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Girl Imagined by Chance
Girl Imagined by Chance is a critifictional novel about a couple who find themselves having created a make-believe daughter (and soon a make-believe life to accompany her) in order to appease their friends, family, and the culture of reproduction. Structured around twelve photographs from a single roll of film, the book explores the nature of photography and the questions that nature raises about the notions of the simulated and the real, the media-ization of consciousness, originality, self construction, and the way we all continually fashion our faces into masks for the next shot. At its heart, Girl Imagined by Chance investigates the mystery of self-knowledge. The prevailing metaphor and structural device of photography examines the way images, in their magical ability to mimic memory, ultimately mock and eradicate it. The seemingly stable and fixed individual past turns out to be as protean and unknowable as the future. The body becomes strangely dispensable, perpetually adrift in a cybernetic world of hyperlinks and interfaces.
- GenresFictionLiterary Fiction
328 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2002
About the author
Lance Olsen
57 books118 followersLance Olsen was born in 1956 and received his B.A. from the University of Wisconsin (1978, honors), his M.F.A. from the Iowa Writers Workshop (1980), and his M.A. (1982) and Ph.D. (1985) from the University of Virginia.
He is author of eleven novels, one hypertext, four critical studies, four short-story collections, a poetry chapbook, and a textbook about fiction writing, as well as editor of two collections of essays about innovative contemporary fiction. His short stories, essays, poems, and reviews have appeared in hundreds of journals, magazines, and anthologies, including Conjunctions, Black Warrior Review, Fiction International, Iowa Review, Hotel Amerika, Village Voice, Time Out New York, BOMB, Gulf Coast, McSweeney's, and Best American Non-Required Reading.
Olsen is an N.E.A. fellowship and Pushcart prize recipient, and former governor-appointed Idaho Writer-in-Residence. His novel Tonguing the Zeitgeist was a finalist for the Philip K. Dick Award. His work has been translated into Italian, Polish, Turkish, Finnish, and Portuguese. He has taught at the University of Idaho, the University of Kentucky, the University of Iowa, the University of Virginia, on summer- and semester-abroad programs in Oxford and London, on a Fulbright in Finland, at various writing conferences, and elsewhere.
Olsen currently teaches experimental narrative theory and practice at the University of Utah. He serves as Chair of the Board of Directors at Fiction Collective Two; founded in 1974, FC2 is one of America's best-known ongoing literary experiments and progressive art communities.
He is Fiction Editor at Western Humanities Review. With his wife, assemblage-artist and filmmaker Andi Olsen, he divides his time between Salt Lake City and the mountains of central Idaho.
He is author of eleven novels, one hypertext, four critical studies, four short-story collections, a poetry chapbook, and a textbook about fiction writing, as well as editor of two collections of essays about innovative contemporary fiction. His short stories, essays, poems, and reviews have appeared in hundreds of journals, magazines, and anthologies, including Conjunctions, Black Warrior Review, Fiction International, Iowa Review, Hotel Amerika, Village Voice, Time Out New York, BOMB, Gulf Coast, McSweeney's, and Best American Non-Required Reading.
Olsen is an N.E.A. fellowship and Pushcart prize recipient, and former governor-appointed Idaho Writer-in-Residence. His novel Tonguing the Zeitgeist was a finalist for the Philip K. Dick Award. His work has been translated into Italian, Polish, Turkish, Finnish, and Portuguese. He has taught at the University of Idaho, the University of Kentucky, the University of Iowa, the University of Virginia, on summer- and semester-abroad programs in Oxford and London, on a Fulbright in Finland, at various writing conferences, and elsewhere.
Olsen currently teaches experimental narrative theory and practice at the University of Utah. He serves as Chair of the Board of Directors at Fiction Collective Two; founded in 1974, FC2 is one of America's best-known ongoing literary experiments and progressive art communities.
He is Fiction Editor at Western Humanities Review. With his wife, assemblage-artist and filmmaker Andi Olsen, he divides his time between Salt Lake City and the mountains of central Idaho.
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Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews
August 1, 2022
Girl Imagined by Chance is like a series of photographs… Reading the book feels like flicking through some bizarre family album…
A childless couple… They often move from place to place… They travel a lot… Children are the onus…
They settle down in the secluded place… They are lonely… They wish they had a child… They start pretending that she is pregnant… They imagine that she gave birth to a girl Genia…
Everything seems to go as if they were characters in the Russian folk tale Little Snow Girl:
“Once upon a time there was an old man and his wife, who had no children, no grandchildren at all. One feast day they went outside and watched other people’s children making snowmen and throwing snowballs at one another. The old man picked up a snowball and said to his wife:
‘If only you and I had a little daughter as white and chubby as this, wife!’
The old woman looked at the snowball, shook her head and said: ‘Well, we haven’t and there’s no getting one now, so there!’ But the old man took the snowball into the cottage, lay it in a pot, covered it with a piece of cloth and placed it on the window-sill. When the sun rose, it warmed the pot and the snow inside began to melt. Suddenly the old couple heard a lisping sound in the pot under the piece of cloth. They ran up to take a look, and there in the pot lay a little girl, as white and chubby as a snowball.
‘I am Little Snow Girl, rolled from the snow of spring, warmed and browned by the sun of spring,’ she said to them.”
They become captives of their own fantasies and lies…
Self-deception is the highest degree of hypocrisy.
Examine the photograph as closely as you like, only you will not be able to locate the child in it.
You will not be able to locate anything that will become important.
The couple’s move from the northeast to the northwest, say.
The log cabin and fifteen acres of lodgepole pine just outside the viewfinder that brought them here with the perhaps not completely unpredictable promise of a wired-down life.
A slightly more wired-down life.
Your parents’ long brawl with cancer that wrecked your father’s lungs sixteen years ago, your mother’s breasts five.
A childless couple… They often move from place to place… They travel a lot… Children are the onus…
On occasion Andi wondered aloud what was wrong with her, biologically speaking, because she did not respond to children, did not long for them, found them nine times out of ten unpleasant ectoplasmic correlatives to black holes, absorbing the light from everything that had the misfortune to fall into their gravitational fields.
They settle down in the secluded place… They are lonely… They wish they had a child… They start pretending that she is pregnant… They imagine that she gave birth to a girl Genia…
Everything seems to go as if they were characters in the Russian folk tale Little Snow Girl:
“Once upon a time there was an old man and his wife, who had no children, no grandchildren at all. One feast day they went outside and watched other people’s children making snowmen and throwing snowballs at one another. The old man picked up a snowball and said to his wife:
‘If only you and I had a little daughter as white and chubby as this, wife!’
The old woman looked at the snowball, shook her head and said: ‘Well, we haven’t and there’s no getting one now, so there!’ But the old man took the snowball into the cottage, lay it in a pot, covered it with a piece of cloth and placed it on the window-sill. When the sun rose, it warmed the pot and the snow inside began to melt. Suddenly the old couple heard a lisping sound in the pot under the piece of cloth. They ran up to take a look, and there in the pot lay a little girl, as white and chubby as a snowball.
‘I am Little Snow Girl, rolled from the snow of spring, warmed and browned by the sun of spring,’ she said to them.”
They become captives of their own fantasies and lies…
You can’t choose your parents and you can’t choose your children.
Some rocking back and forth in their mothers’ arms in existential despair.
No bike. No sled. No ball. No doll. No hope.
Some surveying their frame of reference in numbed out-of-control stupefaction, then slipping asleep fast as they can.
Among them, you make out Gen.
You make out a flickering like the red-eye-reducing flash mode and now you make out your daughter waddle-walking in a frilly pink tutu, blue eyes wide with information, honey-blond hair a-tangle, her fist in mommy’s.
Not honey-blond: platinum.
Not platinum: ash.
Self-deception is the highest degree of hypocrisy.
January 25, 2013
Lance Olsen is one of my favorite authors; his ability with language is uncanny. His experimental literature can compel a person to try writing -- he makes it seem like a fun, though arduous, activity. Fans of David Markson, the themes of William Gaddis' work, or perhaps the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein would like this particular book, as it recounts the upbringing of a girl who may or may not exist as an embodied person, but in any case does exist at least through means of stories and photographs. What is truth, then? That which we feel? That which we know? That which we convince ourselves and others through reproduction and repetition?
September 27, 2025
I've quite a few of Lance Olsen's novels now and have to say that I prefer the later ones where he employs a more fractured approach to narrative using a multitude of voices.
I was intrigued by the idea of a couple manufacturing a fake narrative around the birth of a daughter and how they try to keep the truth from family and friends. However that's not really the main focus of the novel. Olsen uses a number of photographs to illustrate the story and these provide him the prompts to ruminate on photography as an art form and its limitations in revealing reality.
I was intrigued by the idea of a couple manufacturing a fake narrative around the birth of a daughter and how they try to keep the truth from family and friends. However that's not really the main focus of the novel. Olsen uses a number of photographs to illustrate the story and these provide him the prompts to ruminate on photography as an art form and its limitations in revealing reality.
December 29, 2017
Arrived via Flore Chevaillier’s recent book of interviews, which included Lance Olsen’s wonderful thoughts on literature. (From this collection my to read pile has proliferated with countless cutting edge writers that I look forward to reading)
Very much enjoyed this. Wonderful story of falsehood, attenuation of loss, accommodation, desire, fact/fiction, all the great stuff we love but certainly at a very sophisticated level, with no loss of oomph.
Infants/babies/children are indeed wellsprings of our own desires. Interestingly, a lot of books I’ve read recently have incorporated these little ones into their stories - ‘themystery.doc’, ‘Witz’, and although a bit more indirectly but I think influential nonetheless, Joseph McElroy’s Hind’s Kidnap and Ancient History. Of course, birth shares the podium with death for beloved literary topics...
Departing via Mark C. Taylor’s Rewiring the Real. Feeling very enthusiastic by all this talk of literature’s grappling of the present, especially media and technology, hypertext stuff. I really want to get a sense of writing in this age with a hopeful inspirational push towards Danielewski’s The Familiar series.
Very much enjoyed this. Wonderful story of falsehood, attenuation of loss, accommodation, desire, fact/fiction, all the great stuff we love but certainly at a very sophisticated level, with no loss of oomph.
Infants/babies/children are indeed wellsprings of our own desires. Interestingly, a lot of books I’ve read recently have incorporated these little ones into their stories - ‘themystery.doc’, ‘Witz’, and although a bit more indirectly but I think influential nonetheless, Joseph McElroy’s Hind’s Kidnap and Ancient History. Of course, birth shares the podium with death for beloved literary topics...
Departing via Mark C. Taylor’s Rewiring the Real. Feeling very enthusiastic by all this talk of literature’s grappling of the present, especially media and technology, hypertext stuff. I really want to get a sense of writing in this age with a hopeful inspirational push towards Danielewski’s The Familiar series.
August 3, 2008
Meh.
Actually, that might be a bit strong.
The back-cover description pasted here on Goodreads was clearly written by the author himself and is, unfortunately, the most interesting bit of prose contained in the book. Seems fairly common amongst books of this chic new genre called "critifiction," which translates into English, roughly, as "masturbatory tripe." Read some Benjamin, and pronounce it BEYN-yah-meen, and then tell me how avant garde and under-appreciated you are, you hipster fucks.
The "plot" (and I'm using the word out of kindness) is Sontag's On Photography smeared over Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Also, I have not enjoyed a second-person narrator since the Choose Your Own Adventure books in j-high. When they aren't busy being fawning and intrusive, second-person narrators smack of the Everyman. Add the observation that the "you" narrator is loosely based on Olsen himself, and I am grossly insulted by his attempts at pawning off his interior musings as my own, as though he were saying something (a) original, or (b) so astoundingly important I must share in his subject-position.
The cover blurb claims that the book's "prevailing metaphor and structural device, the photograph, examines the way images, in their magical ability to mimic memory, ultimately mock and eradicate it." Which means only that the author read Camera Lucida in grad school. "The individual past, seemingly stable and fixed, turns out to be as protean and unknowable as the future." Noooo, you're shitting me. You mean, like, Schopenhauer circa eighteen fifty fucking one? Can you even say "turns out to be" after a century and a half? Turns out there is a literary trope in which love is fully consummated only in death. Turns out we'll call it Love-Death, or liebestod. Turns out "Hills Like White Elephants" is about an abortion. An abortion, people! Gawd! "The body becomes strangely dispensable, perpetually adrift in a cybernetic world of hyperlinks and interfaces." This last bit is utter trendy bullshit, not addressed at all in the novel but damn, doesn't it sound cool? Interfaces...mmmmm. The closest we come is the "you" narrator's fleeting fascination with a performance artist who looks strangely like Orlan, as if the aura of her brilliance might rub off onto this red-shirted bitch of an author.
Basically, this waste of 328 pages is a stoner's super-deep epiphanies after regurgitating a surface-level recap of actually intelligent people who have come before. There is no story-telling involved in this book. There is only a bibliography strung out and uncited for twelve chapters.
Actually, that might be a bit strong.
The back-cover description pasted here on Goodreads was clearly written by the author himself and is, unfortunately, the most interesting bit of prose contained in the book. Seems fairly common amongst books of this chic new genre called "critifiction," which translates into English, roughly, as "masturbatory tripe." Read some Benjamin, and pronounce it BEYN-yah-meen, and then tell me how avant garde and under-appreciated you are, you hipster fucks.
The "plot" (and I'm using the word out of kindness) is Sontag's On Photography smeared over Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Also, I have not enjoyed a second-person narrator since the Choose Your Own Adventure books in j-high. When they aren't busy being fawning and intrusive, second-person narrators smack of the Everyman. Add the observation that the "you" narrator is loosely based on Olsen himself, and I am grossly insulted by his attempts at pawning off his interior musings as my own, as though he were saying something (a) original, or (b) so astoundingly important I must share in his subject-position.
The cover blurb claims that the book's "prevailing metaphor and structural device, the photograph, examines the way images, in their magical ability to mimic memory, ultimately mock and eradicate it." Which means only that the author read Camera Lucida in grad school. "The individual past, seemingly stable and fixed, turns out to be as protean and unknowable as the future." Noooo, you're shitting me. You mean, like, Schopenhauer circa eighteen fifty fucking one? Can you even say "turns out to be" after a century and a half? Turns out there is a literary trope in which love is fully consummated only in death. Turns out we'll call it Love-Death, or liebestod. Turns out "Hills Like White Elephants" is about an abortion. An abortion, people! Gawd! "The body becomes strangely dispensable, perpetually adrift in a cybernetic world of hyperlinks and interfaces." This last bit is utter trendy bullshit, not addressed at all in the novel but damn, doesn't it sound cool? Interfaces...mmmmm. The closest we come is the "you" narrator's fleeting fascination with a performance artist who looks strangely like Orlan, as if the aura of her brilliance might rub off onto this red-shirted bitch of an author.
Basically, this waste of 328 pages is a stoner's super-deep epiphanies after regurgitating a surface-level recap of actually intelligent people who have come before. There is no story-telling involved in this book. There is only a bibliography strung out and uncited for twelve chapters.
February 27, 2023
Circling back - a favorite of mine that I revisited again before cracking open Olsen's 2023 novel. I'll let you read the synopsis on your own. Let me simply say this: anyone who can appreciate gorgeous writing will absolutely adore "Girl Imagined by Chance."
Absolutely brilliant!
Absolutely brilliant!
July 20, 2009
Lance Olsen's _Girl Imagined by Chance_ is a beautifully written and poetic experimental novel of a couple who, in an unguarded moment, tell a "white lie" to a family member that they are expecting a child. This lie leads them to change their entire lives and will cause readers to question the nature of reality. This book is beautifully set in Idaho and will be especially enjoyable for readers familiar with the Pacific Northwest/Western Rocky Mountains.
January 22, 2026
I am once again impressed by Lance Olsen's ability to utilize the second person without it sounding like choose-your-own-adventure prose. Crazy to think that this was written just before the birth of MySpace and the way social media came to influence our perception of reality. "The world arriving through the boundary of a rectangle... 'world' perhaps being too strong a word (pp 199)." This is one of those criti-auto-meta-fiction type books, so we get a fictional story told from an autobiographical perspective sprinkled with thoughts on visual semiotics, the 'truth behind the image', and paraphrased quotes from various photographers. Not truly autobiographical, though. The real experience is in trying connect the image with its referent, and the constructed narrative that results from that effort.
I'm sure in 2002 it was shocking to think that people living at a certain distance could fake something as monumental as having a child, but it's probably more shocking that in 2026 we've all seen people get away with far more outrageous lies on the internet. Even worse, we seem to have settled quite nicely into Olsen's vision of 21st century social theatre, complete with the grapple between adherence to cultural norms and the perceived liberation of breaking away. Like Muybridge's 'The Horse In Motion' referenced therein, GIBC reads like a series of stills in motion, "hundreths of a second caught precisely, randomly, rendered eternal." I like Lance Olsen a lot.
I'm sure in 2002 it was shocking to think that people living at a certain distance could fake something as monumental as having a child, but it's probably more shocking that in 2026 we've all seen people get away with far more outrageous lies on the internet. Even worse, we seem to have settled quite nicely into Olsen's vision of 21st century social theatre, complete with the grapple between adherence to cultural norms and the perceived liberation of breaking away. Like Muybridge's 'The Horse In Motion' referenced therein, GIBC reads like a series of stills in motion, "hundreths of a second caught precisely, randomly, rendered eternal." I like Lance Olsen a lot.
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November 14, 2022This book was so strange yet so beautiful.
August 21, 2024
Lance olden continues to always be thought provoking, something which after reading this he has gotten better at doing.
March 18, 2012
Sometimes it's really exciting when a bookclub book isn't something you'd normally pick up for yourself... And sometimes you find yourself slogging through chapter after chapter of drek, wondering when you'll get to the end.
"Girl Imagined by Chance" is the story of an East Coast couple in the middle of an existential crisis. Wanting to escape their meaningless lives and crappy jobs, they move to the backwoods of Idaho. Even this doesn't quite do the trick, however- Andi, the wife, struggles to find her own photographic "voice," and the unnamed husband, our narrator, becomes less and less interested in the digital gallery he manages. Hanging over them is Andi's grandmother, who wants nothing more than to see a great-grandchild before she passes on.
The couple takes the most logical course of action, and invents a child to placate dear old granny- an infant daughter named Genia. They become so involved in the fiction as to baby-proof their house and buy a crib. On the eve of her "birth," they sit in front of the hospital and devour pints of ice cream. Doctored sonograms pulled off the internet and fake snapshots of baby Genia get sent for Great-Grandma's approval.
All of this would make for a pretty interesting novel... if it had been written by someone else. Lance Olsen, however, fills the pages with the narrator's (and, one assumes, his own) second-person pontifications about the ephemeral nature of photography, how it lacks any underlying truth, how every moment is completely contextual and there is no "reality" to speak off... As my second grade teacher would have said, show us, don't tell us, Lance. There are more effective ways to get your point across then having your narrator meditate on it at length.
If there's a story similar to this, that lacks a philosophic treatise on photographic and uses third-party narration, someone point me in that direction. Otherwise, my only recommendation is to avoid "Girl Imagined by Chance."
"Girl Imagined by Chance" is the story of an East Coast couple in the middle of an existential crisis. Wanting to escape their meaningless lives and crappy jobs, they move to the backwoods of Idaho. Even this doesn't quite do the trick, however- Andi, the wife, struggles to find her own photographic "voice," and the unnamed husband, our narrator, becomes less and less interested in the digital gallery he manages. Hanging over them is Andi's grandmother, who wants nothing more than to see a great-grandchild before she passes on.
The couple takes the most logical course of action, and invents a child to placate dear old granny- an infant daughter named Genia. They become so involved in the fiction as to baby-proof their house and buy a crib. On the eve of her "birth," they sit in front of the hospital and devour pints of ice cream. Doctored sonograms pulled off the internet and fake snapshots of baby Genia get sent for Great-Grandma's approval.
All of this would make for a pretty interesting novel... if it had been written by someone else. Lance Olsen, however, fills the pages with the narrator's (and, one assumes, his own) second-person pontifications about the ephemeral nature of photography, how it lacks any underlying truth, how every moment is completely contextual and there is no "reality" to speak off... As my second grade teacher would have said, show us, don't tell us, Lance. There are more effective ways to get your point across then having your narrator meditate on it at length.
If there's a story similar to this, that lacks a philosophic treatise on photographic and uses third-party narration, someone point me in that direction. Otherwise, my only recommendation is to avoid "Girl Imagined by Chance."
March 12, 2012
This book was The Paper Street Book Club’s book for February under the category of Local Author, chosen by a member located in Idaho.
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The book takes a while to get into, mainly because of the use of 2nd person as the narrative style. This isn’t the first time I have read a book in this style and it probably won’t be the last but, it is by far my least favorite form of narrative and I don’t think it was actually the best choice for this particular story.
The beginning moves slowly as the author tries to put “us” in his mind and understand the minds of him and his wife, Andi. I understand the purpose of this since we are technically are supposed to be one in the mind of the main character, but the slowness of plot and the speed of his ever changing thoughts are tiresome.
Once we get to the plot the pace quickens. From the moment that Andi tells Grannam she is pregnant the store gets its pace. But it is often interrupted by the authors photograph rambles. I agree with some of the points he tries to make but they go on and on, and repeat WAY too often. They start to pull away from the book and start to make you feel the author only wrote the book as a way to share his feelings about the way people look at photography versus what photography really presents us with. When he pulls out of the story for these moments it also pulls me, the reader out. I feel as if I’m reading someone’s blog and like he doesn’t know when to stop.
Almost every other page you can feel the authors pretentiousness over flooding the book. The pretentiousness of the novel tries to mask an okay novel as something brilliant and fails to accomplish this task.
I loved the idea, I liked the photography but sadly that is all this book had to offer…an idea.
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The book takes a while to get into, mainly because of the use of 2nd person as the narrative style. This isn’t the first time I have read a book in this style and it probably won’t be the last but, it is by far my least favorite form of narrative and I don’t think it was actually the best choice for this particular story.
The beginning moves slowly as the author tries to put “us” in his mind and understand the minds of him and his wife, Andi. I understand the purpose of this since we are technically are supposed to be one in the mind of the main character, but the slowness of plot and the speed of his ever changing thoughts are tiresome.
Once we get to the plot the pace quickens. From the moment that Andi tells Grannam she is pregnant the store gets its pace. But it is often interrupted by the authors photograph rambles. I agree with some of the points he tries to make but they go on and on, and repeat WAY too often. They start to pull away from the book and start to make you feel the author only wrote the book as a way to share his feelings about the way people look at photography versus what photography really presents us with. When he pulls out of the story for these moments it also pulls me, the reader out. I feel as if I’m reading someone’s blog and like he doesn’t know when to stop.
Almost every other page you can feel the authors pretentiousness over flooding the book. The pretentiousness of the novel tries to mask an okay novel as something brilliant and fails to accomplish this task.
I loved the idea, I liked the photography but sadly that is all this book had to offer…an idea.
May 4, 2007
i liked the underlying background color--a couple living in beautiful idaho--better than the foregrounded plot--a couple pretending to their eastcoast friends and family that they're having a child. the theme of photography and imagery also less interesting than the description of massive sky and 21st century rural life... olsen's also a great describer of food prep and drink choices. re: the style, he seemed to have swallowed david markson whole. i have no complaints about it because i love markson's wit and his iambic-sounding pacing--but it was a litle eerie to hear the echo so clear.
March 18, 2008
One of my favorite Olsen novels to date, next to "Burnt."
April 19, 2012
Ahhhh, better every time I read it. However, I didn't make clear to my students that while the Olsens are real people, they do not have a real fake baby.
October 28, 2018
I could not get past the insufferable tone and writing style.
Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews