I think it’s meant to address a way of being and a kind of decision about navigating one’s life,” she said. Wait till you get into the guts of the darkly comic novel set in the aftermath of a failed marriage. Pittard is in Bend to speak in Oregon State University-Cascades Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing program’s Distinguished Visiting Writer series. “She gets online, as I did in real life, and she discovers nothing about the book, which is what she’s looking for. Instead, she discovers a short story he’d published several years earlier, which I also discovered in real life, IRL,” Pittard said.