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Ottessa Moshfegh

City Arts & Lectures

CHAPTER

How to Write a Novel That Would Pay the PG&E Bill and Buy Sandwiches

This was your first novel novel. The driving ambition was to write a book that would pay the PG&E bill and buy sandwiches and it worked. So we're in this novel. Where does a novella stop and a novel begin? 75 pages. Is it really? No, actually I think it's something like 65,000 words. There is an official cut off. And you wrote this as you've said to buy sandwiches. Yeah. Well first I practiced writing for 20 years. And had one prizes. You were published in the New Yorker and the Paris Review and all kinds of very prestigious places. But not when he was writing Eileen. That all happened kind of at

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