Weather by Jenny Offill
Lizzie Benson, who lacks a formal degree, slipped into her position as a librarian. However, this affords her a platform from which to exercise her other profession—she is a fake shrink. She has cared for her God-haunted mother and her sober brother for many years. While they have both temporarily stabilized, Lizzie won’t have much time to enjoy her newfound free time with her husband and son before her former mentor, Sylvia Liller, makes a proposal. Sylvia, who has gained notoriety for her prophetic podcast Hell and High Water, wants to recruit Lizzie to respond to the correspondence she receives from people on both the left and the right who are concerned about the future of western civilization.
Weather by Jenny Offill
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Lizzie is a married mother of a young son, a sad brother, and a university librarian. The events of Weather take place across a number of years, and while being a brief book, it is full of witty and touching remarks as Lizzie muses over current tragedies and offers philosophical reflections on ageing, climate change, false optimism, and, of course, marriage.
As Lizzie plunges into this divided world, she starts to ponder what it means to continue maintaining your own garden after having witnessed the fires outside of its boundaries. Lizzie is forced to confront the limitations of her own experience when her brother becomes a parent and Sylvia withdraws into herself. Despite this, Lizzie continues to work to save everyone by applying everything she has learned about empathy and despair, conscience and collusion, from her years spent rummaging through library stacks. The city’s humorous, unsettling, and steadily crazier voices keep wafting in during this time.
This book is a true gem! This work tackles many of the concerns of our day and is incredibly well-written, intelligent, and even humorous at times. If you like only straightforward prose, you should probably avoid this book. It nearly reads like a well-written stand-up comedy performance in writing. Each passage has a razor-sharp edge and stirs up strong feelings in you. Sometimes you can relate to the main character Lizzie’s feelings of fear and anger while also grinning at her wry sense of humour in the following sentence.
It’s simple to lose one’s own identity when there are so many demands and expectations placed on us every day. Lizzie tries to balance her extended family and her close family (her husband and son) (a brother who is a recovering drug addict and father to an infant daughter). Not to mention juggling her work as a librarian with helping a former mentor spread the crucial and urgent word about climate change.
