How bad do you want it?

Ottessa Moshfegh on the thrill of the sale

Miniature, anonymous, ca. 1790–1810 from the Philadelphia Museum of Art

Ottessa Moshfegh

and

Eddie Huang

are hosting a live auction next week in New York. In anticipation of the event, we invited Ottessa to share her thoughts on the art of the hunt.

Smart yard-sale shoppers know they’ve got to keep it cool when they find the thing they want so bad. Don’t freak out. Compose yourself. Don’t start digging in your pockets. Don’t look desperate. Don’t look too eager.

When I was growing up, my mother would have a yard sale or two every summer in the driveway of our house on Commonwealth Avenue. This was not a normal thing to happen in our staid, upper-middle-class neighborhood.

At 7 in the morning, it was my job to carry the three-foot-square piece of drywall with crumbling edges across the carriage land and prop it up against the tree on the median so that passing drivers could read in bright red paint, “SALE!!!!” An arrow pointed across the road to our house.

I was usually embarrassed by my mother’s eccentricities, but I loved these yard sales. They were dramatic, emotional events. As a would-be writer and creepily prurient observer of human behavior, I enjoyed just sitting there, watching people park in front of our house, get out, hike up their trousers, and try to contain their curiosity as they strolled in. Always slowly. As if walking quickly might indicate a great interest and therefore an easy sale. It’s all a dance, and I loved watching someone else’s mother handling my own mother’s old teapot, or some kid trying on my own discarded roller skates. Look at this lamp, that old stereo.

“How much?”

The reselling industry online has grown immensely since eBay shifted the value of “used goods” into “special market items.” Yes, today you can buy a pair of old Air Jordans on eBay for thousands of dollars. In the ’80s, they were 50 cents. And people still haggled back then.

Haggling requires a fabulous combination of self-control and wild passion. It’s kind of like sex or flirting, in that every engagement is new—you must be adaptive, present. You must know what you want and how much you’re willing to give in order to get it. As a seller, my mother knew not to be too friendly. She was fair but firm, and valued her dignity over any other virtue. She accepted most reasonable offers for her treasures, yes, and she never did that humiliating thing of talking up an item as someone walked away. She refused to grovel.

No, she did the opposite. “Maybe I will keep it,” she’d say. “I like it.” My mother kept a lot of things…

Some of my favorite haggling experiences were with my father. We had a tradition of going out to buy a Christmas tree every Christmas Eve, just as the sun was setting. We’d pull up in our rusty seafoam-green 1967 Chevy Malibu station wagon, the belt squealing like a hyena. Dad would park, grab a $10 bill from his wallet, and tuck it into his front pocket. Then we’d get out and check out all the trees.

The tree seller would be packing up already, and in the spirit of Christmas, when I’d point to a gorgeous six-foot pine that had gone unsold for so many weeks out in the snow, he’d quote a low price. Fifty bucks or something. I’d turn to my father and he’d pull out his tenner.

“Well, shit.”

It’s all these sad immigrants have to spend, the guy would think, maybe. And it’s Christmas, dammit! Don’t be a Scrooge.

It worked every time.

Was this practice dishonest? No. It’s business.

Anyway, the guy would have been shoving that tree into a wood chipper the next day.

Auctions, of course, require a slightly different mentality. While bidding—offering to pay more for something—might sound like the opposite of haggling—offering less—they both require finesse, and restraint. If you appear too confident, too arrogant, bidding too aggressively or anxiously, and then you lose, it can be very embarrassing. Winning and overpaying is even worse. And at an auction, you are not competing against the seller but against other buyers, who are all sizing each other up, wondering just how much the other bidders are willing to spend on the thing they want so badly.

Auction is interactive theater, basically. The auctioneer looks out at the crowd. Just a nod or the slightest hand movement will signal, “I’m in.” It’s not all about raising your hand or flapping some silly paddle. You are in constant communication with the auctioneer, who is keeping score of the fight that he’s brokering between you and your opponents.

You must strategize very carefully: How early do you arrive? How much enthusiasm are you willing to reveal during the “preview” if you see something you want? Is anyone else eyeing your treasure? Do you peacock around, trying to intimidate them? Or do you talk shit about the item, frown falsely in disappointment, planting doubt in others that it’s worth less than they think? And what do you wear? Where do you sit? Do you know how much you’re prepared to pay for the thing you want so badly? Because when the shit hits, it’s on. And it takes intense self-discipline to say, No—I won’t go higher.

When I was in my late 20s, my father and I developed a new tradition. Once a month we drove out to an estate auction in Massachusetts, in a part of the state where a family could inhabit a house for generations without ever renovating or discarding any belongings. But then the internet made everyone angsty, and the young people left their hometowns with FOMO, and the old people did what old people do—they died.

The dead people’s homes had to be emptied, of course. Their contents found themselves arranged around the perimeter of an old Elks Lodge. Rows of folding chairs faced a low stage where the larger items were displayed during the preview—a credenza, perhaps a suit of armor (I wish), a bed frame, some insane chest of drawers or whatnot. At my first auction, I bought a portable church organ for $25 without knowing what it was—it looked like a beautiful sheep-size wooden box.

The auctioneer at the Elks Lodge had a neat mustache and a beer belly. He was quick-witted and maintained absolute composure during the bidding but still brought a fun attitude to the game. If an item sold for nearly nothing, he never let on that he was disappointed. He was professional and personable. In hindsight, maybe I had a crush on him… There’s something magical about an auction. It makes you want things you couldn’t have imagined wanting.

But just how badly do you want it? That’s the question. Bidding at an auction is never about need—if you needed something, you’d simply buy it. An auction is about desire, competition, the daring to say, “This must be mine!” in front of all who might judge you. It doesn’t matter who spotted it first or who was searching longest—tenacity reigns supreme. If you flinch or hesitate, you lose. So an auction can be heartbreaking.

My favorite way to bid at an auction, when I know I want something bad, is the “hungry wolf” approach. Here’s how you do it.

You sit back and side-eye the bidders. You watch them sweat and bid against one another. Desire escalates. The tension grows while the auctioneer fills the air with a hypnotic rant. More and more. Higher. Higher.

But auctions demand restraint, and success isn’t always about winning. It’s not just about how high you’ll bid but the vibe you radiate when you’ve reached your limit. The hungry wolf knows she must wait until the highest bidder thinks he’s won—he’s reached his limit, he can feel it. Let the man break into a smile like an idiot.

Then, with just a flick of your wrist, you signal. The wolf wins. The man turns red. It’s an expensive way to blow off steam, I guess.

Though not always expensive. This one time at the Elks Lodge, mustache man was auctioning off a large oil painting from the late 19th century, something very amateur but charming and weird—I hadn’t noticed it during the preview. Maybe someone had accidentally hidden it behind an armoire, or it fell over.

The bidding started at $20. Nobody made a move.

“Ten dollars?”

Nobody was paying any attention. They were all just looking around impatiently. Someone had just bid $300 on a collection of old hammers and wrenches, but this painting—this portrait of a bygone world—was worthless? No. The palette of blues and greens was beautiful, naive. The paint had a luminescence under the surface, it glowed with a patina. Lovely. It wasn’t a garish show-off work of realism, it was an amateur painting. Someone had spent days, maybe even weeks painting that, for their love of painting, and that was it. Sky, clouds, mountains, a pale stone village, a few sailboats dotting the lake. It was a masterpiece, I decided. I wanted it. So, like a hungry wolf, I waited for the perfect moment.

“Going once? Going twice?”

I locked eyes with the auctioneer and made a swift slicing gesture through the air with one hand—that means “half” in Auctionese.

“We’ve got five.”

Nobody challenged me.

“Sold!”

I really love this painting. It cost my father $50 to ship it to me 15 years later when I finally had a wall in California large enough to accommodate it.

For reference, the naked hottie in the photo, Luke Goebel, is nearly six and a half feet tall.

I ended up hanging it in my bedroom.