april, 2024
Event Details
Books & Books presents
LYDIA MILLET
discussing her new book
WE LOVED IT ALL: A MEMORY OF LIFE
(W.W. Norton, $27.99)
Saturday, April 27th, 6:30pm ET
PEAR House Courtyard - 533 Eaton Street
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 has also worked as an editor and staff writer at the Center for Biological Diversity since 1999. Her new book, We Loved It All: A Memory of Life 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.
The residents of Key West have always been deeply connected to their island home and its natural environment. With a diverse community of artists, fishermen, and environmentalists, locals know the importance of conservation efforts to preserve the island's fragile ecosystems. Books and Books is thrilled to work with Last Stand, a non-profit organization of volunteer citizens who are committed to preserving the Florida Keys beautiful natural environment, to bring this author and her work to the Florida Keys.
About the book: 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.
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 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.
This is an in-person event.
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