This literary power couple have decided to shelve their marriage.
They met in 2016 when Goebel emailed Moshfegh asking to interview her, and they married in 2018.
Moshfegh and Goebel worked together on a screen adaptation of her book “Eileen,” starring Anne Hathaway in 2023. In 2022, they wrote the movie “Causeway” — starring Jennifer Lawrence — along with Elizabeth Sanders.
In mid April Goebel wrote an essay for Literary Hub titled “On the Dark Arts of Writing Dangerously (and Marriage, and Life in L.A.),” in which he discusses collaborating with Moshfegh and alludes to the dissolution of their marriage.
Moshfegh confirmed the separation in a comment on Substack saying “Just FYI, Luke and I have been separated since July,” with a link to the article.
In the article Goebel describes working together on a movie about Debbie Harry for A24 and says that they had four movies under contract.
Moshfegh is a critical darling. A 2018 New Yorker article called her “easily the most interesting contemporary American writer on the subject of being alive when being alive feels terrible.”
She won the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award for 2015’s “Eileen,” and it was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. She’s also written “McGlue,” “Death in Her Hands,” “Lapvona,” and “Homesick for Another World.” She also writes the Substack “It’s Ottessa, bitch.”
Goebel has won the Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize and the Joan Scott Memorial Fiction Award.
His books include “Fourteen Stories,” and “None of Them Are Yours.” He has a new book out called “Kill Dick.”
