Jenny Offill is the only child of two private-school English teachers.[3] She spent her childhood years in various American states, including Massachusetts, California, Indiana, and North Carolina,[3] where she attended high school and received a BA degree from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and later, at Stanford University, was a Stegner Fellow in Fiction.[4] After graduating, she worked a number of odd jobs: waitress, bartender, caterer, cashier, medical transcriber, fact-checker, and ghost-writer.[5]
"I went to UNC-Chapel Hill as an undergraduate and I studied with Doris Betts, Jill McCorkle and Robert Kirkpatrick among others. All three were great mentors to me as a young writer. Later, I got a Stegner Fellowship at Stanford. My big influence there was Gilbert Sorrentino..." —Jenny Offill, to Ellen Birkett Morris[6]
Career
Writing
Offill's first novel, Last Things, was published in 1999 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux and in the UK by Bloomsbury. It was a New York Times Notable book and a finalist for the L.A Times First Book Award. Offill's second novel, Dept. of Speculation, was published in January 2014[7][8][9] and was named one of the 10 Best Books of 2014 by the New York Times Book Review.[1]Dept. of Speculation has been shortlisted for the Folio Prize in the UK, the Pen/Faulkner Award and the L.A. Times Fiction Award. In 2016 Offill was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship.[10]
Her work has appeared in the Paris Review.[11] She is also the co-editor with Elissa Schappell of two anthologies of essays and the author of several children's books. Offill's short fiction has appeared in Electric Literature and Significant Objects.[6]
"I have always liked compressed and fragmentary forms. I trace it back to my mind being blown by John Berryman when I was nineteen." —Jenny Offill, about Dept. of Speculation[12]
Her third novel, Weather, was shortlisted for the 2020 Women's Prize for Fiction,[13] and in December 2020, Emily Temple of Literary Hub reported that the novel had made 13 lists of the best books of 2020.[14]
In 2008, Offill, 39, a writer and creative writing teacher at Brooklyn College and Columbia University, and her partner, David Hirme, 37, a Web director for Channel 13, a public television station, lived in Brooklyn with their child, Theo, 3.[19]
While You Were Napping, Random House Children's Books, 2014. ISBN9780375865725
As co-editor
Jenny Offill; Elissa Schappell (2005). The Friend Who Got Away: Twenty Women's True Life Tales of Friendships that Blew Up, Burned Out or Faded Away. Crown Publishing Group. ISBN978-0-307-41937-8.
^Roxane Gay (February 7, 2014). "Bridled Vows". The New York Times. ...Offill still makes it seem as if the wife's version of the marriage is story enough and, perhaps, the only story that matters. The book calls to mind another proverb, this one from Madagascar: Marriage is not a tight knot, but a slip knot.
^James Wood (March 31, 2014). "Mother Courage". The New Yorker. Retrieved September 18, 2014. 'Dept. of Speculation' is all the more powerful because, with its scattered insights and apparently piecemeal form, it at first appears slight. Its depth and intensity make a stealthy purchase on the reader.
