She jokes comfortably with her husband, Ben, about leaving him. When she ’s not working, Lizzie tends to her small son, Eli, who is attending a giant new school that Lizzie frets is “not on the human scale.” She also helps her recovering addict brother, Henry, tend to his newborn daughter. Lizzie’s job is to answer letters from terrified listeners. For extra money, she also works as an assistant for her old thesis adviser, who runs an environmental podcast called Hell or High Water. Weather is narrated by Lizzie, a former PhD student who dropped out halfway through writing her dissertation now she works at her former university’s library. It’s about trying to understand climate change and motherhood - concepts so big that the mind can’t quite look at them dead on - by looking at them slantwise, through the smallest possible unit of thought. Jenny Offill’s Weather is a novel about living at the end of the world, which is to say that it is a novel about being alive right now.
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