Go ahead, Google Ottessa Moshfegh: you won’t find much. Well, that’s not entirely true—you’ll find several of her arresting short stories, many of which have found a home at the illustrious Paris Review. But as for gritty details on Moshfegh, or even a Twitter account? Hardly anything (and, as for Twitter, she deleted her handle in late July).

It’s unusual in this screen-addicted, social-media-obsessed age for anything with a heartbeat to not have an online footprint the size of a small country—especially a writer. Joyce Carol Oates and Margaret Atwood are both examples of literary authors for whom a Web presence is a huge part of their writerly personae. (In fact, “joyce carol oates twitter” autofills on Google before “joyce carol oates stories” because of any number of her bizarre past social-media displays.) But Moshfegh, 34, has made a concerted effort to not let the Internet—or much of anything—define her.

“It’s insane that people have these Internet identities. It has very little to do with who we really are,” Moshfegh tells me via Google Hangout from her Oakland, California, home. “As a writer, who I’m friends with, how I spend my time, what I look like, what I wear, what I eat, what kind of music I like—it’s totally not important to the work. In fact, if people knew more about me, they might be like, ‘Oh, I don’t know if I like her. I don’t agree with that, and for that reason, I’m going to judge her work based on that.’ And I just don’t want to participate in that.”

Besides, she says, her fiction should be doing the heavy lifting on its own. And Moshfegh’s writing does speak for itself: the Plimpton Prize winner’s short stories often probe uncomfortable questions and physical places (if you don’t like images of bodily fluids, move on), and test the reader with their nuance. Her debut novel, Eileen (Penguin Press), out Tuesday, pushes these boundaries even further, focusing on what it means to live in isolation and secret.

“I’ve always been interested in family secrets and what happens behind closed doors. I find that fascinating and creepy—that’s why I read, because I want to know other people’s secrets,” she says. “I was like, This is going to be a story about somebody who keeps a lot of secrets, and all of the secrets will be coming out.” Moshfegh imagines the 1960s life of 24-year-old Eileen Dunlop, who works as a secretary at a cold, sterile Massachusetts boys’ prison:

“Everybody was broken. Everybody suffered. Each of those sad mothers [of prisoners] wore some kind of scar—a badge of hurt to attest to the heartbreak that her child, her own flesh and blood, was growing up in prison,” Eileen narrates as a mother leaves her child after a seven-minute visit. “I tried my best to ignore all that. I had to if I was going to act normal, maintain my flat composure. When I was very upset, hot and shaking, I had a particular way of controlling myself. I found an empty room and grit my teeth and pinched my nipples while kicking the air like a cancan dancer until I felt foolish and ashamed. That always did the trick.”

Eileen’s only company through the harsh New England winter is her alcoholic father and her own discordant thoughts, until she meets a new staff worker at the facility—and, from there, the story takes a dark and disturbing turn. Eileen excels at evoking chills, and opening up conversations about child rape and incest: topics the high-literary community doesn’t always dare put to paper because “literature is up here,” Moshfegh says, holding her hand high.