Name: The Ottessa Moshfegh Anal Tally
Item: Homesick for Another World
Author: alden_pyle

Homesick for Another World →

by Ottessa Moshfegh, Alexandre Gombau Arnau

The Ottessa Moshfegh Anal Tally

alden_pyle

Jul 27, 2025 4:13 PM

Moshfegh is a good writer. She's good at writing short, zippy sentences with active verbs and lots of concrete detail. Like this: "It was a drive like any drive to any cabin. It was up a dark and winding road. The last half mile or so was badly paved....I brought all my favorite things to eat and ate them almost immediately upon arrival: cornichons, smoked trout, rye crackers, sheep feta, cured olives, dried cherries, coconut-covered dates, Toblerone." Ooh, look at all those different foods. Could someone without an MFA list that many foods?

In all seriousness, this is a writing style that is very difficult to pull off. Moshfegh successfully removes all barriers to understanding; she has perfected a style that makes her writing as easy to understand as possible (I mean on the basic, can-I-figure-out-what's-happening-in-the-scene level). Like Hemingway without all the stuff you have to figure out through context clues. This means she is very easy to read---this book probably took me about three and a half hours. She sees her job as paving the road to semantic understanding so flat and smooth that nobody will ever break down.

But that's not what most people will remember about this book. The thing that will leave the deepest impression for 99% of people is her deep and abiding interest in anal sex. Now, how much should a contemporary book of literary fiction mention anal sex? Let's exempt books that deal with gay men (this book does not) since those will skew our measurements. Exempting those, how many would you say? I would say, for myself, that once three short stories in a collection manage to work in anal sex, I start to think of it as one of the fundamental themes, or at least a guiding motif, and certainly something that has to be mentioned in any serious analysis. You probably have your own number.

Bettering Myself: No actual scenes of anal sex here, but a teacher does assure her class that most people have done it and it's totally normal. That's one.
Mr. Wu: This was the one where I first noticed the anal motif. A man finally receives attention from a girl he has been pining for, and, once he does, he immediately becomes overwhelmed with feelings of disgust for her, imagining her swimming in a pool of shit and stuff like that. So he goes to brothel and anally penetrates a prostitute with his finger, and then makes her lick it, before licking it himself. In doing so he overcomes his feeling of revulsion. That makes two.
Malibu: No anal, although there is a character with colostomy bag.
The Weirdos: On the fence about this one. Contains a reference to a male character making face like "someone being penetrated from behind", but of course this is only implied anal. Let's say this one puts us at 2.5.
A Dark and Winding Road: This is the one where the anal motif really comes out clearly. A male character finds a dildo in their bed, and I immediately thought "There's no way we get to the end of this story without that dildo going in his ass". Sort of a Chekhov's dildo situation. I was not wrong. We're at 3.5.
No Place for Good People: The best story in the collection, although, unfortunately, no anal. Lots of use of the word retard, though.
Slumming: Nothing on the anal front.
An Honest Woman: No anal, although a man does listen to woman fart and enjoy it. Call that 0.25 of an anal reference. We're at 3.75.
The Beach Boy: This one really displays Moshfegh's range. A man spends the story trying to have sex with a male prostitute, but in the end he doesn't succeed. A brilliant subversion of our expectations from the woman known for her depictions of anal.

The last five stories contain no references to anal sex, so we're at 3.75 for 14 stories, 3.75/14=.27 which means that nearly 30% of the collection contains a reference to anal sex. Consider the counterfactual: the vast majority of books, and even the ones written in America in the 21st century, contain no references to anal sex. Thus, 30% a book being devoted to anal clearly indicates a strong interest in anal sex on the author's part. Not that there's anything wrong with that, I mean, like, it's cool.