PicoBlog

My classroom was on the first floor, next to the nuns’ lounge. I used their bathroom to puke in the mornings.

When I first read “Bettering Myself,” the first story in Ottessa Moshfegh’s collection Homesick for Another World, it was one of the most vulgar pieces of writing I’d ever encountered. I loved it. The rest of the collection zipped by in a couple afternoons. This was the dark humor and deadbeat characters of Jesus’ Son, the biting technology-satire of George Saunders, and an intensity of scatological & sexually deviant humor I’d never encountered in literature. It was writing that felt like it could only have been produced in the 21st century: Depraved, depressing, bitter, hilarious.

If that sounds interesting, you can read “Bettering Myself” online (for free) here!

A couple posts ago, we discussed the Lucia Berlin story “El Tim,” about a teacher in a Catholic school who deals with a problematic student. “Bettering Myself” is also a story about a teacher in a Catholic school who deals with a problematic student:

I had another student who drove me crazy. Popliasti. He was a wiry, blond, acned sophomore with a heavy accent. “Miss Mooney,” he’d say, standing up at his desk. “Let me help you with the problem.” He’d take the chalk out of my hand and draw a picture of a cock and balls on the board. This cock and balls became a kind of insignia for the class. It appeared on all their homework, on exams, etched into every desk. I didn’t mind it. It made me laugh. But Popliasti and his incessant interruptions, a few times I lost my cool.

“I cannot teach you if you act like animals!” I screamed.

“We cannot learn if you are crazy like this, screaming, with your hair messy,” said Popliasti, running around the room, flipping books off window ledges. I could have done without him.

Unlike in “El Tim,” though, Popliasti’s depravity is nothing compared to the narrator’s. The narrator considers one of her female students a “best friend,” and talks to her about sexual stuff that I’m afraid to even mention in the newsletter, because my poor grandmothers will be horrified. The narrator is dating a college kid; she tells her senior students “Most people have had anal sex” and “My boyfriend and I don’t use condoms.” She’s an alcoholic who obsessively calls her ex-husband. Her apartment is a mess:

“How can you smoke like that?” he’d say. “Your mouth tastes like Canadian bacon.”

“Ha-ha,” I said from my side of the bed. I went under the sheets. Half my clothes, books, unopened mail, cups, ashtrays, half my life was stuffed between the mattress and the wall.

“Tell me all about your week,” I said to the boyfriend.

“Well, Monday I woke up at eleven thirty a.m.,” he’d start. He could go on all day. He was from Chattanooga. He had a nice, soft voice. It had a nice sound to it, like an old radio. I got up and filled a mug with wine and sat on the bed.

“The line at the grocery store was average,” he was saying.

I think it’s the juxtaposition of the ridiculous and the mundane that most characterizes Moshfegh’s work for me. The ridiculous stuff makes the mundane stuff feel… ridiculous. In any other circumstance, “The line at the grocery store was average” would be a horrible piece of dialogue. Here, it’s hilarious. That’s magic.

Another trademark Moshfegh thing is the basic biological grossness with which she describes what it’s like to occupy a human body. In this collection and in novels like Eileen and My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Moshfegh captures something about being human that feels extremely correct to me: That we’re gross selfish meat-creatures with a bunch of disgusting bodily functions we pretend not to think about but actually think about constantly.

I don’t know where I’m going with this. I was intending to draw some conclusions about Escalation and Causality per the George Saunders craft book A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, which I just did two posts on here. And I do think this story is structured to build reader anticipation (“Will the protagonist straighten her life out?”) and answer that anticipation in a satisfying, unpredictable way (“Not really but maybe there’s a speck of hope?”). The details we receive about the narrator’s life, and the order in which those details are shared, deftly construct a character whose downslide seems to be accelerating. Just when it all seems hopeless, her ex-husband comes into town, and the story gets another kick in the pants.

When I think about this story from the vantage point of “causality”—which is a new thing I’ve never tried to do before reading A Swim in a Pond in the Rain—one thing I note is the way the narrator’s misery causes her to call her ex-husband constantly, and the constant calling of her ex-husband causes him to visit (to ask her to stop). The story could just have been “the narrator was miserable and then her ex-husband happened to visit.” I think that would have been way less satisfying.

Okay this post is far too long. Story’s great, here’s a link again if you didn’t click it up above: “Bettering Myself.” Excited to get deeper into this collection and explore some of my favorite moments with you!!

Thanks for reading,

Your bud Justin

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