Synopses & Reviews
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.
Review
"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
Review
"Lydia Millet's novels have always worked on me like a drug; her tenderly
sardonic voice and the command of her uncanny narrative velocity keep
me turning pages like burning through a bag of chips without stopping to
lick the salt off my fingers.
We Loved It All will break your heart." Jonathan Lethem, author of Brooklyn Crime Novel
Review
"I love reading Lydia Millet, delight in the pithy observations of her
all-seeing eye, and suspect her many admirers will be smitten with this
deep-time story of our immersion in Earth's wild creatures and our
hapless modern attempts to escape nature." Dan Flores, author of Wild
New World and Coyote America
About the Author
Lydia Millet is the author of
A Children's Bible, shortlisted for the National Book Award and a
New York Times Top 10 book of 2020. Her many other works of
fiction have won awards from PEN Center USA and the American Academy of
Arts and Letters; the story collection
Love in Infant Monkeys was a Pulitzer Prize finalist. She holds
a master's degree in environmental economics and works at the Center
for Biological Diversity.