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.
Industry Reviews
[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"
We Loved It All casts a moving spell... [it is] emphatically beautiful at the line level and deeply insightful at an ecological level.--Megan Mayhew-Bergman "Scientific American"
In her first work of nonfiction, [Millet] steps into the light, sharing personal stories and her informed observations of the extinction crisis...[We Loved It All is] a recalibrating mix of memoir, facts, critique, and passages of elegiac beauty.--Donna Seaman "Booklist (starred review)"
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"
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 Weeps
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
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
