Offseason by Avigayl Sharp
Avigayl Sharp explores the bleakly comic millennial urge to self-diagnose in this wickedly abrasive debut novel
In Avigayl Sharp’s debut novel, an unnamed narrator embarks on a self-imposed exile to an all-girls boarding school to reckon with her traumatic past.
Offseason delves into the trickle-down effect of intergenerational trauma on the American Jewish diaspora and the millennial propensity to both self-diagnose and medicate. Aptly named for its exploration of both suspended time and location, Offseason captures the stagnation and confusion of one’s late twenties in excruciating detail. Sharp’s twenty-eight-year-old protagonist glances up and down at the students in her care and at her parents' generation with the confusion and insecurity of one who sits in neither camp. “I did not want to write about New York,” Sharp says when reflecting on her novel. “I wanted to write about a surreal, nonexistent place.”
Heavily influenced by Jewish tragicomedy, Sharp’s writing delves into uncomfortable bodily observations and intrusive thoughts as her narrator creates a vivid and unreliable version of her own reality, all while sifting through familial and personal trauma. In doing so, Sharp’s narrator falls headfirst into the literary ditch of unlikable female protagonists: her morbid fascination with sexual assault, Bleak House by Charles Dickens and inappropriate passion for Stalin is delivered through the vector of abrasive and at times, performative humour. Sharp’s narrator will talk to anyone who will listen, agonising over her family dynamics and the fraught relationship with a mother submerged in layers of an unhealed past, labouring the line between both victim and aggressor.
