Suffering for Beauty in 'Lapvona'

It’s a beautiful irony that Ottessa Moshfegh’s readership, consisting of the prim and proper elite set, gobbles up her highbrow depravities, and it’s all the better that she seems to get off on it. You will read about a drugged-out woman who sleeps for a year (My Year of Rest and Relaxation) and an alcoholic sailor suffering from a traumatic brain injury (McGlue) and a plethora of self-destructive young women who dive headlong into the urban squalor that surrounds them (Homesick for Another World), and you will like it, Moshfegh says with the grand bemusement that has come to define her.