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| Jenny Offill |
Interview
Jenny Offill: 'I don't miss the world as much as, perhaps, I should'
The US novelist on getting through the pandemic, Trump’s legacy of fear, and why a slow apocalypse could be the threat we didn’t see coming
Saturday 9 January 2021
Jenny Offill’s first novel, Last Things, was published in 1999. 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. 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. Weather, her third novel, was published in February 2020 and shortlisted for the Women’s prize for fiction. It is about the climate crisis, Trump, and the state of the US. Offill lives in upstate New York with her husband and daughter, and teaches at Bard College. She was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship in 2016.
Weather continues the fragmentary style of your previous novel. How much do you think about the effect this has on the reader’s experience of the book?
I think about it a lot. I really want the writing act to be collaborative with the reader. 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. 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 feel like the white space in my writing is for the reader to bring their own thoughts and ideas to the book. I know what would go in between if I were to write it, it’s not a mystery to me. I’m not trying to withhold exactly, but rather to distil. Asking myself how much is essential and how much is the part that you plod through to get to the interesting bits.
Are you more optimistic now that Trump is on his way out?
I feel like enormous damage has been done in four years. Obviously not so much to people like me, who are in a pretty privileged position, but to all of those people who were in the crosshairs of the administration – and that was huge groups of Americans. I teach in college and I see through my students the incredible effect it has had on them, and how anxious and fearful they are. We were not even sure if we could stay if he was re-elected. It was so dark. So I feel more hopeful now, even though it’s not so exciting to have a white president in his late 70s. He’s not a lunatic, though, and he cares that 200,000 people have died in the US [from Covid-19].
When it comes to the climate crisis specifically, it feels like the book is angry, but also hopeful…
I came across this idea that I didn’t end up putting in the novel but which I thought was really interesting. It’s by a Romanian author of comparative religion called Mircea Eliade: he said that he’d studied creation and destruction myths all over the world and he’d never found one about a slow apocalypse. It tends all to go up in flames in a moment. I wanted to look at what it was like to live in a pre-apocalyptic moment. You have real existential threats that will impact you, your kids, your neighbours, but you also have everyday life – you’re not just running around picking up tin cans and dodging cannibals like in most apocalyptic novels. You still have to take your kids to school, you still have to avoid that neighbour you can’t stand, there are still money worries.
How did you spend lockdown?
Pretty locked down. My parents not so long ago moved here from North Carolina. Because they’re older and have health conditions, in order to be able to convince them to stay inside we tried to do as much of the shopping and so on for them. In the summer we went out a little more, but I still haven’t been in any of my friends’ houses. We kind of lived outside, but then, in the fall, I got a new job and I had to teach in person. We were all masked and a few of us nervous nellies insisted on teaching in tents. The pandemic has been through all these different stages and you’re constantly moving between boredom and terror. We recently converted our dining table to a ping-pong table and I felt that was the final stage of getting through the winter. I know a few writers – mainly single ones – who have got a lot of work done because no one is bothering them. I’m not one of them. For me, it has been much more about taking care of people. I don’t miss the world as much as, perhaps, I should.
What books are on your bedside table?
Let me take a look. I have a book called Where Europe Begins by Yoko Tawada. I have a book called How to Do Nothing by Jenny Odell, whose name is disturbingly similar to my own. I also got it in my head that I might try to write short stories so I have a collection called The Art of the Story.
Which living writers do you most admire?
I love Rachel Cusk, Claudia Rankine. I just read a book that I thought was interesting by a younger writer, Raven Leilani. They marketed her book so badly – it’s much more interesting than they made it look. I thought her prose was wonderful. I was judging a prize for first books and that one really leapt out.
How do you arrange your books on your shelves?
Completely randomly. They just have to fit. I have different sizes of shelf. There’s no order to it and I often spend a ridiculous amount of time, especially when I’m teaching, looking for a book I know I have. My daughter and her friend one weekend arranged one of my bookshelves by colour. I was slightly aghast. I associate that with people’s houses where they don’t read. It didn’t take me long to ruin it
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