I feel like enormous damage has been done in four years. Asking myself how much is essential and how much is the part that you plod through to get to the interesting bits.Īre you more optimistic now that Trump is on his way out? I’m not trying to withhold exactly, but rather to distil. I know what would go in between if I were to write it, it’s not a mystery to me. I feel like the white space in my writing is for the reader to bring their own thoughts and ideas to the book. For me, so much of the joy that comes from reading a good book is the conversation you’re having in your head with the author. I often feel, when I’m reading a lot of contemporary novels, like so much is filled in and spelled out, so much backstory is put in. I really want the writing act to be collaborative with the reader. How much do you think about the effect this has on the reader’s experience of the book?

Weather continues the fragmentary style of your previous novel. She was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship in 2016. Offill lives in upstate New York with her husband and daughter, and teaches at Bard College.

It is about the climate crisis, Trump, and the state of the US. Weather, her third novel, was published in February 2020 and shortlisted for the Women’s prize for fiction. The wait was worth it, though: her second novel, Dept of Speculation, was widely heralded for its innovative use of brief, impressionistic paragraphs and a luminous stream-of-consciousness first-person voice. It took a decade and a half for her next to appear – Offill suffers from depression and was unable to write for much of this period. Jenny Offill’s first novel, Last Things, was published in 1999.

Dept of speculation by jenny offill