![]() ![]() When she is befriended by a new colleague called Rebecca Saint John, who is beautiful, witty and urbane, her world lights up: meeting Rebecca ‘was like learning to dance, discovering jazz’. She lives in a humdrum town called Xville with her father, an alcoholic retired policeman who subjects her to relentless psychological abuse, and works at a young offenders’ institute. The titular heroine is physically unprepossessing, dowdy, shy and naive. He simply didn’t like me.’ Eileen tells the story of an infatuation, and these are invariably less about the infatuee than about whatever private misery the obsessor is fleeing. Sixty-seven pages later his awfulness is still being dissected: ‘He had no loyalty to me. ![]() S ix pages into Eileen, Ottessa Moshfegh’s narrator-protagonist declares, ‘this isn’t a story of how awful my father was.’ This is not strictly true. ![]()
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