“I felt completely in shock when I read it because I had changed so much, it was kind of like - I wrote this? Weird. Around that time, she revisited “Death in Her Hands,” and, feeling newly inspired by the story, decided to give it another life. Propelled by those early accolades, she released her second novel, “My Year of Rest and Relaxation,” in 2018. That first book won the PEN/Hemingway Award, and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award. The now 39-year-old author wrote “Death in Her Hands” while waiting for her first novel, “Eileen,” to be released in 2015. “I knew I was at a turning place in my life.” “It emanated out of me at a moment in my life before I became disabused of the fantasy of what my career would be,” she says. After finishing the story, Moshfegh put it away and didn’t look back on it for a few years. The book wasn’t written with the original intent of being published, though, and she approached it more as a private project and personal investigation. Both reader and writer were along for the ride. “I’d allow the voice to take me wherever it wanted,” says Moshfegh. Similar to Vesta’s process of inventing Magda, Moshfegh created Vesta in real time as she wrote the book, letting the character unfold as she went deeper into the story. They’re both fictional characters, residing like Russian nesting dolls inside someone’s consciousness. Magda isn’t real - and readers know this - but then, neither is Vesta.

Readers get to know the novel’s secondary character, a young woman named Magda, as Vesta invents her life story and characteristics inside her head.

Structured as a murder mystery, the book lacks a traditional plot, and readers spend the majority of the book inside Vesta’s mind as she toes the line between reality and imagination. Moshfegh describes “Death in Her Hands” as an exploration of writing and imagination. Mugler x H&M’s Collaboration Campaign Photos

Ottessa moshfegh death in her hands