For example, Eileen scratches her vagina under her desk and smells her fingers, then shakes hands with a manager who is retiring that day with the same unwashed hand.Įileen’s narration and grim detail show how a nasty character can have a reader cheer for her. It’s heady and seductive writing, so intimate sometimes it feels like too much. It is a study in damage, and how that is projected onto others, a private world of pain only now being shared like a sacred secret, or picked scar. Themes are strangled sexuality, the loss of body as a sensual tool, and how this manifests when faced with the mirror of an attractive, socially assured woman in Rebecca. It is when she befriends Rebecca, a bright and breezy co-worker who is uncannily nice to her, and an attractive prison guard, Randy, that Eileen cannot draw appropriate boundaries.Īs in Plath’s “The Bell Jar” Eileen is unlikeable and yet magnetic, whisked along by her own demons into the worst, obscure decisions instead of the obvious, happier solution, in the vein of Plath’s fatalism. By the fifth page, Eileen is a confidante – but her memories are not trustworthy.Įileen’s story builds a picture towards something terrible, as she describes her suffocating near-sexual co-habitation with her widowed father in a dirty, hoarded house, the pair held together by a fragile loyalty to her dead mother.

There she is, a human being, diving into the unknown, and she is wide awake.Eileen relates her young life from fifty years ago. Each time I see the woman leap off the seventy-eighth floor of the North Tower-one high-heeled shoe slipping off and hovering up over her, the other stuck on her foot as though it were too small, her blouse untucked, hair flailing, limbs stiff as she plummets down, one arm raised, like a dive into a summer lake-I am overcome by awe, not because she looks like Reva, and I think it's her, almost exactly her, and not because Reva and I had been friends, or because I'll never see her again, but because she is beautiful. And I continue to watch it, usually on a lonely afternoon, or any other time I doubt that life is worth living, or when I need courage, or when I am bored.

I watched the videotape over and over to soothe myself that day. Trevor was on a honeymoon in Barbados, I'd later learn, but Reva was lost. “On September 11, I went out and bought a new TV/VCR at Best Buy so I could record the news coverage of the planes crashing into the Twin Towers.

Eileen by ottessa moshfegh