Name: Jeselnik Book Club: "Dept. of Speculation" Book Review + Q&A
Uploaded: 2026-04-30T15:00:54.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Jeselnik Book Club: "Dept. of Speculation" Book Review + Q&A' from Anthony Jeselnik on Comedy Buff. Published 2026-04-30. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Jeselnik Book Club: "Dept. of Speculation" Book Review + Q&A' from Anthony Jeselnik on Comedy Buff. Published 2026-04-30. Transcript available.

Jeselnik Book Club: "Dept. of Speculation" Book Review + Q&A

If you're married, I think you read this and you're like,
oh my God, this could be me.
If you're divorced, you're like, this was me.
If you never got married, if you're like me,
you're like, oh, this is what it would be like
to go through this.
I'm glad I did not do that.
Hey, everybody, welcome to Jessalynic Book Club's
April recap of Jenny O'Fill's Department of Speculation.
I love this book.
This is one of my favorite books.
I hope you guys enjoyed it.
I hope you felt a sense of accomplishment
when you finished it.
One of my favorite things about this book
is her writing style.
I've read all of Jenny O'Fill's books.
They're all written like this, where she breaks it up.
It's not a stream of consciousness.
It's like skipping a rock across a stream of consciousness
where you get these little paragraphs,
you get little breaks, you fly through this thing.
It's definitely one sitter just because it's so quick
and easy to read.
Some people like to get lost in a story.
I enjoy getting lost in the story,
but I love this writing style of just giving little bits
and pieces and moments that tell a story.
Now, when I sold this book to you guys
at the beginning of the month,
I was like, it's a story about a woman going through a divorce.
I think more after I've read it again,
it's a story about a woman going through life
and trying to come to terms with her life.
It starts out, she's a young woman.
It's written in the first person.
She's talking about herself, and there are no names.
Only, it's like wife, husband, the philosopher,
an ex-boyfriend.
There's one woman named Leah,
who's the only character named in the entire novel
who's a student of hers who tries to commit suicide.
I think she's named only because that is a powerful thing
to give this broken woman a name in the narrative.
There is a narrative switch halfway through the book,
or just over halfway through the book.
When the main character goes from I to the wife,
her husband becomes the husband in the narrative.
But the book starts out with her talking about her life,
wanting to become an art monster,
never thinking about having kids, settling down.
She has friends like the philosopher
who share her hopes and dreams,
and they have fun discussions.
They stay up all night in New York City
and talk about art and ideas
and what their future is going to bring.
She talks about former loves of hers.
She talks about the boy she loved the best,
who was just a drunk in New Orleans who didn't love her.
And she talks about leaving him
and crying the whole drive home,
or wherever the hell she was going after that.
She eventually ends up meeting this guy
who becomes the husband through the philosopher in Brooklyn.
They seem more like best friends than potential lovers.
But he introduces them and he does cityscapes,
or city soundscapes,
where he records sounds in the city
and then plays them on the radio.
And she kind of falls in love with him through that.
She's like, this is interesting.
They start going on dates.
They fall in love.
They move in together.
Eventually, he proposes and she gets married to him.
And she even talks about how her life changes
after she gets married, for the positive,
where she has a chronic cough her entire life
that she has seen doctors for,
and they cannot find a cure.
They cannot find a reason for this.
But eventually, as soon as she gets married,
the next day the cough is gone.
It's over.
She still wants to be an art monster, I believe.
And an art monster is someone
who doesn't care about anything except for art.
They don't care about money.
They don't care about having kids.
They don't care about family or friends
unless those friends or family
can help them pursue their art.
I, myself, like to think of myself as an art monster.
I don't really care that much about money.
I like having it, but I don't do things for money.
I enjoy just trying to put out as many jokes as I can,
put out as much art as I can.
I have not had children.
My relationships don't last very long.
I would sacrifice anything I have to make more art.
I'm not saying that's a good thing to do.
I know a lot of art monsters who are miserable
because they became art monsters.
I know people who decided not to be an art monster
and have kids and a family and are just as miserable.
And the good news is you can always switch.
You can always go from being an art monster
to being a family person.
Or trying to enjoy your life a little more relaxing.
As an art monster, you really can't take your foot off the gas.
You don't really have vacations.
You were just thinking about art all the time.
An art monster is an interesting term.
It's not an aspirational goal.
It's not something that you should even want to do.
It's just something you kind of end up having to do
or end up becoming.
She goes from being an art monster to being a wife.
She's still working.
She writes a book during this, a novel,
that is barely mentioned.
It's only mentioned in terms of people asking her,
when's the next book coming?
And she tells them she hasn't written it yet.
They never get into the details of the first book.
There are people who ask if this is autofiction,
meaning is the author talking about her own life?
Did she have, she's married, she has a kid.
Is this something that happened to her?
Did her husband have an affair and she got through it?
I don't give a shit.
I don't care if it's autofiction or not.
I read it as if it was purely fiction.
Unless they tell you in the introduction,
this happened to me.
And even then, I still read these as fictional characters.
And by not naming any of the characters,
I believe it's easier to see yourself in this book.
Even though the main character is a woman who has a kid,
I read it as if it's happening to me.
One of the things I love most about books
is you're walking a mile in someone's shoes.
I think we talked last week about the difference
between film and books and TV.
I think reading is a superior art form
because it's in your mind.
You actually are walking a mile in their shoes.
You could have watched a movie about this same story
and you're just watching the movie.
Maybe you relate to the main character
because she's the main character.
But when you're reading about her,
especially when she does not have a name,
you are this woman,
no matter who you are reading the book.
And I love that about books, especially this one.
So I love when people aren't named.
And I think she did a great job of not confusing people.
Sometimes they go, wait, who's she talking to?
You always know she's talking to her sister.
She's talking to her husband.
She's talking to her child or about her child.
That was not confusing for me.
I loved the book.
She gets married.
They have a miscarriage.
They really want to have a baby.
They get excited.
They buy an apartment.
And there's a jungle gym in the backyard.
They're like, okay, we don't need this.
But then she gets pregnant.
They're happy.
And then she has the miscarriage.
And there's a beautiful section where she says, we told everyone, we told all
our friends we're having a baby.
Now we had to untell them, which I think was something that a lot of people can
relate to.
And it was just a beautiful way of putting it.
Eventually she gets pregnant again.
And she has a daughter.
And then her life completely changes where she stops thinking about art.
She stops being an art monster.
And she'll sometimes look back and think, oh, I gave up my art monster dreams
to be a mom.
But she is obsessed with being a mom.
She loves it, even though her baby is at one point described as at war with the
world.
It is a colicky baby.
I don't know what the fuck colicky means, but it means they're just screaming a
lot.
It's we need to talk about Kevin territory where the baby's always screaming.
She's trying to find ways all day long.
While the husband works, he gets an office job.
He stops just doing soundscapes for the radio and gets a job in advertising
that he does not love.
But he's making a lot of money.
She's taking care of the baby all day.
She's finding ways to get him to stop crying or her to stop crying.
She is racing through the streets of Brooklyn in a carriage.
The baby likes that.
She finally finds out that the baby likes Rite Aid.
She spends hours in Rite Aid every day just to silence the screaming in her
head.
It's driving her crazy, but it's like having a new puppy.
She hasn't gotten the puppy blues yet when she's sick of the puppy.
She's obsessed with this daughter and just wants everything to be good.
She loses friends.
There's a sense of isolation.
A friend comes over to visit, just referred to as R, and they're playing a
heartbeat over the radio to try to get the baby to calm down.
They heard that would help with the baby.
It doesn't.
But the guy comes over, makes a shitty comment about the heartbeat, says the
baby sounds difficult, and then they're like, we never saw him again.
Like, we were not friends with him anymore.
We disliked him.
The baby starts to grow up, becomes more normal.
And I mean, colicky is not abnormal, but they stop screaming and crying all the
time.
The baby starts speaking.
The baby is fun.
Both husband and wife are obsessed with this baby and doing things with the
baby.
They have babysitters.
I was like, there's a quote where they have this gorgeous Italian babysitter
who says she broke up with her boyfriend.
And they're like, why?
The boyfriend was this, like, devoted musician.
He was devoted to you.
And she says, and I quote, because he cries like a clown.
And I love that.
Like, they're trying, they're living this very isolated life with the baby, but
they're still kind of interested in the Brooklyn of it all, the things that
surround them.
The mom is just, is just talking about what she's given up.
She runs into an old friend who asks how the second book is coming.
She says, it's not.
He says, what happened?
And she's like, she's like, did something happen?
And she says, yes.
And doesn't even get into the baby of it all.
Has just kind of given up her dreams of writing anything.
She stops writing to take care of this kid full time.
Meanwhile, the husband's working.
Life is happening to them.
They live in this apartment.
He gets a piano.
He loves to play the piano.
So they get this piano for him.
It's a very like, you can do this while we're taking care of the baby.
Something for you.
She has nothing for her.
She's not like writing on the side.
She doesn't have a drum kit to practice on.
The piano is for the husband.
They get lice.
They call it lice.
I like to think of it as bed bugs.
I lived in New York when I got bed bugs.
And it sounded like fucking bed bugs to me.
And it's the kind of thing you can't tell people.
They judge you.
You can't go out because you don't want to give anyone else bed bugs.
They're putting their clothes in the oven.
They're keeping everything in bags.
They're washing stuff nonstop.
The lice get in the piano.
They're combing the daughter's hair.
She's watching videos about a mom standing over her child's bed at night with a
lint roller.
Terrifying things that anyone who has had bed bugs or I assume lice can relate
to.
But it just seems awful.
It's like you're tired.
You're not getting enough sleep.
And you just want a break.
And they are not getting this break.
Someone in the book uses the term sleep like a baby.
And she just wanted to curl up and scream into her ear for three hours.
So they're kind of like fraying a little bit.
But in a very normal way.
They move into a new apartment.
Things seem okay.
About halfway through the book, they go to a coffee shop.
And this chapter, like the book starts to change at this point.
I believe it is chapter 22.
Before I get into that even.
She takes a job.
While he's working, she takes a job to make more money.
Working for an almost astronaut, she calls him.
Who is a guy who almost went into space.
Went through the space program.
Has a ton of money that he made inventing and selling bug zappers.
And he wants