“Eileen” Review: Ugly Thoughts, Cold Town, One Wild Book

Ugly Thoughts, Cold Town, One Wild Book

Reading Eileen feels like slipping into a damp basement you’re not sure you want to explore—but you keep going anyway, half-revolted, half-hypnotized. Ottessa Moshfegh doesn’t so much tell a story as she invites you to sit inside a character’s decaying mind. Eileen, the protagonist, works in a juvenile prison and drags around the ghosts of her own broken upbringing. Abuse is everywhere—crackling through the walls of the prison, echoing in her childhood home, and festering inside her own head.

She’s stuck in a life that’s both painfully dull and quietly dangerous. Her days are a cycle of filth, obsession, and grim self-neglect. Then a crime—a real, actual crime—upends the rut she’s been rotting in. And for a moment, everything shifts.

Family Damage and Emotional Scar Tissue

Eileen isn’t just shaped by trauma—she’s practically sculpted from it. Her mother was distant in a way that borders on cruel; one childhood memory, where she shuts the door on a staircase Eileen had just fallen down, says more than a hundred therapy sessions ever could. And her father? A retired cop with a drinking problem and a penchant for rage. He berates her, mocks her, slurs through life while she fetches his liquor and scrapes herself off the floor each day.

On the outside, she’s all quiet nods and yes-dad obedience. Inside, though, there’s a fury that simmers just below the surface, unexpressed but very much alive. That contrast—between her passive exterior and the storm within—is what makes her so disturbing.

The Mirror Is Cracked

Eileen hates herself, plain and simple. Not in a poetic or romantic way—this isn’t tragic beauty. It’s grimy and raw. Her self-loathing is written into every corner of her life: the unwashed house, the clothes she wears like armor, her obsession with controlling her body. She picks at herself physically and emotionally, like someone trying to claw out rot from the inside. Her disordered eating, her mother’s old clothes hanging off her like a disguise—it’s all part of the same unraveling.

And when she fixates on Randy, a prison guard, it’s not love. It’s a desperate grab for something—anything—that might pull her out of herself, even if it’s doomed or deranged. She doesn’t believe she deserves affection, so she seeks it in warped ways. She steals. She watches. She clings.

Compassion, Or the Lack Thereof

One of the most unsettling things about Eileen is how little she seems to care about the kids at the prison. She knows they’re suffering. She sees it. But she doesn’t reach for them. There’s no rescue fantasy, no teacher-saving-troubled-youth storyline here. Her own pain has walled her off from feeling anything real for others.

When one boy, Lee Polk, starts acting strangely, she notices—but more out of obsession than empathy. Once she learns about his violent past, she reacts more with fascination than horror. It’s not that she’s heartless. It’s that her own suffering has shrunk her emotional range. There’s just no space left in her for outrage on behalf of anyone else.

It’s a chilling thing to witness: someone so wrapped in their own damage they can’t see past it. Moshfegh seems to be asking: what do the abused owe to each other, if anything? And can you still be a victim when you start behaving like a villain?

When a Character Lingers, Even If the Plot Doesn’t

I’ll be honest—the story itself? Kind of flat. The twist lands, but it doesn’t hit hard. Rebecca, this glamorous figure meant to shake Eileen awake, never quite feels real. More like a device than a person. And yeah, some of Moshfegh’s fixation on bodily functions felt… excessive. Too much squirm, not enough substance.

But then there’s Eileen.

She’s not likable. Not exactly sympathetic, either. She’s a mess—strange, obsessive, mean in places, weak in others. Yet I couldn’t stop thinking about her. She’s the kind of person you cross paths with in real life and can’t forget. That strange neighbor. That co-worker who’s always quiet, but gives off a weird vibe. You wonder what happened to them. What made them that way.

That’s where the book gets under your skin. It doesn’t ask you to like Eileen—it just dares you to look at her. To sit with the discomfort. To admit how many people like her might be out there, hiding in plain sight.

A Personal Reflection

This book is like drinking something bitter and bracing—it doesn’t go down easy, but it leaves a powerful aftertaste that lingers. Moshfegh doesn’t write to comfort; she writes to expose, to peel back layers of civility and show you what’s squirming underneath. And Eileen is no exception.

Stylistically, the writing is razor-sharp—precise and often hilarious in its bleakness. Moshfegh has a gift for making the grotesque feel fascinating.

Eileen is not for everyone. If you need a lovable protagonist or a cheerful story arc, you’ll probably hate it. But if you like fiction that dives headfirst into the uncomfortable, that explores the margins of human behavior, that challenges your idea of what a female character should be—then this book might just haunt you, the way it’s haunted me.

If You Liked Eileen, Read These 3 Brilliantly Unsettling Novels

There’s something oddly comforting about books that dare to explore the darker corners of the human psyche, especially when they do it with sharp prose and a sense of grim humor. If Eileen drew you in with its moral messiness and mental murk, these three titles will keep you deliciously uncomfortable.

1. My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh

If Eileen was about repression and toxic self-loathing, My Year of Rest and Relaxation is about apathy and self-erasure. It follows an unnamed young woman in New York who decides to drug herself into a year-long sleep, hoping to wake up transformed. The premise sounds absurd, but Moshfegh’s genius is in making it feel disturbingly relatable. Like Eileen, it’s not about what happens—it’s about the psychological rot underneath everything that does.

Expect black humor, a narrator you’ll both judge and empathize with, and that same clinical, brutal honesty that makes Moshfegh’s work so fascinating.

2. We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson

If you loved Eileen’s eerie stillness and unreliable narration, Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle is essential reading. The story centers on two sisters—Merricat and Constance—living in isolation. This book creeps up on you. Like Eileen, it’s psychologically dense, subtly deranged, and deeply satisfying in its strangeness.

3. Nobody Is Ever Missing by Catherine Lacey

This novel is less about plot and more about psychology—much like Eileen. It follows Elyria, a woman who impulsively leaves her husband and comfortable New York life to fly to New Zealand, with no clear plan or goal beyond escape. What unfolds is an internal monologue that’s anxious, poetic, and brutally self-aware.

Lacey’s writing is full of long, breathless sentences that mimic the spiraling thoughts of someone teetering on the edge of collapse. Like Moshfegh, she’s unafraid to show the ugliness and absurdity of the human mind. Nobody Is Ever Missing is for readers who want to sit inside a character’s anxiety and listen to it rattle around.