She’s wearing this long-sleeved, skin-colored gown, and looks so fragile-but absolutely self-possessed. The music starts, and then it pans over to her onstage. It’s a TV program, probably one of those variety TV shows. And her delivery elevates the lyrics somehow, helps you realize the words are just so honest and true. It’s her performance-you’re watching a woman who is so clearly struggling to find a reason to live. The lyrics don’t especially move me, the way they’re written on the page. When I saw her performance of “Going Nowhere,” I was completely stunned. Ottessa Moshfegh: I discovered the singer Lena Zavaroni online in 2012. Moshfegh’s first novel, Eileen, was shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Man Booker Prize her stories have been featured in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Granta, and other publications. (Maybe the child narrator of “A Better Place” says it best: “Earth is the wrong place for me, always was and will be until I die.”) As her characters-a motley assortment of weirdos and grotesques-seek solace in romantic infatuation and sexual debasement, Moshfegh’s frightening, funny, and oddly tender portraits explore the ways some people come to love the things that most disgust them. The protagonists of Homesick for Another World are alienated outsiders, desperate to find home somehow but not sure how to get there. We discussed how writing helped her find purpose and a place, and how the creative process brings her into occasional contact with something even more transcendent: the state of heightened receptivity you glimpse in Zavaroni as she sings, a feeling good enough to guide a life and give it meaning. In a conversation for this series, Moshfegh explained how the lyrics to “Going Nowhere” recall her own struggles with depression, eating disorders, and ennui. Some accounts suggest the procedure was successful, but we’ll never know: She contracted pneumonia in the process, an infection her starved body couldn’t handle, and she died at 35. Zavaroni’s final, most dramatic attempt to save herself was to request experimental brain surgery-the exact details are unclear. But anorexia, a lifelong struggle that started in her early teens, drew her inward and ultimately away from public life.
A child star with a grown-up voice, people once thought she’d be the next Barbra Streisand. Then I read the story of her tragic, too-short life. I couldn’t believe I’d never heard of her: Zavaroni’s performance of Neil Sedaka’s “Going Nowhere” is so charismatic and emotionally affecting that she seems destined for the brightest fame. A few weeks ago, Ottessa Moshfegh, the author of the new short-story collection Homesick for Another World, sent me a video of the Scottish-born singer Lena Zavaroni.
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