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Alana Duggan's avatar

Love Moshfegh's essay and your close reading of it. I for one, want more of this kind of writing, unvarnished, anti-heroic and authentic. It makes me think of a quote by Salmon Rushdie (from a radio interview) that has been rattling around in my head for weeks, (paraphrased here): "we're all just a bag of selves in a bag of skin"

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Maite Chaves Penna's avatar

Perhaps it’s because I am from a different generation or perhaps my life experiences are different but I fail to see how this excellent essay could be negatively judged. Moshfegh is a dispassionate narrator, much like the writings of anthropologists I read in college many years ago. Prescriptive essays are boring, I don’t want anyone telling me what I should take away from them. There was also no need to describe the appearance of the former owner, what she does say tells us everything we need to know about him. I also reacted very personally to this essay. When we first arrived in the US my parents rented a house for a year. From the neighbors we found out that the owner had been institutionalized in a psychiatric facility. They then bought a house from a couple going through a divorce. Like in this essay, the former owners were heavy smokers. They also collected old furniture and cats. The basement was full of sofas in need of reupholstering and fleas, lots and lots of fleas. Even Goodwill would not take them and we had to pay to have them hauled to the dump. Once the cats and the couches left, the fleas stayed. We could not afford to remodel at the time but my mother, whose heavy smoker father had died from lung cancer five years before, scrubbed every wall of every room and washed the curtains. When the neighbors came to call they thought she had repainted and changed the curtains. She had the exterminator come and we had to leave during the time they flea bombed the house. When my first husband and I bought our house the former owner had died in it and was not found until a week later. The bathroom had to be torn out and changed completely because they could not get rid of the smell. She was a widow and had no will nor heirs but an estranged sister turned up and inherited the house. For a year we had to deal with her while waiting for things to be sorted out and the house to be ours although I should have realized that this was a portent to the future of our marriage. Like life, real estate is messy.

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