Dear Reader,
It is truly a thrill to introduce you to my debut novel, Offseason. I wrote most of this book while living at the tip of Cape Cod, through the fall and winter and early spring, staring at the ocean, watching birds do bizarre things, feeling my brain getting turned inside out. Like Offseason’s narrator, I was 28 years old; and, like her, I had a great number of questions that felt pressing and intense and somewhat deranged, and that I could hardly begin to articulate. Writing this book involved feeling my way into those questions and finding that I ended up in many absurd places I hadn’t known I’d wanted to go. I hope reading the book feels a bit like that, too.
Offseason follows a PhD dropout who runs away from her life, starts a job teaching English literature at an all-girls boarding school in a remote coastal tourist town, and proceeds to drag everyone around her—students, townspeople, the possibly disgraced male teacher whose job she’s taken over—into a series of spiraling, deluded, and (in my opinion) pretty funny attempts to wrangle with the past. Erudite, trauma-obsessed, very attached to her inappropriate romantic fantasies about a young Stalin, she’s simultaneously unable to stop talking about every terrible thing that’s ever happened to her and totally unable to actually face any of them. Though you will have to read the book to decide whether you think that remains true.
Offseason is a book about many things, one of them being the fantasies we might have about articulating once and for all the stories of our lives—and how these fantasies get ruptured by the weird, mysterious, impossible-to-pin-down world around us. It’s also, I think, a book about what art and literature can do, and about love, and about the possibility that the future can be different from the past. And sometimes it is about Charles Dickens’s finest and most ambitious novel, Bleak House, which our narrator also can’t stop talking about. It’s a comedy, a tragedy, a campus novel, a Bildungsroman—the list could go on.
Writing Offseason, I was interested in what it would mean to write a book that was at the same time totally absurd and totally serious, totally funny and totally tragic, totally dark and totally light. I hope this novel takes you down strange, strange avenues. I hope it makes you laugh. And I hope it turns your brain inside out a little bit, too.
I am truly and deeply grateful to every person who reads this book. So thank you, dear reader, for being a reader of novels in general, and of mine in particular.
xoxo,
Avigayl Sharp
