![]() When hearing the phrase “sleep like a baby” on the subway, the narrator wants to “to lie down next to her and scream for five hours in her ear.” A long italicized mashup of nursery rhymes, kid’s activities, and board games ends with the devastating line “ you be the thumble, mama, I’ll be the car.” The book is a relentless quest to unpack every trope and truism about motherhood and immediately junk the gift inside. If the moment is tender, then the shard will be tender-the newborn gives her mother “a stunned, shipwrecked look as if my body were the island she’d washed up on.” But “tender” is little more than a fancy word for near-raw. There is a fine line between sentiment and sentimentality, particularly when writing about parenthood, and by writing in short more-prose-than-poem shards across 46 chapters, Offill always halts before indulging in the latter. ![]() “To live in a city is to be forever flinching,” she says, and her flinching-in an apartment with a newborn daughter, a kind but adulterous husband, and a stalled writing project-is quite a performance, a constant wigglesome sort of in-fighting between those five roles. ![]() of Speculation is a brisk, biting 160-page novel that functions like a no-bull, “gloves-off” manual-in-notes for being 1) an artist 2) a wife 3) a mother 4) a woman, and 5) a human. The Conventionalist Speculation SpeculationĮnny Offill’s Dept. ![]()
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