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A Memory of Life
by Lydia Millet
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.
"[A] profoundly affecting meditation on what it means to live through climate change...In scintillating prose, Millet makes a passionate case that humans must own up to their responsibilities to each other and the natural world...Mournful and piercingly beautiful, this will stick with readers long after they finish the last page."
―Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"[T]he author offers a well-written, poignant lament for the greater animal kingdom to which we owe not just our survival as a species but our joy and companionship...A philosophically tinted testament to the challenge of loving animals in an epoch defined by extinction." ―Kirkus Reviews
"Millet's awe of nature is catching, even as it lives alongside the grief of our everyday destructions."
― Eliza Smith, Literary Hub
"In turns heartbreaking and inspiring, We Loved It All reminds us to hold every being dear at a time when we all need love more than ever."
― Amy Brady, Literary Hub
"We have all been the beneficiary of Lydia Millet's eloquence and imagination through fiction. But now she gives us a different kind of story. A story of stunning attention, truths, and urgency, We Loved It All is an ode to the creatures we live among: finned, feathered, furred, scaled, and rooted…This is a rigorous, evocative, brilliant bow to life, even as the world burns. Please read this transformative anti-memoir that shows us a way forward."
―Terry Tempest Williams, author of Erosion: Essays of Undoing
"Lydia Millet's We Loved It All is at once lyrical and densely packed, intimate and all-encompassing. It beautifully captures the current moment, in all its terrors and possibilities."
― Elizabeth Kolbert, author of The Sixth Extinction
This information about We Loved It All was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Photo: Ivory Orchid Photography
Lydia Millet has written more than a dozen novels and story collections. Her novel A Children's Bible was a New York Times "Best 10 Books of 2020" selection and shortlisted for the National Book Award. In 2019 her story collection Fight No More received an Award of Merit from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and her collection Love in Infant Monkeys was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2010. She also writes essays, opinion pieces, book reviews, and other ephemera and has worked as an editor and staff writer at the Center for Biological Diversity since 1999. She lives in the desert outside Tucson with her family.
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