'Jailbait' by Ottessa Moshfegh

[Anonymous No.18083531]

The day before I left home for college, I made a phone call to the publishing house of a writer I’ll call Rupert Dicks. Dicks had a reputation as one of the most audacious and brilliant minds in literature in the last century, and his work represented everything I held as sacred at the time – he was innovative, unapologetic and dedicated to the craft of honest prose. At seventeen, I knew I was a writer, and I wanted to know what Rupert Dicks knew. I was determined to get him to tell me.

‘I’m calling because I’m a student of Rupert Dicks,’ I told the book editor on the phone.

‘I didn’t know Rupert had any students at the moment.’

‘Well, I’m his student. Mind asking him to call me?’

I was a kid, but I wasn’t naive. A glance at Dicks’s author photo had given me some insight into how I could talk my way into his tutelage.

‘Tell him I’m a freshman at college,’ I said to the woman on the phone. There, I thought. That’ll get him. I gave her the phone number of my soon-to-be dorm room. When I moved in the next day, the red light on the answering machine was blinking.

‘Rupert Dicks here. I understand you’re interested in writing. I don’t know what you look like or if you’ve got any talent, but give me a call and I can tell you what I think.’

I called him back. Without much chitchat, Dicks gave me directions to a particular bench in an enormous park on the other side of town, the site of our meeting the next morning.

‘Bring your work,’ he said. ‘See you tomorrow.’

I was thrilled.

That afternoon, I went to college orientation, mingling with students who seemed, suddenly, like children. I had a secret, a path, and passion that would lead my life to interesting places, not just around the corner to the university library. If I felt any anxiety about my meeting with Dicks the next day, it was that he would refuse to teach me or tell me my work was juvenile.

‘Let’s see what you’ve brought me,’ Dicks said when we met. No hello, no handshake. He hunched over on the bench, took out a pen, and started drawing diagonal lines across every page of the story I’d given him. I sat down next to him and surveyed him. He wasn’t a large man, but his body vibrated with the demanding neediness of a man who had once been very beautiful and powerful. At sixty-five, he now had age spots on his face, jowls, thin white hair edging out from under his hat. I remember thinking his waning vitality could be used to my advantage. If I succeeded in reflecting his great masculine strength, then he’d want me around, might take more of an interest in my work, tell me more, explain more, enlighten me more.

[Anonymous No.18083536]

So?’

‘There’s a garbage can over there,’ Dicks said nonchalantly. He seemed to want this to hurt my feelings, although it did not. I took the pages from his fingers and crumpled them up, made two baskets into the garbage can, but missed on the third. I stood and bent down to pick up the balled-up paper, knowing Dicks would have a perfect view of my butt. It was innocuous, and yet very deliberate.

‘Let’s walk,’ he said when I returned to the bench.

He talked for an hour about craft, curiosity, urgency, warned against the pitfalls of subconscious conformity, complacency and people-pleasing. I tried not to ask too many questions because they only inspired outrage and scorn. Along the way, he name-dropped writers and editors.

Finally, he turned to sex. I played along, but I was no Lolita. I was not sucking lollipops or sitting on anyone’s lap. This was a game of egos. If I wanted what Dicks had to give me – the wisdom of his experience as a great writer – I would have to venerate him and lead him on, to flirt. But I couldn’t seem too willing. If I didn’t hold myself up high enough and play hard to get, my allure would vanish, along with his tutelage.

‘Seventeen, eh? Jailbait,’ he said. ‘I should be careful what I do with you. And if you’re ever famous, you could try to humiliate me. Which would be pathetic on your part. Women and their boohoos and neediness.’

Our first meeting concluded with a writing assignment. He told me to come back when I’d finished. I called him a week later.

‘I did what you told me.’

‘Good girl,’ he said, and invited me to his apartment for the first of a handful of meetings over the course of the school year.

Dicks lived alone in a beautiful apartment decorated by his wife, who’d died years earlier. The whole place was dark. The kitchen, even on the sunniest day, was a cold chamber of shadows. Dicks and I sat across from each other, a small desk lamp on the kitchen table illuminating the printed pages I brought with me. At each meeting, he made me a martini. He ate cereal and smoked marijuana. Conversation was mostly one-sided: a man and his audience.

[Anonymous No.18083538]

None of the work I showed him was very good, or very honest. But that was beside the point. I just wanted to listen to him talk. If he spent five minutes addressing my writing, I felt my visit was worthwhile. My ambition was not to be successful – to publish books and be renowned, rich and powerful, like Dicks; I wanted, truly, to use my writing to rise up to a higher realm of existence, away from the stupidity I saw in my classmates, teachers and parents, or on television and on the subway. I understood that life would be meaningless unless my art reached toward an understanding of who I was, and what I was doing here. I don’t know if Dicks sensed my seriousness as a writer. Part of what made him interesting was that I felt he would dismiss me the moment I bored him. And he did, sometimes, tell me to leave abruptly, when he’d had enough. I kept calling and asking if I could visit. Dicks never refused.

When I turned eighteen, our meetings became more overtly sexual in tone. One day he took me by the hand and led me into his office, unearthed a huge cardboard box, and proceeded to pull out photographs, mostly Polaroids, of young, attractive women. ‘These are some of the chicks I’ve laid,’ he said. There were hundreds of them. ‘I shouldn’t have to convince you: I know what I’m doing in the sack.’

Another time, I raised my arms to lift a book off a high shelf and Dicks traced his finger over my exposed stomach. Nobody had touched me there before. ‘You know, with age, the nerve endings in your fingertips become more sensitive. I can do more with this one finger than some college kid could do with his entire body.’ He made a good case for himself. The touch lingered long enough for me to be stunned for a minute. I made up an excuse to leave quickly that day. But I called again before too long.

Then there was the kiss at his kitchen table. Sixty-five-year-old lips, cold, slack, weirdly passionless. I felt nothing. I can’t say I wasn’t disappointed. When he sat back down, he asked if he could take me to bed. He didn’t want to have intercourse, he explained. He just wanted to pleasure me. I said no. We argued about this for hours. Yes, I stayed for hours and argued. They were some of the most rhetorically challenging hours of my life. I’d never been more present. I was alive and engaged, watchful and cautious with my body language, arrogant and flirtatious in my speech. Dicks mesmerized me. If I’d been any less determined as a writer, I may have been persuaded.

[Anonymous No.18083542]

The last time I saw Dicks, I brought a new story. Dicks read it over my shoulder in the love seat in his immaculate bedroom. He edited the entire piece, explaining his reasoning for every move – it was a private masterclass, just what I’d always wanted. ‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘This means so much to me.’ Then Dicks went to his closet and began a show-and-tell of lubricant gels, dirty movies, contraceptive sponges, etcetera. So, we argued about sex again. None of it turned me on, not the argument, not his erotic devices, not him. He’d given me what I wanted, teacher to student. I didn’t feel like paying him back.

‘I’m sorry I’ve wasted so much of your time,’ I said. ‘I won’t come back, I promise.’

Dicks was irate, and yet he helped me on with my boots.

‘I have better things to do, you know, than muck around with some kid.’

That was the end.

At thirty-six, I’m pretty fluent in irreverence and cynicism. My assumption that people are ultimately self-serving lowers my expectations and allows me to forgive. More importantly, it empowers me to be selfish, and to cast off the delusion that I’ll get what I want just by ‘being nice’. We are all unruly and selfish sometimes. I am, you are, he is, she is. Like Dicks, I have little patience for small talk or politesse. One has to be somewhat badly behaved to write above the fray in a society most comfortable with palatable mediocrity. One has to be willing to upset the apple cart. Apples go flying, people trip and fall, yelp, grab for one another. A street corner is transformed into a tragic circus. And everybody gets an apple, each one bruised and broken in a special way. That’s the kind of writer I have always wanted to be, a troublemaker. I can’t fault Dicks or anyone else for wanting the same.

[final post]

[Anonymous No.18083569]

based schizo

[Anonymous No.18083599]

that sucked

[Anonymous No.18083607]

>>18083599
It's based on a real anecdote. She almost fucked Thomas Pynchon, bro.

[Anonymous No.18083622]

>>18083607
The anecdote implies that she became a good writer, so it can't be that real

[Anonymous No.18083637]

>>18083622
Where does it imply that? Also, I was wrong, it was Philip Roth that she almost fucked (dates match).

[Anonymous No.18083749]

east coast culture disgusts me

[Anonymous No.18083753]

>>18083749
how's it different from other parts of the US?

[Anonymous No.18083756]

>>18083753
shameless celebration of cynicism

[Anonymous No.18083768]

You already know the drill
>Moshfegh was born in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1981.[3] Her mother was born in Croatia and her father, who is Jewish
It's all so tiresome

[Anonymous No.18083789]

>>18083531
Wtf I kinda admire her now. I wish I could seduce a hot writer cougar and make her into my mentor

[Anonymous No.18083790]

>>18083768
>when /pol/ rots your brain

[Anonymous No.18083797]

>I hope that it maybe shakes people out of the black-and-white thinking about it… I’m not trying to undermine an actual victim’s experience, and I don’t know a single woman who hasn’t felt victimised by misogyny or sexual aggression, and I’m not trying to undermine any of that. But I do think we get to tell the stories that we want. And I wanted to tell a story in which I wasn’t a victim, I was an active, empowered participant, trying to get something. This is not my sob story; it is rather an example of how sex and power dynamics don’t always lead to a victim experience. Women are powerful too; actually, we have a lot of power.
b-based?

[Anonymous No.18083800]

>>18083637
> I wanted, truly, to use my writing to rise up to a higher realm of existence, away from the stupidity I saw in my classmates, teachers and parents, or on television and on the subway. I understood that life would be meaningless unless my art reached toward an understanding of who I was, and what I was doing here.
Unless she dropped those ambitions. But she's still writing after 18 years, so what are we to assume?

[Anonymous No.18083932]

>woman
>sex
>muh literature
>America

Fucking kys I'm so tired of this garbage being literally every contemporary novel

[Anonymous No.18083976]

It’s like that Cat Person story except shes even more unlikeable because she’s a well connected academic who used her body to get mentored

[Anonymous No.18083986]

>>18083976
She's a 17 yo student about to start college.

[Anonymous No.18084094]

>>18083932
There's no sex.

[Anonymous No.18084155]

>>18083789
sounds hot

[Anonymous No.18084188]

>>18083753
On the west coast they make them fuck first and then they get the favor.

[Anonymous No.18084831]

>>18083768
If you can't tell that someone named "Ottessa Moshfegh" is Jewish without looking it up, you're not allowed to be an anti-semite. Get a different hobby.

[Anonymous No.18084848]

>>18083531
>>18083536
>>18083538
>>18083542
She looks jewish she is jewish (I checked) therefore I know where this is going as I do not need to read all of that

[Anonymous No.18084857]

>>18084848
Where is this going? Let's see if you got it right.

[Anonymous No.18084900]

>>18084857
>>18083084

[Anonymous No.18084905]

>>18084900
It's not about any of that.

[Anonymous No.18084948]

The eternal roastie desperate for male validation

[Anonymous No.18084955]

>>18083531
>the craft of honest prose

I'm not sure if this is supposed to be ironic on some level, but what we're in for is a bunch of "the red light on the answering machine was blinking" style shit which is following show don't tell, but only by showing uninteresting rote images. Then, later on, when he wants to fuck her,

> If I’d been any less determined as a writer, I may have been persuaded.

Just seems ridiculous, especially following

> to use my writing to rise up to a higher realm of existence

Which you might expect from a writer whose aims are not simply honesty and the absence or error.

[Anonymous No.18084999]

Confirms to me the worth of having some aptitude or talent for whatever it is you're pursuing. This lady has worked very hard and clearly has passion but her writing does not have the quality of a writer. There was better rhythm in the 30% repetition of the nigger novel.
Or I could be wrong. She's won a lot of awards. Maybe there is some merit and I should not judge her work based on a few short passages

[Anonymous No.18085009]

[Anonymous No.18085053]

>>18083542
She has learned nothing any other upper middle class, semi educated woman has not also learned.

[Anonymous No.18085064]

>>18083749
same

[Anonymous No.18085126]

Didn't read the whole thing. Sluts and perverted old men disgust me. Post a story about knights and dragons next time.

[Anonymous No.18085173]

>>18083622
My Year of Rest and Relaxation was good.

[Anonymous No.18085192]

>>18084831
Moshfegh is an Iranian name lol.

[Anonymous No.18085199]

>>18083542
>He edited the entire piece, explaining his reasoning for every move... He’d given me what I wanted, teacher to student.
All that for a single editing session.

[Anonymous No.18085201]

>'I don't want to have intercourse! I just want to pleasure you'
Based or cringe?

[Anonymous No.18085232]

>>18084831
Iranian jews aren't real retard

[Anonymous No.18085235]

>>18085173
Agreed. I don't think her prose is anything special, but it was a strong premise and well-organized in its ideas and development.

[Anonymous No.18085244]

>>18085201
He was an old guy. Probably had trouble getting hard
Getting old is cringe though.

[Anonymous No.18085292]

I don't dislike the MFA/autofictional style as much as others do but it feels as ill equipped to portray our current age as Georgian verse was to depict its own. If literature is to remain vital (which is no sure thing) then I feel this current mode that we're operating under must be overturned and quickly. A Romantic/Modernist-esque revolution in style, diction and subject matter is in order.

[Anonymous No.18085309]

I remember this the first time it circulated, people thought it was Gordon Lish.

[Anonymous No.18085312]

>>18083531
Do you guys think he molested her mole?

[Anonymous No.18085697]

>>18085173
Yes.
That book inspired me to start sleeping earlier to avoid being awake. It got to the point where I would sleep at 8pm and wake at 4am. I took sleeping pills once when I was having trouble getting to sleep in the light.

[Anonymous No.18085737]

So let's say some decades from now all that /lit/ browsing has finally paid of and you are lit prof in some prestigious uni. Some thot scams you to mentor her for free with promise of sexual pleasure with her sweet virginal coed pussy but then she doesn't hold her end of bargain. What do?

[Anonymous No.18085747]

>>18085737
But by that point I shall have a loving wife and many strong children. Coed pussy will mean even less to me then than it does now.

[Anonymous No.18085782]

Ottessa Moshfegh
>Jewish

Gordon Lisch
>Jewish

[Anonymous No.18086042]

>>18083637
No you fucking idiot it’s well documented that it was Gordon Lish. Holy shit you zoomers baffle me

[Anonymous No.18086066]

>>18085697
have you turned into a snoozer yet?

[Anonymous No.18086222]

>>18083531
Describing something as common in human life as this has become newsworthy only because of the pathetic level of common discourse.

[Anonymous No.18086254]

>>18083768
Came here to post this, honestly.

[Anonymous No.18086332]

>>18085009
That was the guy? lol never heard of him

[Anonymous No.18086349]

>>18085782
>If you have one drop of Jewish blood, you are Jewish
Not even the Nazis were like this but /pol/fags? Oh boy.

[Anonymous No.18086439]

moshfegh is based

[Anonymous No.18086447]

>>18085737
Nothing, he slept with a hundred women, meaning he chased a thousand and more. This man wanted the feeling of the chase and a nostalgic feeling and he got it, probably had a good time mentoring her. She escaped him as many did and imagined it made her unique, special - the teacher gave freely to his students and this student thought she stole it from him, rewriting the narrative to make him look bad.

[Anonymous No.18086473]

>>18086332
He's probably the most important American literary editor of the second half of the twentieth century. Almost solely responsible for the hyperminimalist mindset that seeped its way in from grade school grammar books to aesthetic theology.

[Anonymous No.18086490]

>>18086473
I don't know much about editors, to be honest. Only authors and some critics. Would you define the thing he popularized as a positive thing?

[Anonymous No.18087914]

>>18086447
wew lad

[Anonymous No.18088025]

pretty good piece desu

[Anonymous No.18088032]

>>18086349
the writers themselves are also like this to sell books
welcome to the real world, young man

[Anonymous No.18089224]

>>18088032
so the jew label sells and helps people get connections?

[Anonymous No.18089370]

>>18083538
>Dicks mesmerized me.
wow its just like my hentais

[Anonymous No.18089543]

>>18089370
kek