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, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “The Sixth Extinction”
Book Reviews
A profound ode to life in an age of environmental collapse
–Caitlin Gibson for The Washington Post
How to Grieve Our Changing Planet
–Megan Mayhew-Bergman for Scientific American
From the publisher
Lydia Millet’s anti-memoir 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.
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 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 addresses with reverence the most urgent crises of our day. A 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.
Notables
- Named One of the 50 Noteworthy Nonfiction Books of 2024 by literaryhub.com
- Named One of the 50 Notable Works of Nonfiction from 2024 by the Washington Post.
- Named a Most Anticipated Book of 2024 by the Washington Post, Oprah Daily, and Literary Hub.
Praise
“[Lydia Millet is] as honest in her reflections on love, motherhood, and ambition as she is in capturing the terrifying realities of climate change. [We Loved It All] is a love letter to the earth and all who inhabit it, punctuated by sharp and lyrical prose.”
– Annabel Gutterman, Time
“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 based on her own wild life. We Loved It All is an ode to the creatures we live among: finned, feathered, furred, scaled, and rooted. I needed this book to feel less alone … Millet’s relationship with the natural world is its own joyous anthem of belonging. This is a rigorous, evocative, brilliant bow to life.”
– Terry Tempest Williams, author of Erosion: Essays of Undoing
“Lydia Millet’s novels have always worked on me like a drug; the combination of her tenderly sardonic voice and the command of her uncanny narrative velocity, which keeps me turning pages like burning through a bag of chips without stopping to lick the salt off my fingers. Her book-length philosophical memoir, We Loved It All, reproduces those distinctions and will break your heart.”
– Jonathan Lethem, author of Brooklyn Crime Novel
“I love reading Lydia Millet, delight in the pithy observations of her all-seeing eye, and suspect her many admirers will be smitten with We Loved It All. This deep-time story of our immersion with Earth’s wild creatures — and our hapless modern attempts to escape nature — is something different from her novels, but the Millet voice is fully present. I’m not sure there’s a better educated-enviro-activist-grounded-in-science approach to natural history out there.”
– Dan Flores, best-selling author of Wild New World and Coyote America
“Magic words, beautiful thoughts, an altogether unique book that allows you to watch a gorgeous mind at work. There is, quite apart from the magic of her writing, not a single page where you won’t learn something new. We Loved It All will leave you breathless.”
– Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, author of Lost Companions and When Elephants Weep