Fairy tale set in gruesome times

American novelist Ottessa Moshfegh, 41, has often raised eyebrows for her depictions of filth and depravity. Her latest novel Lapvona, set in a village in mediaeval Europe, reprises that fascination with the scatological, cruel and violent - details of which many readers have been zeroing in on.

Moshfegh, speaking via Zoom, wonders why."That's an element, but the story at large is much bigger. Maybe the grotesque is too distracting, so the story itself gets lost for those people. But did they not read the book? Or they just didn't like it, I guess."

Her star has been rising since her novella McGlue came out in 2014. Her debut novel Eileen was shortlisted for the 2016 Man Booker Prize. Then came My Year Of Rest And Relaxation (2018), a bestselling novel about a jaded art history graduate who escapes from reality in a drug-induced haze.

Lapvona, her fourth novel, was written during the pandemic. It is set in a fiefdom governed by a cruel lord named Villiam.

"The middle ages were a pretty gruesome time, and we were also living through some very gruesome times during Covid-19 - and here in the United States, politically. It was really horrifying and it felt totally appropriate to be writing a book of horror."

Marek, the protagonist of the book, is a motherless youth who is ill-treated by his shepherd father.

Moshfegh says: "I initially designed him according to some of the struggles I had as an adolescent - feeling enmeshed in a family but completely separate from society and not knowing how to handle that."

Marek is also described as having grown against nature, with a deformed spine. Moshfegh says: "I have scoliosis, and growing up was pretty horrifying. Just as I was entering puberty and my body was shifting, my scoliosis was getting more and more severe and I had to wear a back brace, which really impacted the way I saw myself. It created a lot of dysmorphia."

Moshfegh was born in Boston to musician parents from Iran and Croatia. Today, she lives in a house in Pasadena, California, with her husband Luke Goebel and their four dogs - one of whom, Walter, she dedicated Lapvona to.

Success has brought security.

"When I was writing Eileen, I was living in a s***** apartment I was splitting with this girl I barely knew. I didn't have health insurance - this was before Obamacare - and if I got sick I would have to borrow money to go to the doctor. Now I don't have to do that. I can sell a book, it will come out, I will be able to pay my mortgage for the next six months."

In other ways, however, she still feels "just as vulnerable".

"I noticed yesterday there was a terrible review of the book in The New York Times. I didn't read it, but it was reported to me, and the child in me felt really hurt and scared for a moment, and it felt like that kind of vulnerability on the first day of kindergarten.

"I'm pretty tough, but I'm also obsessive. You know they say that one negative thought is 10 times as powerful as a positive thought?"

Moshfegh says the pandemic made her feel more connected to the world than ever before.

"We were all going through something together, feeling powerless over it and questioning why. The way I used to cope may have been to not want to feel things, but I'm now more interested in my feelings and the feelings of others. It made me want to be a more honest person," she adds.

"I think I wasn't so honest with myself. I was plenty honest in interviews, talking about my work. But in the past I've been in such a hurry and my feelings felt intolerable, so I put what could have been a life of feeling into a life of creativity.

"I've developed this great craft and skill and vocabulary, but meanwhile my feeling life hasn't been growing. There are a lot of reasons for that. I was grieving the deaths of a couple of people I loved dearly, so feelings were very painful."

In 2017, her mentor Jean Stein - a former editor at The Paris Review - took her own life. Moshfegh's younger brother died of a drug overdose later that year.

She says: "Since Covid-19, my heart is opening up, as cheesy as that sounds. I am trying to sit and feel things - I want get better at doing that."

She has come to regard the role of author as akin to that of a mother - you are not fully in control of how your child will turn out.

"You take care of that baby, feed it and make sure you're resting and doing all of those things, so that when the baby is born, it's as healthy as it should be. But you're not in there making the nose a certain way, or making the heart in all of its chambers."

She is trying to use the Internet less - selling her clothes online on fashion marketplace Depop "is as close to social media as I want to be".

She enjoys collecting figurines - during the interview, she shows off an obsidian alien figurine she picked up in Mexico - and adds that if she could have the day to herself, she would want to spend it at a flea market, "a museum of history and strange personalities, full of stories".

Her next novel, she lets on, will be about "a few strange people" and might be set in Britain.

Moshfegh and Goebel - a writer whom she first met at an interview - have co-written a film adaptation of Eileen, which will be out later this year. Adaptations of McGlue and My Year Of Rest And Relaxation are also in the works.

"I'm really curious to see if any film-maker wants to take Lapvona on," she adds. "It's a movie I would want to watch."