Jenny Offill Says The Singularity Is Just Tech's Version of The Rapture
How do we continue to put one foot in front of the other when we’re beyond hope? That’s the question explored in Weather, the much-anticipated third novel from Jenny Offill. Weather is a slim novel about Lizzie Benson, a librarian by day and armchair therapist by night, who can’t help but shoulder the burdens of her loved ones. Lizzie teams up with her old mentor, newly minted podcast star Sylvia, who hires Lizzie to answer the avalanche of mail she receives from listeners who fear the end of the world, whether it be delivered by climate change or by a heavenly rapture. In answering their apocalyptic questions, Lizzie is pushed to her limits, making for a canny, comic story about the raw power of human need, particularly in divisive times.
Offill has a kinetic mind—one that hops, skips, and free associates through troves of information. It shows on the page, with the novel hewn from abundant white space into crisp paragraphs that function as gemlike koans. What emerges is a powerful portrait of Trump’s America, brimming as it is with existential dread, nonstop information, and doomsday prophecies. Even so, Weather is a wise and hopeful novel, managing to locate deep meaning in the act of bearing witness to our slow slide toward the end of days. Esquire spoke with Offill about climate grief, disaster psychology, and why decamping to Mars isn’t the answer.
Esquire: When and how did this novel begin for you?
Jenny Offill: I think there were a couple of starting points. One of them was a decade of conversations with one of my closest friends, Lydia Millet, who’s a novelist who writes about climate change and also works at an environmental organization. I was also interested in an article about this English environmentalist, Paul Kingsnorth, who said, "I can't stand up here anymore and talk in this hopeful way. I feel like a priest who no longer believes in God. I'm going to walk away for a while." That moment made me feel like I wanted to figure out what was going on and what had changed, so I fell down the rabbit hole, where I learned how much worse things were than I had realized. What do we talk about if we don't talk about hope?
ESQ: What did you encounter in that rabbit hole?
JO: I love to do research, so pretty much anything I could do instead of actually writing the novel, I did. I started out trying to learn the science of it so that when someone said 1.5C or 2C parts per million, it wasn't just wonky talk to me. One of the things that can be hard when you're trying to read about climate stuff as a layman is that it's obviously all written in language for scientists. Sometimes that can mean it feels like a wall of statistics.
From reading that, I eventually found my way to a really great book about the psychology of why it's hard to talk about climate change and why it's hard to do anything about it, which was called Don't Even Think About It. That led me down the path of reading about sociology and disaster psychology. I also fell down the rabbit holes of prepping, with advice like, "Keep a guitar case with you so that you can leave town with it as a go bag and no one will know what you have in it." At a certain point, I pulled back from the prepper stuff and went more towards social sciences, art, and literature. Humans have been afraid of the same things for years, but this one feels new, because it affects everyone, and because this time it's not the religious prophets saying the end is nigh—it's scientists.
ESQ: Your research shows in the book's wealth of information. It calls to mind one moment where you write, "Regular life becomes more fragmented and bewildering.” Is that condition a consequence of our information-saturated way of life?
JO: It at least is a consequence for me. It's harder to have time to assemble all the different pieces of information and figure out what you want to conclude from them. Whenever I’m following politics really closely, I start to feel like I’m being hosed down with a million different facts and opinions. Simply understanding what’s happening starts to feel less and less possible.
ESQ: For anyone who feels similarly awash in information, how do we identify what's important or make meaning from it?
JO: I launched the Obligatory Note of Hope website. Much of it came from thinking about the novel and how to write the novel, and then when I was finished, there were all these resources I'd come across. When I tried to fit them in the novel, they capsized the book. The website has tips for trying times about how people have survived different dark periods of history. It's everything from wartime recipes to what people read during different periods of disaster to social science about what it means to collectively join with others.
Rebecca Solnit has written incredibly well about this in her book, A Paradise Built in Hell. She writes about disaster collectivism and how when people huddle together to get by, there's this sense of returning to what makes us human, which can be hard to find when we're all moving at such a pace. Also, I finally came across one statistic that actually made me feel better about things. Erica Chenoweth at Harvard looked at social movements throughout history and discovered that it takes 3.5% of the population becoming involved in a movement to tip the scales for substantial change. That doesn’t seem impossible.
At the end of Weather when the election comes into the picture, I wanted to play around with an idea I came across about search parties. Turns out it’s very common that missing people just walk right by the party searching for them. They often have to be tackled by the search and rescue team because they're in such a trance—they're so convinced they're lost and that they won’t be found. I thought: am I walking past my own search party by not allowing myself to join any collective enterprises? Because I'm an introvert, like most writers, the idea of any group seems hellish, but I've decided it's something that I need to stretch myself and try to do. I'm part of Extinction Rebellion now, which is a flawed group, but a group using the principles that made things like ACT UP or the civil rights movement tip over into public consciousness.
ESQ: The questions that Sylvia's listeners sent in are fascinating—they’re almost like riddles. One of my favorites is, “How will the last generation know it is the last generation?” How did you develop those questions?
JO: Some of them I made up, and some of them I found in weird evangelical rabbit holes. There's something called Rapture Watch that had some crazy questions. Some of the questions are my own questions, like, how can I prepare my children for the coming chaos? In my experience, if you go down the climate crisis rabbit hole, one of the first stops after being like "fuck, fuck fuck!" is, "How can I protect my own family?" Rich people have been doing this for many, many years, and a lot of it's starting to come out, like with the New Zealand purchases. As I got further into my own thoughts about it, I saw that this isn’t about barricading yourself and your family away from everyone. That's what I think the preppers get wrong. Someone like Bill McKibben, who's been working at his environmental organization called 350 forever, often says the best you can do as an individual is not to work as an individual—it’s to try to become part of the community. Right now we have a lot of online communities, so the idea of gatherings feels like an uphill climb. And yet, it's really how people have done things that worked.
I found this fascinating research about a social neuroscientist who researches loneliness. According to him, one of the reasons loneliness feels so terrible is because it's meant to be like pain, as it was very dangerous when we first evolved to be without a band of people working together to survive the elements. As our physical world becomes increasingly dangerous, looking back to that idea is really interesting. What kind of solidarity can be found? What kind of ways can we not go this alone?
ESQ: Some of the questions come from people with rather radical ideologies. How did you find your way into the mentalities of folks at the extreme ends of the political and religious spectrums?
JO: I grew up going to church camp. We didn't end up at the far-right side of the spectrum, Christian-wise, but I'm familiar with it. It's not a foreign language to me. I was not surprised to learn that many evangelical groups are not concerned about climate change because they feel that it’s part of the coming rapture, and that the destruction of this world as we know it is part of God's plan. If you have that point of view (I believe there are a few people in our government who share it), climate change is not a priority because it's God's will.
I felt like a translator between worlds. I knew the code words because I had briefly been in some more evangelical churches, though my parents ultimately ended up in a super progressive church. But, there were a couple of years that we went to some church where they said, "Fanta equals Satan if you change the letters around." I don't agree at all with that viewpoint, but I’m always interested in how people justify and rationalize their choices, and how I myself do that.
ESQ: I loved the scene where Sylvia and Lizzie have dinner with investors from Silicon Valley who have this idea that bringing back the wooly mammoths will solve climate change. To your mind, what should Silicon Valley be doing better or differently?
JO: I think they should get over their stupid ideas about going to Mars. We have a planet here that we're steadily making uninhabitable, but they’re spending money on quests to terraform another planet when there are ideas and solutions available on this one. Paul Hawken wrote Drawdown, which is rigorously researched with solutions to the problems of climate change. This trans-humanist idea that we're all going to eventually shed our bodies and go into the singularity—first of all, it's just flat out the tech version of the rapture, in my opinion. It's no less mystical and extreme. But if tech wants to help, they can’t assume that there’s one magic bullet. Someone said about climate change innovation that the big thing was going to be lots of little things. Also, they should fix our social media, which was invented by white men in their twenties, and think about how it could stop being a vector for so much anger and hate.
AW: Toward the end of the book, Sylvia writes, "The world continues to end." What struck me there is how the end of the world is banal and ongoing. Is there something quotidian about this moment?
JO: I think so. I tried to balance talk of that with Lizzie’s daily life, because I think all of us are existing on both planes. I think part of what makes people so anxious is the slinging in and out. In some ways it's easier to look directly at it than to keep looking away. There’s a book I really like by Stanley Cohen called States of Denial: Looking Away from Atrocity and Suffering. He writes about how there's a kind of denial that you know intellectually, but don’t want to feel or act on. He called that “twilight knowing.” We're all in a twilight knowing, with certain moments where things become frighteningly illuminated and certain moments where it goes dark again. I wanted to think about that with this character. She’s in a twilight knowing in the beginning and towards the end a bit less so, but it's a process. Never acknowledging how much it gets to you is a problem that I see with my students—it's causing them so much dread and anxiety.
ESQ: How is it shaping the stories they write?
JO: Last year I taught undergraduates, and what I noticed was that it was almost a throwaway in their work—how doomed they were, or how they probably wouldn't get to have children because they couldn't morally make that choice. This is not an outlier idea to them—this is something that they grew up with. That's why some of the strongest organizations right now are the youth-led ones, like Sunrise Movement and Extinction Rebellion. I think if more parents saw the incandescent rage that these teenagers and college students feel about the world they're inheriting, they would try to get involved. I don't want my daughter to look at me and say, “You knew all this and just continued on.”
ESQ: As for the structure of the book, you've written very few scenes in the traditional sense. What appeals to you about this more fragmented approach?
JO: I took a stylistic leap between my first novel and my second. I can see the throughline between them, certainly in terms of interest in cross-disciplinary things and stories nested in other stories, but I did put that in a more or less linear narrative. When I wrote Department of Speculation, I wanted to see if I could capture on the page the way my mind moved, which turns out to be fragmentary and associative. The difficulty is how to do that without seeming random or incoherent, and so I write things in little pieces, then let them stay for a while to see if they last in my mind. I let time filter out things that turn out to be less essential. I need the time to think it through—that’s how the layers come. As for Weather, I was interested in seeing if I could make it swirl or have little eddies. I was looking for a form that in some way mimicked the natural world, and that's why it doesn't have chapters—it has sections instead.
ESQ: A lot of the people in Lizzie’s life, whether they're central characters or people on the fringes, seem unstable. What draws you to characters that are a bit unhinged?
JO: Maybe I'm just unhinged myself. I'm drawn to characters who aren’t spinning that things are going better than they are. A lot of people I meet are struggling to make ends meet—they’re struggling to balance different parts of their life, and with bigger things like broken social systems and healthcare. I don’t know many people cruising along, feeling like everything is going well. I meet them sometimes, and they're those transhumanist people. They have a slickness to them—they’re not touched by much.
There’s also the setting of the library. I love libraries, but they're one of the last places we have in American culture where you can go for free. They do draw people for whom the library is one of the things keeping them tethered to the world.
ESQ: There's one question asked of Sylvia that I'd like to ask of you. The question is: “How do you maintain your optimism?”
JO: Ultimately I do feel optimistic. I feel a lot more optimistic than I did in the middle of writing this book. I feel quite optimistic about how good these youth movements are. Something like the Sunrise Movement—they don't want you if you're over 30. I think that’s great—that's what youth is. We need to pare down this old order and put something new there. People have been saying that in every generation, of course—there's a cycle to these things. I don't feel that the youth will save us all. I just feel that there's a possibility of different coalitions coming together, and a possibility of a lot of people who thought “this isn’t my problem” realizing that there is something here worth taking a stand for. It makes me optimistic in that 3.5% way.
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