Her early literary fiction is dotted with scatological detail: a smear of bird shit, an anal dildo, buckets for defecating in ass-to-mouth play, sodomy with a broken bottle, a colostomy bag full of digested Mexican food. But the acclaimed author has also spent the last decade writing about the anus. Moshfegh has dedicated her career to writing about assholes: cruel, pathetic people who do cruel, pathetic things. But no man who lighteth a candle hideth it under a bushel, and in the end, hoping to work a miracle on his dying mother, Brom will demand his anus be cut open with a sword. His name for this practice is illumination: “A few things I’ve managed to illuminate are worth noting: a small bottle of sherry, my sister’s confirmation crown which I snatched from its velveteen case and hammered down straight and flat, a rabbit’s foot, a brass corkscrew, an ivory penknife.” Brom, you see, believes his colon houses the light of God, safely concealed from his serfs, whom he torments, and his servant girl, whom he imprisons and feeds horse manure.
“Coaxing something up there, into the light, can take all day,” reports the narrator of Ottessa Moshfegh’s “Brom,” a 2017 short story about a shut-in feudal lord who spends his days easing foreign objects into his rectum.
If you have ever worked with one, you’ll know that assholes don’t respond well to input.
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