About Jenny Offill: Jenny Offill is an American novelist.
Once when he was still young, I saw a bit of his scalp showing through his hair and I was afraid. But it was just a cowlick. Now sometimes it shows through for real, but I feel only tenderness.
My plan was to never get married. I was going to be an art monster instead. Women almost never become art monsters because art monsters only concern themselves with art, never mundane things. Nabokov didn't even fold his own umbrella. Vera licked his...
A few nights later, I secretly hope that I might be a genius. Why else can no amount of sleeping pills fell my brain? But in the morning my daughter asks me what a cloud is and I cannot say.
My daughter breaks both her wrists jumping off of a swing. Her friend, who is five, told her to jump off of it. I promise nothing will happen, she said. But why did she promise that? she wails later at the hospital.
A thought experiment courtesy of the Stoics. If you are tired of everything you possess, imagine that you have lost all these things.
It is easy in retrospect to see why he’d want to go. There are two women who are furious at him. To make one happy, he must take the subway across town and arrive on her doorstep. To make the other happy, he must wear for some infinitely long perio...
Is she a good baby? People would ask me. Well, no, I'd say. That swirl of hair on the back of her head. We must have taken a thousand pictures of it.
Always the danger for me in life and in art is not to be brave. I am not a naturally brave person. I have to will myself not to hole up in my house and read my life away.
Oh, I collect facts and quotes when I can't write, and I can't write most of the time. I do a little chance operation sometimes where I flip through outdated reference books to see if anything will strike me as beautiful or momentous. Library roulett...
I like to write from midnight to dawn with great stores of candy and Red Bull laid in... I'm not sure why I have the work habits of a 20-year-old coder, but no matter how many times I set up a more reasonable schedule, I always fall back to this.
I have a slightly contrarian streak as a writer, and one of the things I was interested in was how distilled could I make a life, and how I could cross what is kind of trivialized as a domestic novel with a novel of ideas, a philosophical novel.
I can be bolder on the page, as a character. I can gnash my teeth, I can scream and yell, in a way that I'm perhaps too timid to do in real life.
I felt like I could write about quiet, self-contained moments and also about those moments when the world rushes in again.
One of the odd things about being a writer is that you never reach a point of certainty, a point of mastery where you can say, 'Right. Now I understand how this is done.'
What I try to capture as a writer is the feeling of being alive, of being awake.
I had written a novel that was more of a classic linear novel, and I worked on it and worked on it for years, and it always seemed like it wouldn't catch fire. At a certain point I just scrapped it all, and I kept maybe 15 percent of it, and I wrote ...
I think part of what I like about being a fiction writer is that I can inhabit something that's beyond the limits of my own personality.
I think that when we're looking at things when we're right in the center of things, as opposed to being a bit unmoored from what's going on around us, we see things through a kind of dulling lens of convention, and there's something about extreme emo...
Here is what happens in middle age: Some friends and acquaintances who were merely eccentric for years become unmistakably mad.
Whenever the wife wants to do drugs, she thinks about Sartre. One bad trip and then a giant lobster followed him around for the rest of his days.
