The Guest Lecture

The Guest Lecture takes place across one wakeful night as Abby, an economics professor who has just been denied tenure, lies in a hotel bed beside her sleeping family and rehearses the talk on John Maynard Keynes she is meant to deliver the next day. To keep the lecture straight she uses the ancient "memory palace" method, assigning each part of the speech to a room in her house and touring them in her mind. Keynes appears as an imagined guide who walks the rooms with her, fielding her tangents about money, failure, marriage, optimism, and the future her daughter will inherit. The novel unfolds entirely as interior monologue, turning a single anxious night of thinking into its own structure.