She wakes up the next morning parked outside her home, having driven home drunk from the bar.Įileen hurries to get ready for work when a police officer knocks on the door. When Rebecca leaves, Eileen continues drinking, too happy with her new friendship to return home. They meet for drinks at X-ville's dive bar, O’Hara’s, where Rebecca flatters Eileen continually. Eileen leaves work exhilarated to have a friend in Rebecca. Eileen makes an excuse to knock on Rebecca’s door, but Rebecca distracts her by inviting her out to drinks that evening. Rebecca takes Leonard into her office to speak privately, instigating Eileen’s jealousy. Polk, Leonard’s mother, attends for the first time, but Leonard refuses to speak to her. The next day, Eileen oversees visiting hours. Rebecca notices the file and asks to read it herself. She pulls his file and reads that he is imprisoned for patricide. Eileen walks through Moorehead and notices Leonard Polk in the solitary confinement room.

The inmates put on a Christmas pageant, which angers Rebecca as a form of unjust punishment. Eileen immediately becomes enamored with Rebecca’s confidence, independence, and beauty. At work that Monday, Eileen is introduced to a new member of the staff, Rebecca Saint John, who will be responsible for the inmates’ education. The car has a broken exhaust pipe and does not reach Boston. Eileen tries to drive to Boston to test her car’s ability to make it to New York. The narrator describes her usual routine of fantasizing and following her crush, Randy, drinking with her father, and shoplifting small items from boutiques in X-ville. Eileen works as a secretary at Moorehead, a juvenile penitentiary, and devotes the rest of her time to keeping her increasingly delusional father in their home. Eileen has no friends or connections in X-ville other than her father, who has an alcohol addiction and who she feels resentment toward. The narrator describes her younger self’s plan to disappear from her life in X-ville and start over in New York City. She gives herself this name to distinguish who she was in the past from who she is now.

Eileen is the narrator’s name for her former self. The events of the novel take place when Eileen is 24 years old. The narrator is a much older Eileen, recounting her past from fifty years in the future.

Eileen takes place in December of 1964, a week before Christmas and the protagonist Eileen’s escape to New York City.

Eileen by ottessa moshfegh