Becca Anderson, author of Badass Women Give the Best Advice, has written a new blog post on the life and career of writer Ottessa Moshfegh.
Ottessa Moshfegh is a fiction writer from New England who was born in 1981. Her mother was a Croatian immigrant, and her Jewish father was born in Iran; both of her parents were musicians who taught at the New England Conservatory of Music. As a child, she learned to play piano and clarinet. After receiving a BA from Barnard College in 2002, she moved to China, where she taught English and worked in a punk rock bar.
After returning to the US, she worked for a time at Overland Press in New York City, but after catching cat scratch fever from a flea-beset feral cat she took home and tried to bathe, she left the city, going on to earn an MFA at Brown University. Her body of work so far includes three novels, several essays, and many short stories; she is known for stories and characterizations so imaginative they border on the surreal. Her first book, a novella entitled McGlue (2014), won the Fence Modern Prize in Prose and the Believer Book Award. Her stories have appeared in the Paris Review and the New Yorker and have earned a Pushcart Prize, an O’ Henry Award, the Plimpton Discovery Prize, and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. Her first novel, Eileen (2015), won the PEN/Hemingway Award for debut fiction; her second novel, 2018’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation, was a New York Times bestseller.
Badass Women Give the Best Advice
Everything You Need to Know About Love and Life
Advice from girl bosses of all kinds: Women are, far and away, the Oral Sex. Women’s Studies scholar Becca Anderson has gathered the wisdom from a chorus of fabulous femmes for this one-of-a-kind advice book. From housewives to Hollywood starlets, from standup comedians to startup entrepreneurs, these badass women offer unvarnished and unabashed opinions and share their frank and forthright thinking on the wild world of relationships.