We Loved It All : A Memory of Life

Lydia Millet

ISBN 10: 1324073659 / ISBN 13: 9781324073659

Published by W. W. Norton & Company Apr 2024, 2024

About this Item

Neuware - Acclaimed novelist Lydia Millet's first work of non-fiction, We Loved It All, is a genre-defying tour de force that makes an impassioned argument for people to see their emotional and spiritual lives as infinitely dependent on the lives of non-human beings. Drawing on a quarter-century of experience as an advocate for endangered species at the Center for Biological Diversity, Millet offers intimate portraits of what she calls 'the others'-the extraordinary animals with whom we still share the world, along with those already lost. Humans, too, fill this book, as Millet touches on the lives of her world-travelling parents, fascinating partners and friends and colourful relatives, from diplomats to nut farmers-all figure in the complex tapestry each of us weaves with the surrounding world. Written in the tradition of Annie Dillard or Robert Macfarlane, We Loved It All is an incantatory work that will appeal to anyone concerned about the future of life on earth-including our own.

Seller Inventory # 9781324073659

Bibliographic Details

• Title: We Loved It All : A Memory of Life
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company Apr 2024
• Publication Date: 2024
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1324073659
• ISBN 13: 9781324073659
• Binding: Buch
• Condition: Neu
• Dimensions: 232W x 161H x 26D millimeters 232 millimeters width by 161 millimeters height by 26 millimeters depth
• Weight: 464 grams

About this title

Synopsis

A Time Must-Read Book of 2024
A Booklist Editors' Choice
A Washington Post Notable Nonfiction Book of 2024

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.

About the Author

Lydia Millet is the author of more than twenty books, including A Children's Bible, a finalist for the National Book Award and one of the New York Times "10 Best Books" of the year in 2020, and a story collection called Love in Infant Monkeys that was a finalist for the 2010 Pulitzer Prize. Other books have won awards from PEN-Center USA and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Millet works at the Center for Biological Diversity and lives outside Tucson, Arizona.