At first it suits her, this chance to practice her other calling as an unofficial shrink-she has always played this role to her divorced mother and brother recovering from addiction-but soon Lizzie finds herself struggling to strike the obligatory note of hope in her responses. Her side hustle is answering the letters that come in to Hell and High Water, the doom-laden podcast hosted by her former mentor. Lizzie works in the library of a university where she was once a promising graduate student. of Speculation comes a “darkly funny and urgent” (NPR) tour de force about a family, and a nation, in crisis.

From the beloved author of the nationwide best seller Dept.

Her orbit has expanded to include not just child and husband (called Ben), but a drug-addicted brother, a Bible-thumping mother and an intellectual mentor as well. The narrator has a name this time: Lizzie. The resonance between the world she describes and the one I live in is so emphatic that reading her can feel like having my own interior narrative externalised – a disarming sensation that is a mark of her craft.What has changed in Weather? The child is a boy, not a girl.

of Speculation and now Weather with hungry recognition. Offill has invented a literature of the scraps, and as a creature of the scraps myself, I am grateful. It is the sort of writing which suggests the brief intervals of liberty that punctuate days of maternal drudge, the shafts of light between clouds of obligation. ‘Half written or recovered in pieces’ could describe Offill’s own style: short, luminous paragraphs, with a story dispensed through implication and allusion rather than conventional exposition. of Speculation’s form was a kind of answer to that problem, and Weather follows the same lines. How to be an art monster when the mundane demands of home and baby have ‘cut the day up into little scraps’?ĭept. of Speculation, the fear was that by becoming a wife and a mother, the unnamed narrator had burned her opportunity to become an ‘art monster’. of Speculation: she’s a New Yorker, writerly, academic-ish, married with one child, and preoccupied with existential fear. That narrator is very like, but not the same as, the narrator of Offill’s previous novel, Dept. ‘I’ve always had an obsession with lost books, all the ones half written or recovered in pieces,’ says Jenny Offill’s narrator in Weather.

Weather jenny offill