Photo courtesy of Amie Barrodale.
The last time Ottessa Moshfegh saw Amie Barrodale, they were in Park Slope. Moshfegh was leaving New York for Rhode Island, and the longtime friends said their goodbyes over coffee while a silver minivan idled outside. For 17 years, the two have kept their friendship alive through a long-running email correspondence. But last month, to mark the release of Barrodale’s first novel, Trip, they let us listen in. Barrodale’s novel follows Sandra and her autistic teenage son, Trip, who vanishes with a stranger soon after his mother’s death and sets out to sea. What unfolds is a surreal odyssey across worlds both earthly and cosmic—a comic, unsettling, and tender mediation on maternal loss and interdimensional devotion. Below, Barrodale and Moshfegh talk endings, memory, and the bonds that endure.—OLAMIDE OYENUSI
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OTTESSA MOSHFEGH: I am halfway through reading Trip again. It is so fucking good. I knew you were going to write an amazing novel and I was excited about it since I knew you. When we were both living in New York, I had some idea of what the novel would be just based on the context we lived in and what you were interested in at the time, but this really blew me away in a totally different way because I haven’t seen you in 20 years. Has it been that long?
AMIE BARRODALE: I think so. We were close in 2010 and ’11, but we were emailing, I don’t really know the last time we saw each other. Maybe 17 years?
MOSHFEGH: I remember the last time we saw each other. I came over to your place in Park Slope. I was driving the silver minivan and god, what’s this guy’s name? You had a friend visiting.
BARRODALE: Oh, was it Ben Nugent?
MOSHFEGH: Yeah, it was Ben. And we just went out for coffee and I was saying goodbye because I was moving to Rhode Island. I was sort of sad.
BARRODALE: That is sad.
MOSHFEGH: I was talking about you with Akhil [Sharma] the other day.
BARRODALE: Oh, I didn’t know you guys were friends.
MOSHFEGH: Well, I didn’t know him until a couple years ago. The Penn Foundation asked to put together a panel for one of their festivals and I was like, “Now I get to have an excuse to meet Akhil,” because I wanted him to be on the panel.
BARRODALE: Isn’t he so great?
MOSHFEGH: He is. I think you recommended An Obedient Father, is that what it’s called?
BARRODALE: Yeah, I think so. I have some weird Freudian thing where I always change it to “An Obedient Husband,” but it’s An Obedient Father. It happens all the time.
MOSHFEGH: I feel like this interview should be a book of just us talking. We probably have a whole book to talk about.
BARRODALE: Probably so.
MOSHFEGH: The reason I brought up Akhil is that after we were talking about his author photos and subsequent other cool topics, he was like, “Have you read anything good lately?” And I started talking about Trip. “My friend wrote it, I met her when I was 17. She’s the smartest person I know and I’m so excited for this book.” Then I start saying a little bit more about what the novel is about and he’s like, “Oh, I’m sorry. Are you talking about Amie Barrodale?” I was like, “Yeah, I’ve been talking about her for at least two minutes.” He said, “Hold on, I know Amie and I gave Trip a blurb.” I think I told you I didn’t get a single blurb for Eileen.
BARRODALE: You didn’t tell me that!
MOSHFEGH: Oh, I didn’t? This is a little bit of an origin story for me because I had even worked in publishing. I had worked in the production side at The Overlook Press for a couple of years and sort of knew the process of what it meant to have a book published, but I didn’t really know anything about the blurbs. So when it came time to ask for blurbs they were like, “Who do you want to ask?” Maybe I thought of a couple of names. If I did, I probably never heard back, but they sent the book to so many people and no one wanted to blurb it. Not a single person.
BARRODALE: My god. How were you feeling about this at the time?
MOSHFEGH: I was like, “Fuck.” It really was sort of an identity crisis because I had such specific feelings about Eileen, and it was my first novel, and I had no idea what was going to happen. It’s definitely true in film, how if someone gives you $15 million and you make a feature and it flops, you will never get another movie financed.
BARRODALE: I feel like it’s that way with books too. I remember with 10:04, Ben Lerner quotes his agent by saying, “They don’t expect this to sell. They just want you for prestige.”
MOSHFEGH: Yeah, yeah. But it helped me find this positioning against the “world” that was like, “I don’t give a shit what you think. I’m doing this and it’s happening and it’s going to be done.” I don’t ever want to be at the mercy of somebody else’s favor or have to say thank you for anything. I’m not saying I’m not grateful for things, but I want the book to run on its own merit and find readers not because someone said it was good. When I was like, “I’m never reading reviews,” Lorin Stein was like, “Yeah, that’s smart, because no matter what you’re going to be disappointed because no one is going to understand you.”
BARRODALE: No, it’s true. Obviously the thing to do is not to read them. It is not where I’m at right now, but it’s obviously right. And it’s not like I would ever allow a review to change my opinion of my work.
MOSHFEGH: There are people who are going to read them, like your agent and your publisher. For my last book, my agent called me and he was like, “Have you read The New York Times?” I think he wanted to just prepare me because it was a critic that has been really enthusiastic about my work in the past, but this book just didn’t work for him. But I’m kind of glad that he told me because the subsequent negative reviews were so bad, especially in England, that it became a thing for me and I retreated back to feeling like a reject. I felt young again in that way.
BARRODALE: What is your current book about?
MOSHFEGH: The book I’m writing is called Only Children, and it takes place in a sort of fictionalized, Brighton, England. It’s about an 18-year-old boy who is a self-harmer, who has been hospitalized and is now under an order of restraint from his father. It’s about him, his mom, his social worker —who’s in love with this former client junkie who’s in prison. What about Trip? You told me that you rewrote the beginning at some point?
BARRODALE: It took a long time to write, so a lot of things had been worked on. At first it was third-person man, then it was third-person woman, and then it went into first-person toward the very end, right before we submitted it. When it was a man, I felt so comfortable with there being an estrangement between father and son, because that’s just natural. And then when it became a woman, I felt uncomfortable with the estrangement, but I didn’t change it. I was like, “No, we’re going to keep that.”
MOSHFEGH: I don’t want to spoil it for anyone, but I found the book to be scary and I couldn’t put my finger on why. But now that you say it, I think it was that distance, and maybe also the lack of access, because we don’t actually know her interiority.
BARRODALE: I always feel like there’s a lot on the surface that people ignore in writing, and they go to the interior because they feel like that’s the meat. But I kind of feel like the surface is the meat.
MOSHFEGH: That’s such a great way to put it, and you really pull it off in a way that is startling and suspenseful at the same time.
BARRODALE: Thank you. I wanted to ask you where you find your endings.
MOSHFEGH: I usually get my endings when I’m like, a quarter of the way through a first draft. It’s a premonition, and it’s always an image, usually a violent one, and I feel it.
BARRODALE: Do you remember a last line coming to you?
MOSHFEGH: Yeah, it’s for a book that I haven’t been working on since before COVID, and it was this threatening line. “If you don’t do it, you will be a ghost” or something like that. Oh, I wish that I’d written that book already because we could have a really interesting conversation about writing characters who are not living in this realm. My book is about this Chinese girl in the turn of the century who pretends to be her brother and crosses the Pacific from Shanghai to San Francisco in drag. Chinese women weren’t really allowed to go to America, although they were smuggled in a lot. It’s sort of like a Scheherazade thing where she understands that in order to continue to have consciousness, she needs to keep telling her story. It’s sort of an interesting thing to be a writer writing from a consciousness that we… I mean, I’ve never been dead.
BARRODALE: The one thing I struggled with was I was trying to follow these rules of The Tibetan Book of the Dead, and one of their descriptions of this consciousness would be that since you don’t have a body, when you think of something, you’re there, you’re in it.
MOSHFEGH: I mean, that’s what’s so cool about the book. Your dialogue, especially the dialogue at the seminar, is so fucking funny.
BARRODALE: Well, thank you, because I don’t know if everybody’s going to connect with that.
MOSHFEGH: I think people are going to get it if they know anything about that. I’m not even talking about Buddhism at all. It’s just like, if you’ve been around people who’ve learned how to meditate and then they think they’re really good at it, they start talking about it. Since living in Los Angeles, I used to be around it a lot when I was in AA and I went to some meditation stuff. It’s this competitiveness, smartassness, and that’s so funny. But I want to ask you about titles. How did you come up with Trip as the name of the protagonist, but also the title of the book?
BARRODALE: We had a different title and my editor didn’t like it. I didn’t want people to misunderstand it as solely the acid trip element. I wanted them to understand it’s also about an understanding of our reality. So I just gave the son the name Trip to deepen it a little bit. Does that make any sense?
MOSHFEGH: It feels very perfectly balanced and symmetrical too. And then he goes on this crazy journey.
BARRODALE: I wanted to ask you something that you might not want to talk about, but you told me this story a decade ago, and I didn’t really ask for more details. It’s about giving a reading at the Columbia MFA program.
OTTESSA MOSHFEGH: Oh my god, yeah.
BARRODALE: Do you want to tell that story?
MOSHFEGH: I’m happy to tell that story. Every now and then I’ll be like, “I really wish I could find that recording.” That wasn’t the only time I’ve sort of been hostile to the audience. Years later, when I was in Harvard Square in Cambridge doing an event for a book, someone in the audience was talking and it ruined the event for me because I have an auditory processing disorder. I was like, “Can you please be quiet?” And it made me so mad that I had to stop and I could not speak afterwards.
BARRODALE: I completely understand. It can block you when you get angry. The flow of ideas just stops and suddenly you’re just trapped in this angry thing.
MOSHFEGH: I mean, my heart was racing. Now, you know, everyone knows about it. It’s so uncomfortable. And that’s basically what happened when I did this craft talk at Columbia. It was the day after Trump’s first election and I did not get invited to the pre-talk reception for some reason. I wish I’d been invited because when I showed up, everyone was drunk. Probably not everyone, but it was clear everyone was feeling very heavy. We were all so weirded out in that pocket of culture, I think, that Trump had won the election. We were like, “What the fuck?” And I had prepared this talk and it was sort of about what art is versus what entertainment is and where they overlap. I was like, “I really hope this is going to make sense, because these feel like very abstract concepts.” I had never given a craft talk before. I was in the classroom where I used to take painting classes when I was a student at Columbia. And as soon as I started talking, there’s this guy and this girl in the very back who started talking. Off the bat, I was like, “Shit. I really need to focus because what I want to say feels so easy to get wrong.” I could just so easily collapse into nonsense. So I started writing things on the board and at some point I was like, “Blah, blah, blah is important.” And the guy from the back yells out, “What’s not important?”
BARRODALE: Asshole.
MOSHFEGH: I was so baffled. But I was also impressed because he’s saying, “You’re bullshit. Don’t bullshit me.” I was so flummoxed that I said, with a British accent, “Well, what’s not important is you asking me that question right now.” I got all stuck up. And I wanted to ask you, the character Trip in your novel is autistic, and I don’t really think I’ve ever read an autistic character before.
BARRODALE: One of my kids is autistic, so he was the inspiration for a lot of it. I mean, he’s really smart, so I sometimes think people don’t understand that autism isn’t like brain damage. It’s just like they don’t have a filter. So some of it is just his behaviors and the things he likes. Sometimes you just start to go out on a limb without realizing it and the character’s moving and doing things. You know what I mean?
MOSHFEGH: Yes, absolutely. Your answer is so good because it also reminds me that when I write, I don’t ever think about things. So after, people ask you, “How did you write the book?” You kind of have to make it up, there’s this false story.
BARRODALE: I know, because they get disappointed when you say, “Oh, it just had to be that way.” I remember my friends were visual artists and their teachers drilled into them, “You have to be ready to give your reasons.” But our writing teachers never told us about this necessity.
MOSHFEGH: No, no, because they didn’t think we would ever have careers. So back to that failed craft talk at Columbia, the dude kept talking to his girlfriend, to each other. There was some faculty in the front row, and I was looking at them like, “Hey, someone help me.” Everyone was in this weird fog and the lights were really bright, but finally I’m just like, “You need to shut the fuck up.”
BARRODALE: Wow. What did they do?
MOSHFEGH: They kept talking. My sense was that we were exchanging something necessary, some kind of hostile but challenging and correct energy. I was completely defeated and I was swearing a lot and not making any sense probably. It was a horrible talk and I literally gave up, but I had to fill out the hour because they were paying me 500 bucks or something. But right toward the end, a very kind student quietly asked them to leave, and they did. But then I kind of missed them because I had nothing to say.
BARRODALE: I didn’t do readings on my collection, and I’ve only done a handful in my life. So I’m a little nervous about it, but we’ll see how it goes. Do you have any advice?
MOSHFEGH: Don’t be afraid to repeat yourself, because you can say the same thing at every event and no one will ever know. It takes more out of you than you would think because you’re just sort of like, “I’m just showing up and talking about shit.” But you’re also dealing with the book coming out and seeing all these strangers, and I think you need some kind of gesture of protection.
BARRODALE: Oh, that’s a good idea.
MOSHFEGH: Well, I could talk to you forever, but I’ll let you go. I’m so glad we could do this. Thanks, Amie.
BARRODALE: Lots of love. Bye.
