Magpie Style: Jenny Offill on Climate Change Art, Defamiliarization, and the Immediate Affirmation of Social Media

Jenny Offill is an acclaimed fiction writer whose debut novel, Last Things (1999), was named a New York Times Notable Book and finalist for the LA Times First Book Award. The New York Times named her second novel, Dept. of Speculation, one of the 10 Best Books of 2014. Weather: A Novel was published in 2020 and lauded by the Boston Globe as “tiny in size but immense in scope, radically disorienting yet reassuringly humane, strikingly eccentric and completely irresistible.” Her critical work has appeared in the New York Times Book Review and Slate. She is coeditor, with Elissa Schappell, of the anthologies Money Changes Everything and The Friend Who Got Away; author of a number of children’s books; and subject of a February 2020 feature in the New York Times Magazine, “How to Write Fiction when the Planet is Falling Apart.” Honors include a Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University, Guggenheim Fellowship, New York Film Academy Fellowship in Fiction, and resident fellowships at Macdowell Colony, Slovenian PEN Centre, and Yaddo. Offill previously taught in the MFA programs at Brooklyn College, Syracuse University, Columbia University, and Queens University of Charlotte, North Carolina; and served as Visiting Writer at Syracuse University  and Sarah Lawrence College, and as Writer in Residence at Vassar College and Pratt University.

On March 12, 2021, Jenny Offill  joined The Interlochen Review editors Sara Carmichael, Maia Siegel, Chrisli Markram, and Grace Schlett, for a virtual conversation about her writing and research process. 

Sara Carmichael: I’m really interested in how you integrate research so seamlessly into Department of Speculation. It almost serves as another voice throughout the novel. I was wondering if putting outside texts beside your own writing changed the way that you approached the project, as well as how you found a balance?

Jenny Offill: One of the things I was worried about when I was writing Department of Speculation was that it would feel too claustrophobic to be in that narrator’s head the whole time. And so part of the reason I wanted all those other voices, whether it’s what the explorers wrote, or even Thomas Edison, things like that, was that I wanted to have a feeling of another voice coming in, even though it’s all filtered through her consciousness. The other part is that I just have so much fun collecting little stories. I find writing itself very hard, but I sometimes say I write in a kind of magpie style. I go around, and these certain things seem shiny to me, and then I take them, and then it takes a while to figure out the nest, but I have the shiny things for a while. So I have hundreds of pages of research notes, and very few pages of the actual book. It’s sort of ridiculous.

Maia Siegel: You write with this really great, sparse, minimalist prose. I was wondering who your literary models were for that?

Jenny Offill: Well, if I’m going back a little bit I would say, Jean Rhys, I don’t know if you guys have read her. She wrote a series of novels with the modernist movement, and of course, we think about Virginia Woolf for that, but Rhys wrote these books like Good Morning, Midnight or After Leaving Mr. McKenzie, which were about a woman who was a little bit at loose ends. Sometimes she had been a dancer, and now that life she’d had when she was a little bit younger was gone. And like Jean Rhys, the person is often quite a drinker. But the books themselves, even as they’re about increasing madness, are so lucid and beautiful. I was really impressed by those when I read them. 

And then I think Amy Hempel was an influence. I was lucky enough, many years after I started reading her, that she became my boss at Brooklyn College and I got to work with her. It was so interesting, because she said that part of her style came from spending a lot of time listening to stand up comedy. I think about that, too, I think about what you can learn from other arts, like from stand up, the idea of the comeback. It means that when someone’s telling a long story, there’s a little detail that you hear, and it doesn’t necessarily land yet. In Department of Speculation, the first time you hear, “why would you ruin my best thing,” it means one thing, and later, it means another. When I’m writing, I don’t necessarily plan those. They kind of float back in if they’re going to stay. 

In terms of other writers, I think I'm going to say it was mostly poets. And then the biggest influence, to the degree of teaching this book now, is Jesus’ Son by Denis Johnson. That’s the book that I think I have read the most and have admired the craft of the most. Oh, there’s some Joy Williams in there too. I read a lot of Joy Williams.

Chrisli Markram: I am interested in the way that you arrange your fragments. In Department of Speculation’s first few sections, the fragments feel a bit more scattered in terms of the narrative information that we get, and then as it goes on and the family dynamic unfolds, the fragments feel like they follow each other a bit more in terms of the story. How did you go about that?

Jenny Offill: Yeah, I did plan that because I think a lot of times in novels, there’s a secret key in the beginning of them on how to read them, especially if they’re written in an experimental way. At the beginning of Department, on the first page, there’s that story, the Edison idea, that memories are microscopic, that they swarm together and apart. I wanted, in the beginning, for them not to entirely swarm; if you think of a few bees or a few insects, there’s a certain point where they gather. So I wanted it to feel a little in-and-out. I tried to mitigate against that a little bit, so it wouldn’t feel too random, by making it chronological. You’ll notice that it really does go from the very beginning, talking more generally, it does tell the story from the beginning of her being alone, when she really thought she would never be with anyone, and then what it’s like when they meet, and through the marriage, and having kids, and the affair. So that was the idea of the beginning being a little different than the rest.

MS: The perspective changes several times during Department of Speculation, especially during moments where the speaker seems like they’re attempting to emotionally distance themselves from the action. Did you set out to write the novel in this way, or did it unfold organically? What were some of the challenges you encountered with these shifts in perspective?

Jenny Offill: Yeah, it did actually unfold organically. I did not intend it initially. I kept writing because I wasn’t writing—I mean, I was just talking about writing, that there was a linear chronological movement, but I wasn’t writing it in a linear way. I had these different moments and I was trying to figure out how I wanted to order them. So when I was writing it, it was funny, because you know, I’ve been teaching writing for a long time, as well as writing. And I kept thinking to myself, “Well, why are you writing that part in third person? You’re just going to have to go back and change it.” Or, “Why did you write that in second person?” And I kept writing things in different ways and then just being like, “You’re just making more work for yourself. Why are you doing this?” 

And then, the only moment in the whole many year process of writing the book that I had kind of like a eureka moment is when I did realize what the emotional reason was, and it was great. And then I knew at that point, that was maybe the first half of the book that I figured that out, but I hadn’t written the end. Then I intentionally decided that I wanted to come back out of the third person. And it’s very quiet because I was trying to figure out how to do it so it wouldn’t be really jarring. Then at the end, it’s still the wife, you know, and then on the second to last page, I say their daughter instead of the daughter, so that even if you don’t notice that I feel like on some quiet level, you notice it. It took me a long time to do this part. Then I decided to put the rabbi thing in because it’s impersonal in a way, so, we’re not dealing with point of view and it’s more distant. And then I wrote three sentences in the last chapter, with snow, “Finally, the world looks blankly beautiful.” I remember messing with this passage so much. And it wasn’t until I made it three times more distant that I said “we.” And then it goes back to the way that she talked to her husband at the beginning, where they’re not just in their roles of, my husband, my wife, and they’re not in this state where it’s like watching a play or what she calls “the little theater of hurt feelings.” And I kind of had done the reverse, I guess, in the earlier part, that halfway point in the book that’s like, “how are you? soscaredsoscaredsoscared…” So I had this little passage and I wasn’t sure where it went. And then I realized that I could use it kind of formally as a barrier, and it would mark the break in the book. Then it says, “the wife is praying a little,” and that’s the first time we have the bee. So it was sort of like playing with these formal, structural things, not just for fun, but to show the emotional calibrations of the narrator.

SC: As I was reading your books, I really admired the way that you created such a strong sense of place in such short fragments, and I was wondering how you thought about building the setting while still adhering to such a tight form.

Jenny Offill:  I’m glad to hear you say that because I sometimes get accused of not having enough place in my books or not enough, you know, details of how people look or where people are. That was something I actually thought a lot about in Weather, because I was thinking about how to make this character start to be more aware of the natural world, the nonhuman world around her. But in Department, it’s like, she’s so bookish, she lives so much in her head, that it is very hard for her to notice, except in these really particular details. And then once they moved to the country, I tried to expand that slightly. She’s like, “oh, why do we have all these stars, we don’t even need all of these stars,” because she’s such a city person. And then as it gets to the part where the husband starts knowing these obscure things about plants and leaves, that’s like, what if we look a little more closely at this world that’s outside of this tiny little unit they had? So, that’s about as much place as I manage.

MS: So, how do you think technology has influenced your writing? Because your short fragments can feel very of this era in a “brain tweet” of sorts. And I also wonder if writing about motherhood tends towards the short and the hybrid? I’m thinking about Little Labors by Rivka Galchen, and so I wanted to hear your thoughts on both of those. 

Jenny Offill: Yeah, there are a lot of similarities in some ways. I’ll tackle the motherhood one first, I think that I was already interested in writing in a fragmentary way. There were certain short stories that I’d read so long ago, probably when I was about eighteen or nineteen, like, In the Heart of the Heart of the Country by William Gass. And it’s written in these little blocks, it just says, like, a person, places, things. And so I always admired that, when people carried it off. But I also felt like I wasn’t sure that I knew how to do it. 

And then, when I had my daughter, I had always been a kind of person who was not a very orderly person. So, I never was the person who was like, “I now write from blank to blank.” I always wrote in these kind of benders. And they would be when I had a break from whatever job I was doing, and then I would write a ton, and then I wouldn’t get to write for a long time. And that just changed completely when I became a parent—because I couldn’t do that anymore. I just started to think I’d never write again. And then my friend who is a poet was like, “No, you’ve got to take these tiny little bits of time, but you can’t insist that you’re going to make it into the story yet.” So that’s kind of what I did. 

Now, it’s kind of funny to me, because I take so long to write a book that I feel like I’m never going to land on anything, but, Twitter, which is what I think it looks the most like, I was on Twitter for three months before Department of Speculation—it was between when I turned it in and when they were going to put it out. And they were like, “Oh, you should have a Twitter account,” or whatever. And I went on it and I was immediately like, oh, this is a bad drug for me. Because I could just tell that it was the same idea of compression, but the opposite of my writing life, where I wait a long time and decide if it’s what I want it to be and then it kind of accumulates and it’s like, oh, and now it’s out there. So it wasn’t so much that I thought, oh, I tweeted something bad or wrong, or that kind of thing, it was more, it felt sort of like a spendthrift. Like, if you had an idea, you just threw it out there, and then it was gone in that moment. So it felt like if you try cocaine, and you were like, “I love cocaine! I’m going to take cocaine all the time,” and so I had kind of a feeling like, oh, I don’t know if this is a good thing for me. But I felt like I was supposed to do it. 

Then I talked to this friend of mine, who’s my age, I’m fifty-two, and he said at the time, I guess it was like ten years ago, “You know, we’re just old enough that we can pretend we don’t understand it.” And I was like, that’s really smart, that’s what I’m going to do. So what I did was, I was thinking already that I should get off it, but at the same time, I was meeting all these really fun book Twitter people and so I can see why people don’t want to be off it. But one night I said to my husband, “I don’t think this is good for my brain.” And he said, “Why don’t you just quit it?” And I said, “Okay, I will.” And he was like, “Why don’t you just delete your account right now?” And I did. And then I thought that my publisher was going to be mad, and so I just faked that it was a New Year’s resolution seeming thing—I deleted it on January first, my book was coming out January thirty-first. And they didn’t even notice. Like, they made such a big deal that I was supposed to do it. But nobody noticed. 

I do find, though, that if I’m going to do any writing at all, I actually have to not have a connection to the internet. I mean, I did a lot of research about this, it’s not about willpower now, it’s just meant to be insanely addictive. It’s made with the same technology as gambling machines. I think it’s pretty hard for a writer, unless you really want it to be exactly like Twitter, to let that stream come into the focused consciousness you need when you’re writing. I don’t know, does it affect you guys? Does it affect your writing—the being on social media? 

Grace Schlett: For sure, me.

Jenny Offill: I mean, do you feel like you can shut it off when you write?

GS: I find myself having to go to different tabs because I think in the moment I need it for this part of my story, but I really don’t.

Jenny Offill: Well, but see, as someone who likes to research, I had to make a rule for myself, because I was like, you don’t get to do internet research—if you want to do internet research while you’re writing, you have to make a whole separate day that’s not a writing day. So most of the information I get from a book and the library because it’s so much slower. And also I wouldn’t just fall. I mean, if I fell, it was more pleasurable because I would just be reading some book. 

I think that the other thing that is a little bit weird about social media for writers is that, in general with writing, you have to write for a long time before people give you any recognition. I mean, between my first and second book, it was fifteen years. And also, my first book, critics liked it, but it didn’t sell many copies, and I wasn’t sure I could even publish the second one. And there’s just a sort of way that the immediate affirmation of social media is contrary to what it takes, at least for me, to write a book. 

I also think I don’t show people stuff for a long time for that reason, too, because I get spooked easily that it’s bad. But these are all just me. I guess I lurk on Twitter, I totally lurk on Twitter. The one thing about Twitter that I was really pleased with is that I always read these authoritarianism scholars because I was totally like, we are headed for a fascism—this was before the siege. And so I was reading people that study disinformation on Twitter and on January fifth, I was walking with a friend of mine and I was like, I really think that bad things are happening. All the disinformation, people on Twitter think something is going to happen tomorrow.

CM: I found your choice to not name any of the main characters in Department of Speculation really interesting. I wondered what made you decide to take this approach? And how did it influence the narrative while you were working on the novel?

Jenny Offill: Well, actually, for a while I kept trying to name them, and they kept not sticking in that funny way, when you’re doing something that you think you should. And the reason I wanted to give them names is that I thought, oh, it’s just kind of annoying when people write those books where there aren’t names, it always feels like it’s sort of written as though everything is extra serious, you know, that everything is meant to stand in so universally. And so I was worried that it would add so much weight. But once I figured out that shifting point of view thing, I knew that it would only make sense if we didn’t have names—because the names are just such markers, so the change would be too jarring. 

So that’s when I decided, there’s a reason these names aren’t sticking, it’s because they’re not supposed to have names. I always feel sometimes like your intuitive brain is smarter than your analytical brain when it comes to doing something like that. Because you can keep having an idea about how you want something to be, and it just keeps not working. And at a certain point, you think, well, maybe I’m not supposed to be doing it this way. So that’s kind of how I almost stumbled into it. But then I incorporated it as like, oh, it’s meant to be that.

GS: You have six numbered sections in your novel Weather. What do you wish your readers would grasp at the end of each section that maybe has changed their minds about the beginning of that section, that they can carry on to the next? And also, why did you choose to use sections?

Jenny Offill: Well, in Department, I obviously had the chapters, and in Weather—this is interesting, to try to talk about the back and forth of how you decide to structure a book because it comes sort of late to me—I had this idea that the book was supposed to move sort of like weather. And so I wanted it to have these qualities where it seems something like it was storming, and then it was quiet. And at first, I tried to do that with no section breaks, and it actually just made the book incoherent. I was like, I’m going to have to accept some breaks in order to have enough structure, but I’m not going to have all the tiny chapters. So then I think it was kind of about distinctness. I knew in the beginning, I wanted it to be very much like before any of this matters very much to her, and then, she gets more involved with Sylvia, and then I knew that I wanted to skip over the actual election stuff, in some ways. I wanted to tell that backwards. 

I always had an image that she was walking down the street in her neighborhood, and it was raining, and she didn’t know if she was crying or if it was raining. I always knew that was somewhere in the book because there was that weird surge of random aggression that was happening all over the place, particularly targeted, obviously, towards some groups more than others, but it was also just that people would randomly be so aggressive in the city and to say some weird thing. And so I wanted to capture that—like, someone would just say, “boohoo,” or something. So I knew that was going to be the break. Later on, it was also about trying to move them through time. I knew that the almost-affair thing had to end a section. I went back to what I had and tried to figure out which felt like movements of time. And you know, to be honest, which felt like things I wanted to skip, that I didn’t want to write about. That’s the joy of a book, you don’t actually have to write every single part of it if you can figure out how to elude.

SC: I really love the dark humor that is present throughout Weather. It seemed to play an important role in easing the tension surrounding a heavy topic like climate change. I was wondering how you made a place for humor in your novel while still remaining close to the emotional center?

Jenny Offill: I mean, part of it was that I was reading things about climate change, so many things, and there was almost never any humor anywhere in it, which I understand. It’s about the end of the world as we know it. And it’s incredibly terrible. But also, both what I’m like, and what this character was like, we can’t just take in darkness, darkness, darkness, darkness. I felt like if I wanted to put climate stuff in a novel, and as I increasingly decided after the election that I wanted to put fascism stuff in the novel, both those things are so heavy, and they have a chance to be so self-righteous and polarizing, that there needed to be a way that we could come back a little bit and the tone could change. You know, there’s this documentary from a while ago about the band the Pixies, which is called loudQUIETloud, and sometimes I think about that when I’m writing. It’s serious, serious, you know, funny. You can’t keep it in one mood the whole time. Now, the transition points are tricky, right? Because if you get them wrong, it seems like you’re making light of something that’s important, so that’s why so much of the humor is kind of deadpan. 

It’s very funny sometimes to read Weather and even Department, thinking about what different people laugh at. Like in a city, sometimes people will laugh at all these incredibly dark jokes, whether it’s about drugs or suicide or terrible people you live with, but sometimes you’ll be in another place and there’s just total silence and you’re like, oh, this is really stressful reading this because it’s not meant not to be funny. And then the same with Weather, but I did find with Weather though that it was really about younger people getting the humor of it, and maybe people my age and older, being locked into this certain kind of old school environmentalism. I mean, I’m sure you come across that, it’s from like the sixties or seventies, or I don’t know when it’s from, but it’s very earnest, it doesn’t have any room for hardcore activism, or youth movements and things like that. So, I’ll say I just like comedy. 

CM: Your use of defamiliarization is really fascinating to me, especially in Department of Speculation when it switches to third person. I was wondering what tactics you used to achieve this aspect of your writing? And how did it influence the way in which you manipulated psychic distance in third person point of view?

Jenny Offill: Well, I feel like with all of the things that I wrote about in either of these two novels, there are no huge dramatic things that a lot of people haven’t gone through before. I’m not telling the story of like—there was this story in The Guardian a year ago, that was “I was swallowed by a hippo” or something like that, and now that’s an unusual story—like if I was writing “I was swallowed by hippo,” I don’t think I’d worry all the time, oh, but other people have written this. But I’m not writing “I was swallowed by a hippo,” I’m writing “I got my heart broken” or, “I’m scared about the end of the world.” And so I think defamiliarization for me is always just trying to notice that gap between what I think something looks like or feels like, and what it actually feels like to me. 

And, I was listening to some true crime podcast the other day, which, I don’t really listen to them, so it was kind of like a whole new thing. And the cops on it kept talking about how you can’t be a cop without a bullshit detector. And I was just thinking that you can’t really be the kind of writer writing the kind of things I am unless you have that kind of radar of “this isn’t how people said it was going to be.” So whether it’s about parenthood or about anything, I sort of noticed those moments, I guess, and tried to put those on the page.

GS: Weather certainly seems to be an exhibit of a single perspective on life, instead of a captured plot. It’s quietly spoken, yet it holds a lot of weight. Would you say this character’s perspective was influenced by your own life? Or did she come to you in pieces as a perspective entirely separate from your own?

Jenny Offill: I think this character in Weather is probably the closest to me of any character I’ve ever written. The only thing that’s different is that she tells jokes, and I don’t ever tell jokes. I’ve always thought that it was very possible that I would keep writing but no one would ever read it, or that I would meet lots of people but never meet anyone that I was going to spend my life with. I always just imagined—this is probably just a depressive person’s tendency—but I just always imagined what might not happen. With Lizzie, her life just unfolded because of the events around her. And, especially when I was in my twenties, I was the person that a lot of people would call when they were really, really on edge and so I spent quite a lot of my own emotional energy. I care about people so I didn’t mind doing it, but I did feel like I didn’t have very much room to put it anywhere else. So I was imagining this character a little bit like: what if I’d gone on that way? What if I had a brother? I’m actually an only child. But what if I had someone that I felt responsible for, that I had to go round and round in that kind of eternal cycle with? Also, I think that the job she has is great and I think she’s turned out at a great point in her life, but that wasn’t where she thought she was going to be. So I wanted to write like, what if I hadn’t been a writer? What if I hadn’t written Department of Speculation? 

MS: Do you see “climate change art” as a monolith or a concerted effort, and how do you feel about the label of “climate change art?” 

Jenny Offill: I mean, I don’t love it. I do want to read something when I hear that it’s that. Often it is good, and especially with climate art I really do think visual artists have done amazing work on it. Much more before the writers got to it. I honestly think it’s going to be this generation of you and maybe people who are in college right now. I think a lot of really amazing fiction about climate is going to come out of that. They’re always talking about new generations like, “they are the technology generation,” but I feel like I can tell from my students and from my daughter that the climate thing is not escapable. It just feels like it’s going to be integrated in a more true way into all the art forms, I think. Sometimes I think that artists and writers have their antenna up a little earlier, and people who are younger also have their antenna up because they don’t want to do what’s already been done. I don’t love a lot of what passes for it, but every once in a while there is something really fantastic that is climate, but I don’t seek it out. I don’t type in “cli-fi.” It’s not a great phrase. 

SC: Speaking to that a little bit, Weather seems to be grappling with how to acknowledge a type of destruction that isn’t particularly visual, because climate change feels like less of a hand that is physically dismantling the ecosystem and more of a gradual erasure. I was wondering if there were ways that you had to make climate change more tangible for yourself while you were working on the book? 

Jenny Offill: That’s a good question. I mean it was a little bit like falling off a cliff. I was inching towards the cliff and then I was off the cliff. I felt like I saw it everywhere for a long time. It felt like every single thing that people talked about—I wouldn’t say it because that would just drive people mad—but I would think it. So I would think sometimes when people would talk about where they were going to live or where their kids were going to go to school, I would run through the climate predictions in my mind about whether that was a good idea. Especially when people posited this world that was exactly like our world, but twenty years in the future, I would feel very destabilised. You kind of feel crazy, I mean this is seven years ago. I feel like the conversation got a lot more apparent, you know? So I was feeling a little bit like—am I wrong to be this worried? But I did notice that there was this whole spate of articles, where the people who really do know about climate change, the journalists and the activists, they were trying everything to make people care. They would be like “climate change is coming for your coffee and your ski vacation,” they would just try every single thing. 

What I did—I live somewhere where there are a lot of apple orchards—I thought about the apples. It came in in a funny way, there is only one line. It just says, “no more apples soon, apples need frost.” It’s just that way where I used to just look at an apple tree and be like, “apple trees are beautiful.” It was a moment where I was like, “are those not going to exist?” The nice thing is, I don’t know if it’s nice, maybe it means I'm in denial, but I did go back out of that again. But that was a weird way to live. I worry—I hope you guys aren’t living like that all the time. I worry that’s what it’s like to be sixteen or eighteen or twenty.

GS: You tackle multiple topics in Weather, like old age, a slowly deteriorating planet, the meaning of life, depression, addiction, and more. Towards the end of the book, though, instead of leaving us with a satisfying revelation about ways to fix the world and the people in it, we are zeroed back in on Lizzie and the small, mundane proceedings of everyday life. What was your thought process through crescendoing events like that and then ending the novel mid-surge?

Jenny Offill: Well, I always think so much about the beginnings and endings of every book. I mean, I spent so much time on that last page of Weather, trying to figure out what I wanted to do with it. I did know that I wanted to leap a little into the future, but I was sort of like, “how do I do that?” I’m a little bit obsessed with dating a novel I write. In general I don’t put a lot of brand names or events or anything, so I was kind of at a loss when I put the Trump thing in. 

It ended up being about the images. I heard that sound one night and it sounded exactly like gunshots. I used to live in Las Vegas where it would be gunshots if you heard that, and then I heard it was walnuts. I just remember thinking about that sound for a while. When I was writing the end, sort of like if the beginning is a key to everything, I feel like the end has to have some way that important moments creep in for a second, but still open up. So, one of the things that I spent a lot of time on was trying to figure out how to write this. I don’t think this is a sentence anyone else would even notice—it’s at the very end when he’s reading a long book about an ancient war. I wanted to gesture towards how they are financially precarious, but their lives are so much more protected than most people’s, so the blankets are arranged so it’s very cozy. Then there are dreams of running and of other animals and she’s looking at her dog. I wanted that to be able to go both ways. It literally means that the dog is dreaming of running, but I also wanted to write “dreaming of running” because of the will story and then also other animals. So when I finally got the dog with the paws and the dreams of running and of other animals I was like, “okay I have that now,” and then I wrote the gunshot part. 

Now, I did debate for a long time if I wanted to put that last line there. I kept thinking of it, and I kept thinking, “it’s going to sound weird and yoga-y, maybe I don’t want to put it in.” But I kept coming back to it and then a friend of mine who is a filmmaker, she was saying—we were talking about women writers and filmmakers—and she said “You know it’s so interesting to me when a woman decides to go big at the end of something and just like, I’ll do it.” And then I was like, “Fine. I’m going to say this statement.” And then it stuck. I was going back and forth about it because I was nervous, I was nervous that it was too much. I do remember one time going to a talk about something and they said “What’s the core delusion?” and then they didn’t answer it. I remember going and researching it later. It’s very hard to research, because you can’t google it very easily. Finally, after going through all these Buddhist talks and everything, I finally came on this idea. So yeah, that’s where I landed. 

CM: All of us are curious about your future projects. Are you planning on continuing to write in these fragmented forms or are you interested in exploring others? 

Jenny Offill:I can’t imagine writing without some element of fragmentation, but I could see writing short stories that interlocked or something. I could see trying something that had, like this one has, slight differences. It has questions and answers and so many more people coming into it. So I think with each project I try to pick something that I haven’t tried before. Like politics, which you know I haven’t really tackled before. So I might keep the form, but try to bring in something that I haven’t tried before that seems really hard. You have to keep yourself interested for a really long time when you’re writing a novel, so I think it feeling kind of beyond what you can do is frustrating, but it also makes you keep working on something for a long time. So I don’t know what the form will be yet. I haven’t written much during the pandemic. I have to be honest, I found it almost impossible to write. I’m just starting to have it come back a little bit.