Book Review :: We Loved It All by Lydia Millet
Review by Kevin Brown
Besides being an award-winning writer, Millet has worked at the Center for Biological Diversity for roughly twenty-five years. In We Loved it All: A Memoir of Life, she combines those two areas of expertise to create a poetic, meditative book that explores climate change, storytelling, hope, and despair.
However, Millet is not making an argument here, so much as she is simply sharing her love of nature and animals, celebrating the beauty and wonder of the world, in the hopes that others will see and appreciate the awesome diversity she recognizes. In fact, she doesn’t even seem to offer any practical solutions—though there are a few in the final essay. She believes that, if people love the world the way she and so many others do, they would make the necessary changes in their lives, in their policies, and in their corporate decisions to change the world.
Given Millet’s work as a writer, her approach to language is both beautiful itself and ironic. She writes each essay—there are three, roughly eighty pages or so long—in short sections, ranging from one sentence to a few pages, using fragments to provide a fractured, imagistic tone. She talks about the importance of bearing witness and telling stories to help shape the ways in which we see the world.
She also admits the limitations of language to both explain the scope of the problem and provide solutions, even acknowledging that the world will outlive our words. In the meantime, though, her language calls us, as best as it can, to truly see the world around us and love it all, hoping beyond despair that love will be the beginning of enough.
We Loved It All by Lydia Millet. W.W. Norton, 2024.
Reviewer bio: Kevin Brown has published three books of poetry: Liturgical Calendar: Poems (Wipf and Stock); A Lexicon of Lost Words (winner of the Violet Reed Haas Prize for Poetry, Snake Nation Press); and Exit Lines (Plain View Press). He also has a memoir, Another Way: Finding Faith, Then Finding It Again, and a book of scholarship, They Love to Tell the Stories: Five Contemporary Novelists Take on the Gospels. Twitter @kevinbrownwrites
