Reading time: About 1 minute
I like to share interesting pieces of figurative language I encounter in my reading. I write today about the metaphorical language of Ottessa Moshfegh….
Ottessa Moshfegh is an American author and novelist who was born in Boston with a Croatian mother and an Iranian-Jewish father. Her debut novel, Eileen, won the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and was a fiction finalist for the American National Book Critics Circle Award.
Her subsequent novel, My Year of Rest and Relaxation, which was published in 2018, tells the story of a young, New York based woman who wants to sleep for a year, with the help of drugs.
I found the book both funny and bleak and while I’m not sure I can recommend it, I found Moshfegh’s writing to be spectacular. Here are my favourite bits of figurative language from her book:
- They had square jaws and manly foreheads, bold, caterpillar eyebrows. And they all looked like they had eyeliner on.
- “Studied grace is not grace,” I once tried to explain. “Charm is not a hairstyle. You either have it or you don’t.”
- After a minute or two of silence, she looked up at me and put a finger under her nose — something she did when she was about to start crying. It was like an Adolf Hitler impression.
- She got up and ticktocked across the floor in her heels and shut the door softly behind her.
- The art at Ducat [an art gallery] was supposed to be subversive, irreverent, shocking, but was all just canned counterculture crap, “punk, but with money,” nothing to inspire more than a trip around the corner to buy an unflattering outfit from Comme des Garçons.
- Days slipped by obliquely, with little to remember, just the familiar dent in the sofa cushions, a froth of scum in the bathroom sink like some lunar landscape, craters bubbling on the porcelain when I washed my face or brushed my teeth.
- The bed was a king, low to the ground, and whenever I slept in it, I felt very far away from the world, like I was in a spaceship or on the moon.
- His arms were like bare tree branches.
- Reva had always been god at hugs. I felt like a praying mantis in her arms.
- Reva cried and cried. Tissues stained with mascara like crushed inkblot tests piled up on her lap.
- My tongue was thick and gritty, like I had dirt in my mouth.
- It was midafternoon, I gathered, from the clouds drifting overhead like crumpled bedsheets.
