Mireille Dushaw

We're getting, we're finding in many novels dealing with this question of what is happening to the weather?

What is happening to the climate?

And what does that mean for us in 30 years, in 50 years?

And what does that mean for our children?

And children at the heart of this novel, both in the form of her son, who's quite young, and her brother's new baby.

So this question about what's happening to the world and how to actually manage it in a novel, I think, is a really interesting one.

Because in dystopian fiction, you can go right into that disaster.

You can depict it and show it in all its sort of epic ways.

strangeness but the literary novel tends to be more interested in the quieter moments around events and the sort of everyday making the everyday strange and so i think she's found a really perfect form to do that because she's not she's not talking about the disaster whatever it may be directly she's talking about what it does to the way we think and the way we interact with people and our complicity in what's happening to the world

So I think that using vignettes is a really perfect form for that because it keeps you really focused on the detail rather than the great big coming apocalypse.

I've read that essay and it's extraordinary actually.

And part of what it's talking about is exactly what Jenny Offal is talking about.

It's this idea of anticipatory grief that if you, whether you choose to have a child or not have a child, you're sort of carrying this grief for what's yet to come.

And I started thinking about this and thinking, well, isn't that what it is to be a parent anyway?

You can never control the future for your child.

Your child is hopefully going to outlive you and you can't control what happens to them.

But this is sort of exacerbated by what we know is happening to the planet.

And so Lizzie is constantly thinking the 50 years ahead, the 30 years ahead, and looking at the predictions that are being made and thinking, will New York be livable for my son?

Do I need to be part of the climate departure?

She starts preparing a doomstead in a colder part of the country.