We Loved It All
A Memory of Life
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- US$14.99
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A Time Must-Read Book of 2024 • A Booklist Editors' Choice • A Washington Post Notable Nonfiction Book of 2024
"A rigorous, evocative, brilliant bow to life." —Terry Tempest Williams, author of Erosion: Essays of Undoing
This lucent anti-memoir from celebrated novelist Lydia Millet explores the pain and joy of being a parent, child, and human at a moment when the richness of the planet’s life is deeply threatened.
Across more than a dozen acclaimed works of fiction, readers have become intimate with Lydia Millet’s distinctive voice and sly wit. We Loved It All, her first nonfiction book, combines the precision of fact with the power of narrative to evoke our enmeshment with the more-than-human world.
Emerging from Millet’s quarter century of wildlife and climate advocacy, We Loved it All marries scenes from her life with moments of nearness to “the others”— the animals and plants with whom we share the earth. Accounts of fears and failures, jobs and friendships, childhood and motherhood are interspersed with exquisite accounts of nonhumans and arresting meditations on the power of story to shape the future.
Seeking to understand why we immerse ourselves in the domestic and immediate, turning away from more sweeping views, she examines how grand cultural myths can deny our longing for the company of nature and deprive us of its charisma and inspiration. In a thrilling distillation of experience and emotion, she evinces the familiar sense of feeling both well-meaning and powerless—a creature subject to forces that are baffling in their immensity. The fear and grief of extinction and climate change, Millet suggests, are forms of love that might be turned to resistance.
We Loved It All shimmers with curiosity and laconic humor yet addresses with reverence the most urgent crises of our day. An incantatory, bewitching devotional to the vast and precious bestiary of the earth, it asks that we extend to other living beings the protection they deserve—the simple grace of continued existence.
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Novelist Millet (Dinosaurs), also a creative director at the Center for Biological Diversity, ruminates in this profoundly affecting meditation on what it means to live through climate change. The narrative flows as if by instinct, moving from personal anecdotes to condemnations of corporate pollution to elegiac examinations of the havoc wrought by humans on the natural world, the organizing logic arising tacitly through suggestion and juxtaposition. In that vein, Millet's admission of how she used to believe systemic explanations constituted attempts to evade personal responsibility leads into a discussion of how the mid-1970s "Crying Indian" anti-litter campaign redirected culpability from the companies selling single-use plastic products to consumers. Contemplations of mortality recur throughout, as when Millet writes "I fear that my children one day... will be forced to endure the vanishing of much more than we ever did" and discusses how the last Tasmanian tiger died in 1936 after "she was locked out of the warm part of her enclosure overnight in a cold snap and froze." In scintillating prose, Millet makes a passionate case that humans must own up to their responsibilities to each other and the natural world ("Our coexistence has been, since forever, the backdrop of being. A dappled, shifting impression like the patterns of sun and shadows that fall across beds and ceilings and walls"). Mournful and piercingly beautiful, this will stick with readers long after they finish the last page.
