Dept. of Speculation

Gather initial thoughts and broad opinions about the book.

1. What were your overall impressions of Dept. of Speculation? Discuss your favorite and least favorite aspects of the narrative, and why.

2. How did your experience reading Dept. of Speculation compare with your experience reading Offill’s novels Last Things and Weather? What narrative, formal, and thematic crossovers do you notice between the three titles?

3. What other works of literary fiction does Dept. of Speculation remind you of? Discuss parallels between Offill’s novel and titles like Sheila Heti’s How Should a Person Be or R. O. Kwon’s The Incendiaries.

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