{"id":142846,"date":"2020-02-14T11:00:03","date_gmt":"2020-02-14T16:00:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=142846"},"modified":"2020-02-17T15:24:07","modified_gmt":"2020-02-17T20:24:07","slug":"learning-to-die-an-interview-with-jenny-offill","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2020\/02\/14\/learning-to-die-an-interview-with-jenny-offill\/","title":{"rendered":"Learning to Die: An Interview with Jenny Offill"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\u201cAll around us things tried to announce their true nature,\u201d observes Lizzie, the heroine of Jenny Offill\u2019s new novel, Weather<\/em>. \u201cTheir radiance was faint and fainter still beneath the terrible music.\u201d In Weather<\/em>, as in her groundbreaking novel Dept. of Speculation<\/em>, Offill captures both the \u201cterrible music\u201d and the \u201cquiet radiance\u201d of contemporary life. She allows us to see the world anew, as a place where we can\u2014and must\u2014encounter both discord and poetry.<\/p>\n

Lizzie, a librarian \u201cnot young or pretty enough to matter,\u201d moves through a stunned city during and after an election. As she grows \u201cedgy and restless,\u201d she listens to podcasts and lectures about glaciers, and to the seemingly trivial worries of Uber drivers and competitive mothers; she meditates with Buddhists before watching TV shows about extreme shopping and drug addicts ambushed by their families. Like the Wife in Dept. of Speculation<\/em>, Lizzie is a keen, often hilarious observer, fiercely intelligent but utterly ignored and relatively powerless. Yet Lizzie attempts, even achieves, something heroic by the novel\u2019s end. She sympathizes with the flawed and the flailing; she investigates and instigates survival strategies, and, like Offill herself, she finds the \u201cquiet radiance\u201d despite it all.<\/p>\n

Offill and I live close to each other in the Hudson Valley. Reading Weather<\/em>, I recalled two moments where her presence had shifted something from the ordinary to the beautiful and then to the terrifying. In the first, we went for a walk on a route that was private and, to me, unknown. She had said something about a beach, but I thought this must be an exaggeration, as the landscape around us is forests and hills. Yet when we broke through the clearing, there was not only a beach but a small island and a cove set off from the rest of the Hudson. Something shimmered in the water; I thought it might be a bird. Instead, a naked woman rose out of the water and began to swim toward us. My daughter screamed with joy, thinking she\u2019d at last seen a mermaid. Jenny shrugged her shoulders, as if to say, This is where I live. Strange things happen. Years later, as she drove me home from a party, I mentioned that I was having trouble breathing but it was likely nothing, probably an allergy to dust in my attic or pollen in the fields. I might have ignored the fact that I was often winded and dizzy, but Jenny insisted I go the ER in a manner that felt somehow sage and inarguable. When I went to the hospital the following day, the doctors discovered a collapsed lung and something \u201csuspicious.\u201d All around us things tried to announce their true nature<\/em>. Recently,<\/em> I emailed Jenny to ask about post-Trump anxiety, preppers, and how the novel, and the author, can create quiet beauty in a time of terrible music.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

Was there a particular moment that led to the inception of this novel?<\/p>\n

OFFILL<\/p>\n

The novel came out of years and years of talking about extinction and climate change with my friend, the novelist Lydia Millet. At a certain point, all of it just added up and I thought, what is wrong with me that I still think about this so abstractly, that I still don\u2019t feel it? So in a way the process of writing Weather<\/em> was about trying to move from thinking about what is happening to feeling the immensity and sadness of it.<\/p>\n

I was also struck by an article I read about how a well-known British environmentalist, Paul Kingsnorth, was walking away from years of campaigning because he believed hopes were being raised falsely that we could still stop or contain the climate crisis. The article was rather glibly titled \u201cIt\u2019s the End of the World as We Know It \u2026 and He Feels Fine.\u201d<\/p>\n

In fact, he went on to found a group for artists and writers called Dark Mountain. You can read their manifesto here<\/a>.\u00a0It begins quite chillingly with this passage:<\/p>\n

Those who witness extreme social collapse at first hand seldom describe any deep revelation about the truths of human existence. What they do mention, if asked, is their surprise at how easy it is to die.<\/p>\n

The pattern of ordinary life, in which so much stays the same from one day to the next, disguises the fragility of its fabric. How many of our activities are made possible by the impression of stability that pattern gives? So long as it repeats, or varies steadily enough, we are able to plan for tomorrow as if all the things we rely on and don\u2019t think about too carefully will still be there. When the pattern is broken, by civil war or natural disaster or the smaller-scale tragedies that tear at its fabric, many of those activities become impossible or meaningless, while simply meeting needs we once took for granted may occupy much of our lives.<\/p>\n

What war correspondents and relief workers report is not only the fragility of the fabric, but the speed with which it can unravel. As we write this, no one can say with certainty where the unravelling of the financial and commercial fabric of our economies will end.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

A very early draft of Weather<\/em> had the working title \u201cLearning to Die.\u201d<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

\u201cThat pattern of ordinary life\u201d Kingsnorth mentions, as a kind of disguise of social fissures, could also apply to a lot of contemporary American literary fiction. Either as disguise or indifference, the lauded novels of our time tend to focus on the ordinary daily lives of the characters, rather than portraying the characters as intertwined with or impacted by political or environmental issues. Were there novels you turned to as models, either from the past or from your peers?<\/p>\n

OFFILL<\/p>\n

Lydia Millet\u2019s trilogy How the Dead Dream<\/em>, Ghost Lights<\/em>, and Magnificence <\/em>is always my model for how to write well about these things. I was also influenced by Amitav Ghosh\u2019s nonfiction book The Great Derangement. <\/em>One of the most brilliant \u201cclimate change\u201d novels was written nearly thirty years ago: Octavia Butler\u2019s The Parable of the Sower<\/em>.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

The narrator of Dept. of Speculation<\/em> was a Brooklyn author dealing with motherhood, her artistic ambitions, and infidelity. In Weather<\/em>, the crisis is outside the narrator\u2019s home\u2014she grapples with climate change and the election of a dangerous president. What interested you in exploring the world around and beyond the narrator?<\/p>\n

OFFILL<\/p>\n

Well, she works in a library and people who work in libraries are constantly thinking about the world around them and their patrons as well as about what is going on in their own heads. So it seemed fitting to make Weather <\/em>have a wider field of concern.<\/p>\n

I spend a lot of time in both local and university libraries and one of the things you immediately notice is how much the people who work there function as emergency social workers for our threadbare social systems. Librarians should be designated official first responders at this point. When the economy crashed, many people turned to librarians for help writing r\u00e9sum\u00e9s or filling out job applications. Many librarians also find themselves on the front lines of our country\u2019s opioid crisis. Nearly any city library you go to will have people trained to administer Narcan or hold workshops to teach citizens how to help their addicted family and friends. They also hold literacy classes and after-school book clubs and a million other things that contribute to the community. Some are even experimenting with lovely programs such as toy or tool libraries within their space.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, everyone who ever meets a librarian says, Oh, lucky you, you get to sit around and read books all day.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

The library also works surprisingly well as a setting. You have all these minor, but important recurring characters, like the \u201cdoomed adjunct\u201d and a \u201cmostly enlightened\u201d woman.<\/p>\n

OFFILL<\/p>\n

Libraries are one of the last noncommercial spaces we have where everyone is welcome. They strike me as a little glimpse of how we could live if we chose to be a generous society rather than a fearful one.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

It does feel like we\u2019ve chosen to be a fearful society, particularly since Trump\u2019s election. You do such an astonishing job of capturing the fear that existed in the days immediately after that. I found it painful to read\u2014in a good way, I suppose\u2014because it forced me to acknowledge there was\u2014and there still is\u2014this kind of humming, imperceptible unease we\u2019ve all become inured to. Maybe we\u2019re dealing with it by TV binges or social media; it\u2019s too disturbing to really think about. How were you able to return to that moment of Trump\u2019s election and evoke the very specific and peculiar unease?<\/p>\n

OFFILL<\/p>\n

Oh, I don\u2019t think that unease ever left me. I didn\u2019t have to return. It waits for me every night when I turn off the light and think about the news of the day. But the unease was so strong that it overrode my introverted tendencies and made me start to explore collective action as an antidote to this pervasive fear and dread. In the political area, this meant lots of calling, letter writing, et cetera before the midterms. In terms of the climate, it has meant donating as much money as I can to long-standing environmental groups like the Center for Biological Diversity<\/a> which is fighting to save the Endangered Species Act. And I have also joined Extinction Rebellion, which is a nonviolent direct action group that reminds me in many ways of Act Up. One of its main demands is a quite simple one: tell the truth, which means admit that it is an emergency and act from that place.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

Despite the engagement with these issues, Weather<\/em> never feels didactic or expository. I imagine it wasn\u2019t easy to take on these subjects within the confines of a novel.<\/p>\n

OFFILL<\/p>\n

I tried very hard not to be didactic. I don\u2019t have the answers to these questions, so in that way it was easy not to be prescriptive or self-righteous. Also I am, by any measure, a hypocrite who has not figured out how to align my daily life with my conscience. Instead, I am the queen of half measures. I eat 85 percent less meat than I did five years ago. I take trains instead of planes sometimes. But that kind of incrementalism is all I\u2019ve managed. The only area where I have pushed myself at all is that, though I\u2019m not a joiner, I have decided that collective action is needed over the lonely individual kind.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

In terms of not being prescriptive or self-righteous, the use of language in this book is avowedly original, the opposite of a screed or lecture. Instead of authoritative statements, there are such startling sentences and moments of beauty. I know in the past you\u2019ve spoken about the importance of poetry, and the book has these moments where, formally, it feels like there\u2019s a necessary intervention of lyricism. Can you talk about these shifts in language, i.e., \u201cHard to believe that isn\u2019t joy the way it flies away when I fling it out the window.\u201d<\/p>\n

OFFILL<\/p>\n

I think Lizzie\u2019s mind just moves that way sometimes, especially when what she is experiencing is just a flicker of feeling, like this moment of interspecies curiosity. She says at one point early on that she has to be careful because she is prone to making sudden alliances with strangers. \u201cMy heart is prodigal,\u201d as she puts it. She is startled to discover that these alliances and moments of recognition are starting to include nonhuman creatures as well.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

She also discovers preppers and becomes more involved with activism when she starts working for Sylvia, her former mentor, who is now a popular podcaster. Did you spend time with these kinds of characters, in real life, while writing?<\/p>\n

OFFILL<\/p>\n

Yes. Activists in real life, preppers in the ether. Activists much preferred. The prepper world is fascinating, but sometimes if you go in too far you will find a really dark xenophobic or racist streak underlying all the talk of go bags and candles made out of a can of tuna fish. This is, of course, not true of all people who designate themselves as preppers. Some are genial back-to-the-land types, or friendly folks who want to live locally in case the intricacies of the global food chain collapse.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

Did the novel change, as you spent time in these worlds?<\/p>\n

OFFILL<\/p>\n

It became less about materially prepping and more about spiritual prepping, maybe. In this way, it mirrored my own sense of what I needed to do and what kinds of action I might take. This is why I included the section Tips for Trying Times on my website<\/a>. I am really interested in how people in other moments of history kept their spirits up in dark moments.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

Did writing about this moment of history help you with that aspect\u2014keeping spirits up in a dark moment? I wonder, since you seem drawn to writing about states of crisis, whether marital or environmental, if it is cathartic to explore them through art?<\/p>\n

OFFILL<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t know if it\u2019s cathartic. I\u2019m not sure I think that way. But it is deeply interesting to me to try to make something out of this endless swirl of thoughts and images and ideas in my head.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

There is a really striking moment in the novel when Sylvia says, \u201cWhat it means to be a good person, a moral person, is calculated differently in times of crisis than in ordinary circumstances.\u201d It seems to me that all your novels ask this question. In this moment, where the culture is so interested in the \u201cantihero\u201d and the \u201cbad guy,\u201d it feels almost defiant to care. How do you avoid that kind of pervasive cynicism?<\/p>\n

OFFILL<\/p>\n

Caring is all we have, I think. Cynicism is just a soft form of denial.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Rebecca Godfrey is the author of the true crime book, <\/em>Under the Bridge, and a novel, <\/em>The Torn Skirt.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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