“He’s this sort of disabled medical professional who’s relegated to being this terrible orderly, not even a nurse, just someone who brings you your soup and brushes your teeth. So I think that lent itself to Jerome, and exploring my sense of humor in the context of a young white male novelist.” “Like everybody else, I have an annoying person in my mind that’s talking to me telling me that nothing I do is good enough, and it’s such a stupid voice. “I think I was sort of riffing off of my own neurotic insecurities that I can really only express through satire because they’re so absurd to me,” Moshfegh said. We’ve met this guy before, but Moshfegh unearths new facets of the consummate literary misogynist like an entomologist discovering a new species of bug.
He binge drinks and fancies himself a genius on the make. A struggling author, Jerome stares shamelessly at strangers’ breasts and pays to be berated ruthlessly by his analyst. Jerome Littlefield, the story’s “hero,” is repugnant. “Everybody always says it would be cool to do a collaboration between writers and artists, but no one does it, so I feel lucky that I was the first. “But when I was revising My Year of Rest and Relaxation, I felt moved to write a short story and I was like, ‘Well, that’s an interesting feeling like, let me indulge that.'” She completed M y New Novel and set it aside, unsure of where its home would be until Cline approached her with the Gagosian project, and everything clicked. She finished her short story collection Homesick for Another World in 2015 and turned her attention to novels, thinking she was done with the former medium for a while. I reached her in Bend, Oregon, where her sister-in-law’s wedding was a day away from taking place. “I had been really passionate about the short story genre for most of my development as a writer,” Moshfegh told Observer during a recent phone call. My New Novel is a story that makes use of rhythms that will be familiar to Moshfegh fans – alcoholic, morally repugnant characters who give off the stench of mediocrity are at the fore – but her ability to shock and delight in just a few, skillfully condensed pages only seems to be hardening further into diamond-like indestructibility.
The inaugural version of this project pairs Moshfegh’s My New Novel, a previously unreleased short story, with a creation by Issy Wood, a multi-hyphenate painter and musician whose works are deeply dark and amusing. This December, Gagosian Gallery is launching Picture Books, a new imprint conceived by The Girls author Emma Cline that pairs fiction writers with visual artists – the artist is given free reign to produce an image inspired by the book, and the resulting works are being presented together in limited hardcover editions.
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