26 pages • 52 minutes read
Dept. of Speculation
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Chapters 1-10Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of pregnancy loss.
The narrator remembers stories from the start of her relationship with her husband and the prior era, toggling between the past and present tense. She remembers the first time she traveled on her own. She went to Paris, ate at restaurants, visited parks, and rode trains. She remembers the people from Canada, France, England, and Australia she met while there. She also recalls the rainy weather and all the sights she saw.
The narrator recalls a night she spent in her “old apartment in Brooklyn” (5). She felt panic being in this space but didn’t know how to alleviate it.
Chapter 2 Summary
When the narrator was living alone in Brooklyn, she worked as a fact checker for a science magazine. She didn’t like the work, but she loved where she lived. She had ideas of her own, too. She pinned inspirational quotations on her wall and planned to develop her artistic practice. She didn’t want to get married because she wanted to focus on her writing. She spent time with her friend the philosopher, partying and drinking. Around this time, her ex-boyfriend resurfaced in her life, visiting Brooklyn from San Francisco. They didn’t get back together but seeing him reminded the narrator of another ex-boyfriend from New Orleans. She can still remember the songs they’d listen to and the way it felt to love him and lose him.
Chapter 3 Summary
The narrator continues meditating on her past life. Whenever she felt frustrated with New York, her sister would encourage her to leave. The sister left New York for Pennsylvania with her husband and liked it better because she could hear birds. The place the narrator felt most peaceful in the city was the philosopher’s apartment. One night while she was over at his place, he suggested introducing her to his friend who made “soundscapes of the city” (12). The philosopher gave the narrator one of his friend’s CDs for her to take home. Listening to it alone later, the narrator wondered who the soundscape artist might be.
Chapter 4 Summary
The narrator recalls when she met and started dating the soundscape artist. She loved his soundscapes and began listening to his nightly radio program. They started seeing each other regularly and began traveling together, too. On one trip, they went to Capri. The narrator was overwhelmed by the beauty of the place and imagined living somewhere like it.
Chapter 5 Summary
The narrator recalls when she and the soundscape artist got engaged. They were visiting a museum and the artist dropped to one knee in the gems section. Afterward, they fell into bed together, kissed, and marveled at their engagement. Not long after, they got married. The narrator was shocked when her persistent cough (which she’d had since before they met) went away. They moved into the narrator’s apartment and started building a home together, but it was infested with mice.
Chapter 6 Summary
The narrator and her husband went to see a new apartment. There was a jungle gym in the back garden, which they liked because the narrator was pregnant. However, after they moved in, the narrator lost the pregnancy. The jungle gym made them sad. The day the narrator lost the pregnancy, the husband took an expensive cab across town and made her a dinner of everything she hadn’t been able to have while pregnant. To feel better, the narrator began feeding the sparrows outside her window, thinking of facts that she’d read about the birds.
Chapter 7 Summary
The narrator remembers getting pregnant again. She gave birth to a healthy baby girl. Immediately after the birth, the narrator spent most of her time at the apartment; she’d only leave to make Rite Aid errands. It was hard being home alone because the baby was colicky. The narrator soon developed tricks for calming her down; still, the narrator was tired and restless. She struggled to tell the husband how she spent her time. Her days felt endless and monotonous. Finally, the narrator bought a CD meant to calm colicky babies. She played it one night when their friend R came over. Bothered by the CD and the baby’s crying, R soon left and stopped talking to them shortly thereafter.
Chapter 8 Summary
The narrator remembers when she discovered the baby was calm at Rite Aid. She began visiting the pharmacy every day. She wandered the aisles, bored and dazed. While she did so, the narrator fielded strangers’ questions about the baby, instructions for how to care for her, and comments about motherhood. Then one day, the narrator’s friend flew across the country to see her. The narrator got a babysitter, and the friends went out for a drink. They talked about how things changed after giving birth, philosophizing about motherhood.
Chapter 9 Summary
The narrator reflects on her personality versus her husband’s. When the baby was little, she began to feel like a bad person in comparison to him. While he was kind and generous, the narrator was critical and irritable. She wondered why he wanted to be with her.
One day, the narrator was talking to her sister on the phone when the baby choked. The sister talked her through removing the object from the baby’s throat. In the days following, the narrator became anxious, suddenly on the lookout for danger. Some days were better. The narrator remembers when the baby began playing with the hose, laughing. She recalls a photo of her mother looking at her as a baby; it reminds her of how she felt about her daughter.
The husband got a new job scoring commercials. He didn’t like the work, but it paid well. Meanwhile, the baby grew up. She became more adventurous, which frightened the narrator. The sister often reminded her that she only had to keep her daughter alive until she was 18.
Chapter 10 Summary
The narrator remembers when a group of punk kids moved into the unit above her family’s apartment. The narrator was fascinated by them and they by her, but she wanted to assure them there was nothing punk rock about her life. Meanwhile, people started encouraging the narrator to do yoga. The narrator was skeptical. Other times, people interrogated her about her second novel. (She taught writing at the university and has only published one book so far.) Then one day, an old boss put her in touch with an astronaut who needed a ghostwriter for his book on outer space. The narrator accepted the project because she needed the money. Meanwhile, she began asking herself what she wanted but struggled to answer the question.
Chapters 1-10 Analysis
Chapters 1-10 introduce the primary conflicts, stakes, and themes of Dept. of Speculation via the unnamed protagonist’s first-person point of view. At the start of the novel, the narrator remembers when she was living alone in Brooklyn, New York, and trying to establish her life as a single woman and an aspiring writer. In the narrative present, she is reflecting on this past era of her life and trying to reconcile it with her current life as a wife and mother. Her first-person perspective grants access to her interiority and affects a vulnerable, questioning, and confessional tone. These formal aspects establish the novel’s themes of Fragmentation of Identity in Marriage and the Conflict Between Motherhood and Personal Aspirations by juxtaposing her memories with her current status as wife and mother. Before marrying her husband and giving birth to her daughter, the narrator “had ideas about [her]self” (7). She swore she wouldn’t get married because she planned “to be an art monster instead” (8). However, these personal aspirations soon conflict with her love for her husband and her child. Marrying and giving birth shatters the narrator’s sense of self and complicates how she sees her future as an autonomous individual. Offill uses a fragmented narrative structure that parallels the depth of the destruction of her identity. The text is divided into a series of disjointed prose parcels, few of which abide by a chronological timeline. This form mirrors how the narrator feels in her life: She loves her husband and child, but her domestic lifestyle distances her from her artistic aspirations. Offill emphasizes that although the narrator’s love for her husband and daughter is real and intense, she has still sacrificed pieces of her identity to assume this new one. Through these formal elements, she captures how a woman is socioculturally compelled to give up her dreams after she marries and has children.
The narrator maintains an imaginative way of seeing the world despite her internal conflicts; her use of figurative language, symbolism, and vivid imagery conveys her distinct way of seeing. In particular, the narrator’s inventive sentence structures, her use of parataxis, and her detailed descriptions throughout Chapters 1-10 illustrate her skills and sensibility as a writer, someone who understands how to use form to convey meaning, and subtextually convey her identity as an artist. For example, the way the narrator discusses birds illustrates both her psychological state in her marriage and in Brooklyn, as well as her creative way of seeing the world:
There is a man who travels around the world trying to find places where you can stand still and hear no human sound. It is impossible to feel calm in cities, he believes, because we so rarely hear birdsong there. Our ears evolved to be our warning systems. We are on high alert in places where no birds sing. To live in a city is to be forever flinching (11).
Images of and references to birds recur throughout the opening chapters, conveying notions of entrapment and freedom. This imagery also reiterates the narrator’s imagination and implies that she hasn’t lost her artistic identity despite her isolation and confusion—particularly after getting married and having a child. The narrative shows that she is still seeing the world with an artist’s eye and is actively seeking a way to reignite her practice and reclaim her sense of self.
Chapters 1 through 10 also establish a conflict between the narrator’s past and present lives, which reiterates the conflict she feels between who she was before marriage and motherhood and who she has become now. At the novel’s start, the narrator begins a practice of remembering. Although she believes “[m]emories are microscopic,” she also holds that they “swarm together and apart” like particles in outer space (3). This metaphor evokes notions of separation and cohesion; it both clarifies the narrative structure—each fragment is a new memory that stands alone but also interacts with the surrounding fragmented memories—and enacts the narrator’s work to reconcile with past and present iterations of self. She is trying to collect her memories as a way to reconstruct a version of herself she recognizes. Her ongoing act of remembrance becomes particularly urgent in the wake of her daughter’s birth—an event that pulls her away from her previous social and artistic circles and estranges her from reality. To make sense of the isolating facets of motherhood in the present, she becomes more attached to her recollections of the past. In addition, the juxtaposition of these two eras of the narrator’s life grounds the narrative in her sense of change and loss, which will fundamentally motivate her Search for Meaning in Everyday Life.
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