She also has a lot in common with Joan Didion’s heroines: She is prone to anxiety, dread and the feeling that “a car alarm was perpetually going off in my head.” Offill’s unnamed heroine - who sometimes addresses the reader in the first person, and sometimes is referred to as “the wife” - has a lot in common with the narrators of “Speedboat” and “Sleepness Nights”: She is observant and literary minded, given to seeing the odd connections (or lack of connections) among the things that make up her day-to-day life and the more subterranean thoughts that jitter around in her head. of Speculation,” owes a huge debt to these two pioneering novels, and to their classic precursor, “The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge,” Rilke’s 1910 novel, which was structured as a kind of journal. Elizabeth Hardwick’s “ Sleepless Nights,” whose narrator bore more than a passing resemblance to the author, mapped the contours of her life by putting memories, aphorisms and observations on shuffle. Renata Adler’s “ Speedboat,” narrated by a woman who worked at a tabloid newspaper, jump-cut among vignettes from her life to capture the incongruities of her experience and the larger incongruities of American life in the ’60s and ’70s. Two innovative books published in the 1970s used fragmentation and discontinuity to create kaleidoscopic portraits of their heroines’ lives.

Dept of speculation