“Put a hat on that baby,” said every old biddy that passed me. Not unlike Offill’s character, in my decades ago, pregnant, pre-parent self, I remember harboring a pristine vision of myself with a happy cooing infant by my side - and the reality, many months later, crouched behind a wooden baby gate and sobbing over a cup of tea while my son shrieked at me, his tiny hands wrapped around the wooden bars like some incarcerated victim of my inadequacy. It’s that annoying rift between what we want, or thought we would have, what we ended up with, and how we made peace with that (or didn’t).
It’s a simple premise, elegantly conveyed with Offill’s spartan prose life is full of twists, bumps, disappointments and personal tragedies, often with only a modest helping of joy on the side. She opens the story with a chronicle of her early adult years, including marriage and the birth of her daughter, giving the reader a rare window into the character’s insecurity and hesitance. Offill’s main character is wickedly funny and poignantly vulnerable woman. Not the lives our pre-adult selves imagined having, but the emotional grist that most of us actually end up with. Of Speculation is a perfect, condensed (as in nothing spare or superfluous – every word is knife point) chronicle of lives lived with full-on, unapologetic drama and baggage.
After sobbing into the arms of a friend, I opted for the dramatic exit and a long walk home, during which I realized I have become that woman every guy is talking about when he stipulates… “no drama, no baggage,”… I had just perpetrated both – in spades. Then the mysterious and heartbreaking retreat into phone and internet silence, followed by both of us turning up at posh hotel dance event, but not with each other.Ĭonfronting failure is not something I do particularly well, but never had I attained less-than-well so publically. There had been a few weeks of daily emails, four Latin dance classes, a bit of flirtation, a few lies, some mixed signals, and one particularly passionate kiss. It was the culminate event of yet another bungled, fifty-something, this should be easier than it is, relationship. Both when he loved me and when he didn’t.Ī couple weeks ago, I experienced an epic social fail. He made me sing along to all the bad songs on the radio. If you had to sum up what he did to me, I’d say it was this.
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