My body was either on high alert or utterly exhausted.

My purpose became quite simply to keep her alive. I couldn’t think in any sustained way anymore my mind flitted from thing to thing, and the novel I’d been writing for years no longer made much sense to me. The startling, terrifying (and sometimes exhilarating) thing about becoming a mother was that that vanished almost immediately. How did the book begin, and at what point did you know this would be the subject of a novel? I’ve always been someone who lives very much in my head. It’s not just a matter of finding time or changing up one’s writing processes, but a much more complex identity shift-the biological and animal running up against the intellectual. The book is one of the more honest I’ve read about the experience of parenthood for a writer, and how strange and obliterating the arrival of a child can be. Via e-mail, we discussed with Offill the tyranny of smug mommy narratives and how the very thing that kept her from her art came to be the subject of it. Told in a series of crackling, ironically juxtaposed vignettes-Offill touches on everything from the spiritual defeatism of yoga pants to doomed Russian cosmonauts and Keats-the novel captures love’s lonelier, less telegenic moments, none more heartrending than the narrator’s discovery of her husband’s affair. of Speculation (Knopf), an unflinching portrait of modern motherhood and its effect on one Brooklyn writer’s inner life.

“Some women make it look so easy, the way they cast ambition off like an expensive coat that no longer fits,” says the narrator of **Jenny Offill’**s slim marvel of a second novel, Dept.

Dept of speculation by jenny offill