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| Jenny Offill |
Jenny Offill: ‘I no longer felt like it wasn’t my fight’
Saturday 8 February 2021
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Weather follows Lizzie, a university librarian, who responds to the emails sent in to “Hell or High Water”, a climate-focused podcast hosted by her former academic mentor. The job opens Lizzie’s eyes to the crisis and the myriad ways different people respond to it, from “dreary” environmentalists obsessed with composting toilets to “end-timers” eager to embrace the Rapture. Amid a growing sense of her own responsibility to the planet and fear for the future, Lizzie struggles to balance her responsibilities as a wife, mother, sister, daughter and friend.
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| Jenny Offill Photo by Christopher Lane |
“I became interested in why I wasn’t more interested,” Offill says, considering the question of why she chose to focus a novel around a subject many people find too vast and frightening to contemplate. In other words, she was curious how it was possible to be intellectually aware of an unfolding disaster without feeling emotionally connected or moved to action. The novel follows Lizzie as she moves from “a state of twilight knowing” to a more conscious awareness of the crisis. At its core, the story asks: what happens after we start to pay attention?
When writers and artists have tackled the climate crisis, they’ve tended to come at it obliquely, through imagined dystopias. Even the “zombie apocalypse” that Offill says crops up on doomsday-prepper websites is somehow more comprehensible than the ravages of climate breakdown. “‘Apocalypse’ is one of those words, like ‘fascism’, that immediately feels like an overstatement,” Offill says. “But it was hard to see those pictures coming out of Australia in the last few weeks, or hear that a billion animals may have died, and not feel like that is what’s happening.”
Offill’s novel might best be called “pre-apocalyptic”. There are no large-scale emergencies, no heroic survivors; there is no overt horror. Instead, the novel belongs to the everyday world of contemporary gentrifying Brooklyn. As with Dept. of Speculation, the narrative is crafted from short, resonant passages, rarely longer than three or four sentences, that read like diary jottings, conversation fragments, jokes, quotations, trivia or poetry. Their lightness is deceptive. In the gaps between, there’s “the ambient dread of feeling something is coming or happening, but that you can’t understand its dimensions,” she says. That dread is increased in the wake of the 2016 election, which features, indirectly, in the novel’s plot. “I don’t think they’re unrelated,” Offill says, of climate anxieties and Trumpian politics. “I think the spectre of climate change is leading to some of this tightening of us-against-them, lifeboat-ethics feelings.” Strikingly, it’s the election that elicits a grim, panicked response from Lizzie’s husband, Ben, who has been unmoved by her climate worries; he wonders, fleetingly, if they ought to get a gun.
Offill is fascinated by the way that these distances can open up, suddenly or slowly, between people within the intimate confines of a family. In Dept. of Speculation, the protagonist finds herself isolated by the intense experience of early motherhood, depression, and the struggle to complete her second novel. The contours of her life reflect Offill’s own, also a married writer with one daughter who has supported herself by teaching and ghostwriting, and who took 15 years to publish the follow-up to her 1999 debut novel, Last Things. But she has resisted the “autofiction” label, which she thinks is applied too readily to women writers, minimising the craft that goes into their fiction. In the course of writing Dept. of Speculation, Offill jettisoned another, more conventionally structured novel, experimented with writing poetry, taught fiction, and eventually hit on the style, stripped to the bone, that would make the novel so powerful – so “joyously demanding”, as Roxane Gay put it in her review for the New York Times. Despite Offill’s belief that the book’s fragmented form would mainly excite other writers – Ocean Vuong, Sheila Heti and Jia Tolentino are among her fans – it found an unexpectedly wide audience, drawn to its offbeat yet honest depiction of the clash between motherhood and creativity.
Dept. of Speculation’s unnamed protagonist was a writer who declared her intention to become an “art monster”, the kind of artist who makes a ruthless priority of her creative life. Yet she finds it impossible. The domestic and emotional worlds of motherhood and marriage – not to mention the pressure to make a living – exert a far stronger pull than she anticipated. That character and Lizzie are not the same person, Offill stresses, but she sees a continuity between them in the struggle to balance their domestic roles with their larger ambitions. “To me, the through-line is caretaking,” she says – the work women do to care for children and other family members, often without pay or even the recognition that it is work at all, leading to a kind of burnout that makes it difficult to pay attention to the wider world. “That exhaustion was something I wanted to channel through Lizzie.”
It’s no accident that Sylvia, the host of the podcast that draws Lizzie towards an awareness of the climate emergency, is a superstar academic with no children. Her approach to the crisis is shaped by her social class and the freedom of movement it brings. When Lizzie accompanies Sylvia to a conference in Silicon Valley, the well-heeled attendees want to know where the safest place will be to escape the apocalypse – not for themselves, they insist, but for their children. Of course, as Lizzie is well aware, most people don’t have the freedom to choose where to go if their family is in danger. “There’s a lot of people in the world right now who have terrifyingly little control over how to keep their children safe,” Offill observes. When Lizzie worries about the future of her young son, Sylvia’s only advice is to become really rich.
Lizzie herself is neither a climate refugee nor a tech titan, but rather “smack in the middle”, Offill says. She has enough support and security to be able to think about the world beyond her immediate situation, but not enough to protect everyone she loves. And like many women entering middle age, her responsibilities keep extending beyond her husband and son to her brother, a recovering addict, her religious mother, and her brother’s wife and baby. She gives too much of herself to them, she chides herself, listening to their problems and offering her advice for hours on end (her husband drily, or sourly, points out that if only she were a real shrink, they’d be rich). Her impoverished mother drives around town giving socks to the homeless, which gives Offill the opportunity to show us a different kind of caring and social responsibility at work. “They’ve done all these studies to show that, proportionally, the people who make the least money give the most to charity,” she points out. “I think what Bezos just gave to charity” – he announced that Amazon would donate $690,000 (£527,000) to the Australian wildfire relief fund – “was something like the equivalent of if I gave one 18th of a penny in terms of proportion of my income.”
These bits of information pepper Offill’s conversation as they do the book, connecting ideas and hinting at the research underpinning its allusive style. But while the studies she consulted provided useful reference material, Offill says that her reading began as a way to understand her own reaction to the climate crisis, or lack of it. One book that she cites as formative is criminologist Stanley Cohen’s States of Denial: Knowing About Atrocities and Suffering (“so, big sell at a party”). It was in Cohen’s work that she found the idea of “twilight knowing”, a state hovering between denial and knowledge, as a name for where Lizzie finds herself at the beginning of the book. Her reading widened to climate science, mythology, psychology and sociology, in an effort to understand how people have responded to disasters at different points in history. To confront a looming apocalypse through reading, she admits, was “deeply silly, and also the only thing I knew to do”.
By making her protagonist a university librarian, Offill was able to create a character who shared her own instinct to look for answers in books, and to indulge in imagining “a little bit of an unlived life”, she says. Yet Lizzie’s job involves far more human than literary interaction, with an array of lost souls including a pale adjunct professor (“I worry he is selling his plasma again,” Lizzie says) and an eternal graduate student. Offill, who has taught at several different colleges, is familiar with this highly educated but precarious class, who have “social capital and not so much other capital”. It certainly doesn’t escape Lizzie’s notice that her skills and knowledge would be of vanishingly little practical use in a doomsday scenario.
Yet libraries also represent, for Offill, a bastion of hope. “As the social fabric of our society has continued to unravel, libraries have become one of the last places where you don’t have to buy anything and yet you are welcome,” she says. “It’s like a tiny little vision of utopia.” She mentions the current interest in experimenting with libraries of tools and household appliances as evidence of this utopian instinct at work.
It’s surprising, given the subject matter, how much fun Weather is, both to read and discuss, and also how darkly funny. “I’m always trying to figure out when you can puncture some of the self-righteousness,” Offill says. Even where it seems warranted, relentless seriousness about serious subjects can keep people from facing and fighting them. “They feel undone by the earnestness, by the sense that you have to have your own house completely together before you’re able to join a bigger movement.” Lizzie’s tone is often earnest, sometimes self-righteous, but usually a blend of deadpan and terrified.
One joke is something called the “obligatory note of hope”. In the story, it’s a sardonic label for what Sylvia feels she has to include in every article and speech about the climate crisis, if she wants to keep her audience. After the end of the book, the phrase reappears as a URL, which Offill is excited to explain will direct readers to a website that reaches beyond the novel to offer some pathways to activism (right now, it leads to a landing page with a picture of a goat in an abandoned library). The site highlights the work of three environment-focused organisations – the Sunrise Movement, the Transition movement (which emphasises grassroots local initiatives) and Extinction Rebellion – as well as sharing stories of people who have worked for change. A further section, “Tips for Trying Times”, sounds the most distinctively Offill-like, taking the research that didn’t make it into the book and turning it into a resource that is both practical and encouraging. It includes “what people did when their movements didn’t seem like they were making any headway” and “what does the Swedish government say to do if crisis or war comes?”
Offill is adamant that the site is purely a resource, and doesn’t feature any links to buy her books. It’s simply an effort to connect with other people, to stick to a promise she made while writing Weather, that she would undertake more in-person activism. “I no longer felt like I could opt out. I no longer felt like it wasn’t my fight,” she says. That means moving far beyond the individualistic ambitions of the art monster, and the comforts of books and intellectual isolation. “Out of the library, into the streets. But, boy, is it a nerve-racking place to be!”
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