Dept. of Speculation

Encourage readers to connect the book’s themes and characters with their personal experiences.

1. How did you respond to the revelation about the husband’s affair? How did his affair change your impressions of his and the narrator’s relationship and the novel’s commentaries on love and marriage?

2. Through the narrator’s struggle to maintain her sense of self, the novel explores questions of identity and purpose. How does the narrator’s quest for purpose relate to your own?

3. Discuss the significance of the narrator’s relationships with the philosopher and the sister. How do these relationships remind you of your own friendships?

4. Compare the narrator’s life in New York to her life in Pennsylvania. How do these settings impact her emotionally? What parallels do you notice between places you’ve lived and the narrator’s contrasting homes?

Examine the book’s relevance to societal issues, historical events, or cultural themes.

1. Dept. of Speculation explores the tension between the narrator’s individual identity and her identity as a mother. Discuss the social and cultural relevance of Offill’s representations of motherhood. How is her work in conversation with novels like Rachel Yoder’s Nightbitch and Elena Ferrante’s The Lost Daughter—novels that also centralize the conflict between maternity and creativity?

2. Explore how Offill’s representations of marriage relate to contemporary marriage traditions in the United States. Originally published in 2014, are the novel’s relationship presentations and commentaries still relevant today? Why or why not?

Dive into the book’s structure, characters, themes, and symbolism.

1. Stylistically, the novel is organized into a series of prose fragments. How does this unconventional structure relate to the narrator’s internal experience, the narrative mood, and the novel’s explorations of identity?

2. Discuss the development of the husband’s character. How does the narrator represent him at the novel’s start versus at the novel’s end? Which facets of his character are most and/or least believable, and why?

3. How do the narrator’s experiences in Brooklyn create a different narrative mood than her experiences in Pennsylvania? What do these settings imply about the impact of place on the human spirit?

4. Images and descriptions of birds recur throughout the novel. Discuss the symbolic significance of this motif. Cite specific examples from the text and consider how each bird reference differs from the next.