Run a Self-Guided Route: Office Girl by Joe Meno
Route created by Allison Yates, Read & Run Chicago founder and organizer
Joe Meno’s novel Office Girl tells the story of two twenty-somethings figuring out life and roaming around Ukrainian Village and Wicker Park in the February 1999.
Buy the Book | Run the Route | Listen to the playlist
Suggested use: After reading Office Girl, lace up your shoes and head to Wicker Park for a 3-mile run using the route linked above. The run starts at Wicker Park’s Polish Triangle (also known as shit fountain. You’ll see why.). Listen to Office Girl-themed playlist or simply listen to the sounds of the streets. Pull up this page during your run for suggested stops.
About Office Girl:
Content warning: Office Girl contains a brief mention of sexual assault.
Much like Naomi Hirahara’s Clark & Division, Joe Meno’s Office Girl (2012, Akashic Books) seems to be perfectly constructed for a Read & Run Chicago running route. Scenes throughout the story set in 1999–nostalgic, sometimes absurd–take place along an easy-to-follow map of the East Village/West Town/Wicker Park area, which at the cusp of the 21st century would have still been considered pre-gentrification. (Other writers like Megan Stielstra have written about it.)
Joe Meno, a Professor of English and Creative Writing department at Columbia College Chicago and the author of more than seven books, spent his twenties in this area, “mostly at music venues and cafes and record stores, many of which are mentioned in the book,” he said in an email interview. Jack and Odile, the two main characters, are artists in their early twenties who develop a fleeting but meaningful relationship after meeting while working at a call center for Muzak Situations, a place that sells waiting room music to dentists and insurance agents.
Meno told me that one of his goals with the book was to “document how the East Village and Wicker Park neighborhood felt at that time as a way to connect to the sense of upheaval and change the characters are experiencing and what they are pursuing with their projects.”
As Jack and Odile’s relationship progresses, they traverse Division, Augusta, and Chicago, discussing the downfalls of pop culture, their futures, and their art movement, the latest attempt in a quest for meaning. Ironically, Odile is fed up with Chicago and makes several mentions of its dullness and inability to satisfy her.
Jack, much more entranced with the city, challenges the reader to stop. Look. Listen. His obsession with capturing moments of time through his recorder puts pause on habitual to do lists. On this route, take inspiration from Jack. What do you see, what do you hear? What do you notice? We are hyper present to the exact moment in Jack’s life and in this neighborhood’s history.
“Maybe this is what all writers and artists attempt to do: capture a moment before everything changes all over again,” Meno told me. We, as runners, can embrace that captured moment and bring it back to life through movement and exploration.
To best align your Wicker Park experience with the story, I recommend venturing out on snowy, chilly day.
Get Interactive: Suggested Stops & What to Look For Along the Route
Here are a few things to notice or reflect upon to bring the book to life (one of Read & Run Chicago’s mottos) along the route. These brief stops showcase just some of the many scenes in the book.
START and END: Algren Fountain at Polonia Triangle
Polonia Triangle and Nelson Algren Fountain are the center of Chicago’s once thriving Polish community. The fountain attracts a mountain of pigeons, so those who are bird averse should be warned.
In the book, one of the tapes included in Jack’s box of FAVORITES is one from the intersection near Division and Ashland of a “woman singing “Look at the Silver Lining” to a fountain of warbling pigeons, their coos being what he assumes is the birds’ way of showing their appreciation.” (86)
Milwaukee Avenue
In pre-gentrification Wicker Park, the strip of Milkuakee you’ll run on–from Ashland to Damen–was once called “furniture row” and features dozens of low-cost furniture stores.
One of the other tapes in Jack’s collection–his “favorite tape ever, of all time..”–comes from the Milwaukee Avenue bus stop. It’s the “sound of a young woman in a purple coat talking softly to the young man beside her, and which goes exactly like this: “I ate plum today and thought of you.” (86)
At this point, if you’re listening to the playlist, press pause. Make sure you’re near a Milkwaukee bus stop. Take off your headphones and listen. What do you hear? Do you catch any pieces of a conversation? Does anything you hear make your smile?
Damen Blue Line El stop
Odile and her brother, while on their way to get him back to a greyhound en route to Minneapolis, from which her brother has escaped, have a race that ends at the turnstiles of the Blue Line station on Damen Avenue.
“And it’s snowing all around them and all of a sudden Odile remembers what it was like to be a kid, and to have played in the snow with her little brother, and for now other reason she turns and shoves Ike into a pile of it. And then she hops onto her bike and tries to pedal off.” (25)
Bonus addition to the run: Take the Blue Line all the way to the Greyound station downtime, just as Odile and her brother did.
At the corner of Damen and Augusta
This is where Odile decides to, while stopped at a red light, “add a pair of boobs to a poster,” something she’s been doing lately because she “hasn’t made anything good, anything really interesting of her own, in weeks.”
Diner at the corner of Damen and Chicago
Jack and Odile order pancakes at a corner diner on Damen and Chicago, a few blocks from Odile’s apartment. “Jack gets his with blueberries. Odile orders with chocolate chips. “The pancakes are huge and perfectly circular and come with tiny butter squares,” the book reads. (158)
Quick food stop: Though the diner Meno was envisioning from his years in the neighborhood closed in 2005 or 2006, you can still channel Jack and Odile by ordering pancakes from nearby West Town Bakery and Diner.
Chicago Avenue
Odile and Jack meet up at a party store on Chicago Avenue, where Odile buys 50 silver mylar balloons. They’ll plan to use these for their art movement.
Insider note: Meno says that while there actually was a party store on Chicago Avenue, this store no longer exists. Use your imagination!
Division and Ashland
Jack and Birdie decide to go to an Imaginary Building party, one in which everyone makes a building out of a cardboard box and wears it. At the party, Jack sees a girl he’s met before, “named Leigh G, not Leigh M,” and they leave together on bikes, riding through the snow towards her house off wood. As they ride, Jack stops at the intersection of Division and Ashland. Jack “holds the tape recorder up and hits play and records the sound of the snow drifting down and floating through the air somehow seems to grow louder, and after ten seconds Jack holds the tape under his chin and says, “Snow, at the corner of Division.”
Bonus: at the end of the run, keep running or ride a bike down Milwaukee Avenue until you get to Grand Avenue. As you ride, recall Jack’s bike trip (page 187) in which he rides “past the bombed-out-looking apartments that have somehow managed to avoid gentrification.” Keep riding until you get to Gene & Georgetti Steakhouse, an old school Chicago restaurant that Joe Meno often rode past while delivering flowers once upon a time for a shop in Old Town. Imagine it: “Polished wood and red vinyl chairs, with cloth napkins folded in little red tents everywhere.” (159)
Not interested in running? Bike the route, just like Jack and Odile did. In a Newcity Lit interview, Meno says he included so much biking in the book because, “In a purely aesthetic way, there’s something so lovely and youthful about a young woman on a bicycle that kind of sums up the way that I feel about my twenties. It was a small period and then it was over, so there was this real sense of brevity.”