But it was 2018’s brilliantly acidic, wounded “My Year of Rest and Relaxation” - about a beautiful young woman who, in an abyssal depression, decides to confine herself, drugged, to a New York apartment - that made Moshfegh a force of cultural cool, the writer to take with you to a park bench in Eagle Rock or Bedford-Stuyvesant. Her 2015 novel “Eileen,” a northeastern noir told from the perspective of a woman looking back on her wretched early adulthood, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Moshfegh grew up in Massachusetts, the daughter of musicians, and accumulated a blue-chip writer’s pedigree: Barnard, an MFA from Brown, a Stegner Fellowship at Stanford. Which roughly sums up the consensus about her too. “Probably a genius,” she said, after a moment’s consideration. When we distance-met, one of the first things she told me was that she’d been watching “ Miss Americana ,” the Netflix documentary about Taylor Swift. She has the air that some writers acquire after finding success (and some before, no doubt) of finishing her sentences at exactly her own pace, in a way that verges on inattention to others, or else implies close attention.

The author of four previous books, Moshfegh is 39, dark-haired and dark-eyed, a little bit guarded in a way that seems sensible, and very plainly intelligent. Then again, maybe that faded novelty is more in line with Moshfegh’s most consistent theme, which appears once more in her forthcoming novel, “ Death in Her Hands”: that even radical personal change cannot cleanse our lives of ourselves. In retrospect it was touching to have thought at the time that this scene would hold its tension, maybe even gain in eloquence and meaning, over the months that followed.

We talked first across the social distance of a hiking path and then, when it started raining, on the phone from our two parked cars. I first met the novelist Ottessa Moshfegh a little over a week into quarantine, in a small park in Pasadena not far from where she lives.

Death in Her Hands by Ottessa Moshfegh