My ~*process*~ for writing these emails is:
Enjoy books, music, stuff, outside cats
Start writing about books, music, stuff, outside cats
Forget about it
Finish writing and pray I haven’t missed any typos and hit send
Step 3 took a lot longer than usual this time because I was busy doing… something, surely, but who can remember?
All of this is to note that a week later I’m still pretty upset about this book.
— Ashley
let me tell you about this book
When I finished reading Lydia Millet’s A Children’s Bible I immediately recommended and then un-recommended (dis-recommended?) it to a friend. Suggesting it feels a bit like suggesting you eat a gallon of ice cream. It’s going to be so good but you’re going to feel very bad when you’re done.
The gist:
A Children’s Bible follows a group of twelve eerily mature children on a forced vacation with their families at a sprawling lakeside mansion. Contemptuous of their parents, the children decide to run away when a destructive storm descends on the summer estate, embarking on a dangerous foray into the apocalyptic chaos outside. Lydia Millet’s prophetic and heartbreaking story of generational divide offers a haunting vision of what awaits us on the far side of Revelation.
It’s a slightly off-kilter adventure with a big cast of characters, each with their own persona-defining quirks and maybe even Biblical counterparts. There are tree houses, boat expeditions, generational struggles, class divides, precocious little brothers, teen hormones, diseases, guns, and some truly savage commentary on adulthood in the eyes of youth. It’d be a great read even if Millet didn’t have a bigger point to make.
The thing is, the climate change apocalypse in this story seems to be happening in the very near future and also feels very possible. We’re just a few months past Hurricane Ida and its remnants — it’s remnants! — killing more than 80 people from the Louisiana coast through the Northeast. Parts of Louisiana were barely habitable for weeks and months. A series of monster storms that leads to the collapse of civilization doesn’t seem that far-fetched. I thought reading this might be easier to deal with outside of hurricane season but it turns out my climate anxiety is not at all confined to immediate threats.1 This is a defining characteristic of all my anxieties, but I didn’t think that hard about it, OK?
A n y w a y.
Survival drives the plot but the generational tension is what really slapped me across the face. The parents in A Children’s Bible are well-off intellectuals who drink non-stop and only barely concern themselves with their kids. And those kids, who haven’t met before, are so filled with contempt for them that they make a game of hiding their parentage from each other. In the face of disaster, the parents are beyond incompetent. They fall apart. And while the kids have plenty of disdain for the way their parents act in the moment, they’re outright angry and disgusted at the way they behaved in the past. Specifically: doing absolutely nothing to reverse the course of climate change.
“You gave up the world,” said David.
“You let them turn it all to shit,” said Low.
“I hate to disappoint you, but we don’t have that much power,” said a father.
“Yeah, and that’s what they all said,” said Jen.
“Listen, we know we let you down,” said a mother. “But what could we have done, really?”
“Fight,” said Rafe. “Did you ever fight?”
“Or did you just do exactly what you wanted?” said Jen. “Always?”
Am I fighting? Or am I doing more harm than good? If I have kids, can I look them in the eye and say I tried? I don’t know. And that’s a bad feeling that we should all face. So I’m recommending you eat the ice cream.
let me tell you about this thing
I’ve purchased three light green collared shirts in the 34th year of my life and Rihanna’s life. Four if you count mock-neck as a collar and a pale olive as a light green, which I guess I do. I wrote about one of them here last week but I just got two more and, as previously mentioned, I’m on a temperature-inappropriate shopping bender.2
This particular LGCS™️ is totally different from the other LGCS™️ I wrote about. That one was a house and this one is a skin. A very thick skin, which I’m told you need to do things like send your writing to a lot of people, work in media, and be a woman.
You can’t quite tell but it’s sort of shiny and velvety. You can for sure tell that it’s very lime and snug.
Anyway, this is part of my recent and surprising discovery that PacSun has some good stuff. I thought it was just bikinis and board shorts, to be honest. I also got this olive and white mock-neck checkered shirt (OaWMNCS™️). It’s about 80% less thick but 70% more stretchy. It’s 100% making me think I should join a ska band.
And it’s 81 degrees as I’m writing this.
It’s 81 degrees as I’m writing this.