paid fifty-seven dollars a week as a kind of secretary at a private juvenile correctional facility for teenage boys. I think of it now as what it really was for all intents and purposes—a prison for boys. I will call it Moorehead. Delvin Moorehead was a terrible landlord I had years later, and so to use his name for such a place feels appropriate. In a week, I would run away from home and never go back. This is the story of how I disappeared. The Christmas season offers little cheer for Eileen Dunlop, an unassuming yet disturbed young woman trapped between her role as her alcoholic father’s caretaker in a home whose squalor is the talk of the neighborhood and a day job as a secretary at the boys’ prison, filled with its own quotidian horrors. Consumed by resentment and self-loathing, Eileen tempers her dreary days with perverse fantasies and dreams of escaping to the big city. In the meantime, she fills her nights and weekends with shoplifting, stalking a buff prison guard named Randy, and cleaning up her increasingly deranged father’s messes. When the bright, beautiful, and cheery Rebecca Saint John arrives on the scene as the new counselor at Moorehead, Eileen is enchanted and proves unable to resist what appears at first to be a miraculously budding friendship. In a Hitchcockian twist, her affection for Rebecca ultimately pulls her into complicity in a crime that surpasses her wildest imaginings. Played out against the snowy landscape of coastal New England in the days leading up to Christmas, young Eileen’s story is told from the gimlet-eyed perspective of the now much older narrator. Creepy, mesmerizing, and sublimely funny, in the tradition of Shirley Jackson and early Vladimir Nabokov, this powerful debut novel enthralls and shocks, and introduces one of the most original new voices in contemporary literature. Ottessa Moshfegh is also the author of My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Homesick for Another World: Stories, and McGlue. |
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LibraryThing Review
User Review - japaul22 - LibraryThingMerry Christmas, everyone! Now for a review of the most non-Christmas-y Christmas book you can find. Only Otessa Moshfegh could write this. It's 1964 and Eileen is a 24 year old young woman in a ... Read full review
LibraryThing Review
User Review - gypsysmom - LibraryThingOne of my book club members recommended this book so we read it for our November meeting. On the back of the book Jeffrey Eugenides calls the author "a writer of significant control and range" and ... Read full review
Contents
Section 1 | 1 |
Section 2 | 13 |
Section 3 | 43 |
Section 4 | 67 |
Section 5 | 87 |
Section 6 | 117 |
Section 7 | 153 |
Section 8 | 181 |
Section 9 | 251 |
Section 10 | 261 |
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Common terms and phrases
arms asked barely beautiful believe better body bottle boys breath called child Christmas cigarette close coat cold couldn't course dark dead death didn't don't door dress drink drive Eileen eyes face father feel felt figured fingers floor front girl hair hands hard head heart held hold hope imagined inside It's kill kind kitchen knew laughed leave light lips live looked mind Moorehead morning mother mouth never night once Perhaps Polk prison pulled purse Randy Rebecca remember rolled seemed shoulders smell smile snow someone step suppose sure talk tell things thought told took tried turned visitation walked wanted watched window woman wondered wore X-ville young