Death in Her Hands

Ottessa Moshfegh’s Death in Her Hands explores the power of the mind to author its own reality, suggesting that the narratives individuals construct can become more potent than objective truth. For protagonist Vesta Gul, storytelling is not merely an escape but a fundamental coping mechanism for loneliness and trauma. Faced with a void of evidence and human connection, Vesta’s mind insulates itself from painful realities by inventing an elaborate fiction, demonstrating how a subjective narrative can supplant the external world.

The process begins the moment Vesta finds a note in the woods describing a murder but discovers no corresponding body. Instead of dismissing the note, her mind immediately works to fill the narrative vacuum. She critiques the note’s opening as if it were a story, thinking, “Here is her dead body. Surely there was more to say” (3), before proceeding to invent the details herself. She conjures a victim, Magda, and a suspect, Blake, embarking on a murder investigation that is entirely a product of her own imagination. Her analysis of the note as “bad writing” foregrounds the metafictional project of the novel.