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. But if she can’t save others, then what, or who, might save her?Īnd all the while the voices of the city keep floating in–funny, disturbing, and increasingly mad.Jenny Offill’s first novel, Last Things, was published in 1999. When her brother becomes a father and Sylvia a recluse, Lizzie is forced to acknowledge the limits of what she can do. Sylvia has become famous for her prescient podcast, Hell and High Water, and wants to hire Lizzie to answer the mail she receives: from left-wingers worried about climate change and right wingers worried about the decline of western civilization.Īs she dives into this polarized world, she begins to wonder what it means to keep tending your own garden once you’ve seen the flames beyond its walls. They have both stabilized for the moment, but then her old mentor, Sylvia Liller, makes a proposal.
For years, she has supported her God-haunted mother and her recovering addict brother. But this gives her a vantage point from which to practise her other calling: as an unofficial shrink.
Lizzie Benson slid into her job as a librarian without a traditional degree. ‘What are you afraid of, he asks me and the answer of course is dentistry, humiliation, scarcity, then he says what are your most useful skills? People think I’m funny’ SHORTLISTED FOR THE WOMEN’S PRIZE FOR FICTION 2020
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