
I had read that Helen of Troy was her least favorite fictional character.

She told me she doesn’t give a shit about what she wears now, which made me feel gauche for wearing a white blazer in the desert, though it was linen. People were so dishonest with their clothes and personalities.” The protagonist in her first Paris Review story, published when she was 31, mused, “Makeup made a girl look so desperate. Jeans, a T-shirt, and sneakers in midtown.


Black flip-flops and a cotton sundress in Palm Springs. The clothes Ottessa Moshfegh wore to meet me - to drink water in shitty hotel lobbies in California and New York - were practical and cheap, the kind of miscellaneous cotton garments you find discarded on stoops in Park Slope.
