Boston Native Ottessa Moshfegh On Her Debut Novel 'Eileen'

"Eileen" is a novel about a depressed and self-obsessed young woman in the anonymous New England town of X-ville.

"I looked like a girl you'd expect to see on a city bus," Eileen says in the opening of the book. "You might take me for a nursing student or a typist, note the nervous hands, a foot tapping, bitten lip. I looked like nothing special."

In Eileen's world, it's 1964 and it's a cold, New England winter. Within the first few pages, Eileen tells her readers: "In a week, I would run away from home and never go back. This is the story of how I disappeared."

Ottessa Moshfegh, fiction writer and author of "Eileen."