Weather

Weather (2020), a novel by American author Jenny Offill, chronicles one woman's attempts to deal with marriage and motherhood while coping with the imminent planetary doom posed by climate change. The Guardian called Weather "a dazzling response to climate crisis and political anxiety."

The narrator, Lizzie, a lapsed PhD student living in Brooklyn, leaves school before completing her dissertation. She raises her young son, Eli, with her husband, Ben. Presently, she works in the library of her former university and serves as an assistant to her former dissertation advisor, Sylvia. Sylvia runs a popular podcast, The Center Cannot Hold, and Lizzie spends much of her time answering letters on Sylvia’s behalf. Increasingly, Lizzie's passion involves managing her own environmentally themed podcast, Hell or High Water. Lizzie’s brother, Henry, is a recovering addict. To help Henry, Lizzie spends a great deal of her time taking care of his newborn daughter.

Because of her fears about climate change, Lizzie wrestles with her own mortality and that of her family. She attends Christian and Buddhist religious services in search of spiritual answers. Lizzie also confers with a Zen meditation expert who frequents the library where she works. She describes the meditation expert as "mostly enlightened," a recurring theme in a book that sees Lizzie grapple with the knowledge of climate change and the desire to do something about it, but also a lack of agency in terms of sparking systemic progress.



The story is largely told through a series of loosely connected episodes. In one, Lizzie struggles with the idea that to become a Buddhist she must let go of everything. The idea of letting go of everything when a person has a young child to care for is difficult for Lizzie to fathom. Her meditation teacher poses the argument that, through reincarnation, "everyone here has done everything to everyone else." This proverb is particularly relevant to the issue of climate change, given the book's argument that a huge number of middle- and upper-class Americans like Lizzie deserves at least some blame for the climate crisis. All the while, Lizzie faces the impossibility of striking an appropriate work-life balance, a challenge made more difficult by the knowledge that climate change might bring about an Anthropocene extinction event.

As time goes on, Lizzie devotes increasing energy to her Hell or High Water podcast. She also becomes something of a climate survivalist, hatching plans for what she calls her "doomstead." She plans to build a domicile on a hill that will protect her and her family from both floods and post-apocalyptic attackers. Lizzie also compiles several survival tactics. She learns how to use a battery and a gum wrapper to start a fire. She also learns how to trap fish with a shirt and her own spit.

Meanwhile, Lizzie deals with her brother Henry's bizarre fear of harming his newborn daughter. A recovering addict, Henry struggles to accept that he can ever be a good father. At one point, he writes down a list of all the ways he could accidentally harm his daughter and reads them aloud to Lizzie in an effort to prevent these things from occurring. Henry has frightening visions of burning, flaying, smothering, or strangling the baby girl. Certain that Henry would never really do these things, Lizzie tears apart the sheet of paper. At the same time, she recognizes that she too stands to burn and smother her own son because of humanity's collective unwillingness to address climate change.



At home, Lizzie's son plays the video game Minecraft, building his own virtual world that thrives while the real world burns. She struggles to square the minutiae of paying bills and making sure Eli washes his hands with the impending doom she perceives in every waking moment. Lizzie also debates with herself over the nature of pain and suffering. She cannot determine if intense personal pain makes an individual more empathetic to the pain of others, or blind to suffering outside of an individual's own experiences.

In the end, little is resolved for Lizzie. In a phone call, Sylvia tells her, "Of course, the world continues to end." In response to this, Lizzie hangs up the phone and tends to her garden, a small ecosystem like Eli's Minecraft world that she can control and cultivate as a coping mechanism to address the fact that the larger world around her is dying.

Weather offers a compelling domestic narrative while also addressing urgent questions about the future of planet Earth.