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Jenny Offill Maps an Ambient Dread

Photo credit: Courtesy Penguin Random House/Emily Tobey
Photo credit: Courtesy Penguin Random House/Emily Tobey

From ELLE

Weather, written from the perspective of a librarian living in Brooklyn with her husband and son (and, occasionally, her struggling brother), is a quick sprint of a novel. Author Jenny Offill’s agent has said of her previous book, Dept. of Speculation, a New York Times Notable Book, “If your average book is a body, this is an X-ray,” and the same is true here: Weather comes in bursts, with diary-esque entries interspersed with facts and historical references, many of which touch on climate change. “About five years ago, I heard that a lot of longtime environmentalists were starting to feel so hopeless, they were walking away from the issue,” Offill says. “I was fascinated by that. How could it be true? I started doing my own research, and like many people who get involved in climate action, I had an ‘Oh, shit’ moment—a realization that things were happening so much faster than I’d imagined.”

Weather is acutely topical. At the end, Offill even provides the web address of a site with suggested measures to address global warming. President Trump’s election factors heavily as well, which raised various technical issues for the author. “I wrote about so many things that didn’t stay in the book because many more outrages piled up,” Offill says. “I had to figure out a way to incorporate what I almost think of as this ambient dread—about climate change, but also politics. The ideal was that someone could read the book years from now and not know the details of what was going on but still understand the feel.” The book also addresses ideas that are perennial—for example, the absence of a direct line between intentions and results. Above all, it’s concerned with how people approach the circumstances they en-counter, and how in many ways that is the measure of a life. “I ended up feeling that it wasn’t really important if I had hope or felt despair, because what does matter is complicity,” Offill says. “What am I seeing? And what can I do? It’s very small. But I don’t feel like it’s nothing.”

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