Perhaps this is why it didn’t remain some “weird book,” as Offill assumed it would. Critic Elaine Blair, writing in the New York Review of Books, said it can be read “in about two hours.” She’s right. of Speculation is propulsive and absorbing. I didn’t think a novel that was structured like that would have a big audience.”įor all its unconventionality, Dept. “I was hoping other writers would like it,” Offill, 51, says of Dept. When she did produce that second novel, it exceeded expectations. of Speculation, she struggled for years to produce a second novel.

In the years that followed, Offill worked as an adjunct writing instructor at various universities and wrote children’s books. That book received critical acclaim but failed commercially. She published her first novel, Last Things (Bloomsbury), in 2000, when she was 30.

After graduating, she worked a number of odd jobs-waitress, bartender, caterer, cashier, medical transcriber, fact-checker, writer of “things for rich people who have a story to tell,” as she puts it. Her parents were boarding school teachers, and throughout her childhood she moved around the country, living in Massachusetts, California, Indiana, and, eventually, North Carolina, where she attended high school and college, at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Offill’s biography, like her novels, is haphazard.

Dept of speculation