Where Did You Go, Eileen?

“ONLY A MASSIVE shock would wake him up,” Eileen thinks after killing a woman with tranquilizers and deciding to frame her father. “If he believed he’d killed an innocent woman, that might be enough to shake him. Then he might see the light, accept the truth of his condition.” Eileen (2015) is difficult to read, not for the simple reason that its titular character is immoral or disgusting but because we intimately understand her motivation for patricide. “Of all the characters in the book, Eileen is the one I relate to,” author Ottessa Moshfegh has said.