difficult weather

imagining the worlds that continue within collapse -- a bunch of book recs

Tuesday, around 4:45 pm, a near-derecho thunderstorm with 70 mph winds hit Pittsburgh hard. It was very sudden. We watched the rain blow wildly sideways, the power going out instantly, my husband scrambling to manually close our garage door. Our home was thankfully undamaged, we didn’t lose any trees, but there is a ton of damage elsewhere in our neighborhood and the whole city, and 500,000 people were initially without power. In a press conference with the Mayor, the electric company said it may take 5-7 days for complete restoration. On the scale of natural disasters, this is truly very minor, but it still has me feeling rattled. The next morning, we waited in a very, very long line for coffee at a Dunkin Donuts that was spared from the power outage, then took our kids and the contents of our freezer to the church where my husband is the facilities manager to recharge — literally and figuratively. The power is still out at our house on the third day. We’re camped out across town at my mom’s. I have never experienced the possibility of a prolonged power outage before. I watched old friends struggle in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene in North Carolina last year. A friend of mine is still evacuated from the fires in Los Angeles. I’ve checked Pittsburgh on the climate maps, feeling darkly relieved that it’s one of the “safer” areas of the country in terms of future disaster probability — but what kind of safety does that mean? Safety that still means 70 mph winds and damaged infrastructure that shuts down a city for days? It’s scary. I try not to feel that this experience is some kind of foreshadowing for something much worse. I just checked the outage map for the millionth time — the restoration time for our neighborhood is still “to be determined.”

In this power outage of undetermined length, my anxiety is reaching a fever pitch. 70 mph wind. But it’s been building for the past month or so, creeping up my back, slowly wrapping around my head. After months of great sleep, suddenly I’m up at night, worried. Too many uncontrollable threats, too fast and too slow. Too much to remember, to much to consider and plan. Do something? Or nothing? What’s right?

a page from The Antidote by Karen Russell which I’m not talking about much here but big recommend!

At night, after our little boys are asleep, I read fiction to try to settle my mind — so why have all the novels I’ve gravitated toward recently somehow landed squarely in the midst of cataclysmic catastrophe? My reading has been doing more unsettling than settling, but somehow I feel more comforted running toward the danger than away. I can’t stop thinking about collapse, ecological, financial, and societal, because it terrifies me. Big collapse, small collapse, collapse we imagine in the future, and collapse we’ve already lived or are living through (I’m thinking of covid, which none of us have actually really collectively processed in any meaningful way). Personal collapse (death of a loved one, loss of a home, etc.) and societal collapse (natural disaster, economic recession, political upheaval, war).

The Dust Bowl and the Great Depression’s double disaster a hundred years ago is one palmful of the past in which to rub up against collapse, to try to understand it, to figure out what it does to people and how we can survive it — if we can survive it. I’ve been thinking about the Dust Bowl a lot, reading multiple novels that use that season of America as setting. It made me think about what my prior impressions of the dust bowl were, before this deep dive. Some sort of vague understanding of people suffering, I guess — and then things improving slowly. We’ve all seen Dorothea Lange’s famous photograph, Migrant Mother, Nipomo, California — this woman has become an unwitting emblem of something. Resilience? Despair? Both and neither? Now that I’m a mother too, I try not to imagine myself in this woman’s shoes. Too easy to fall down that rabbit hole to a slantwise scary wonderland, but more and more it feels like all of us are kind of wobbling over the edge of some kind of devastating downward slide. I don’t want to linger there in this essay, in fear for the future, but it’s terribly terribly on my mind, and I expect it’s at least somewhat on yours too. I know I’m not alone when I say that I fear more for my children than I fear for myself. That somehow that fear grips me tighter than worry about my own singular fate. It makes me crave details. What really happened, and how? These families, how did they survive?

Last month, I listened to the audiobook of one thick dust bowl novel, Kristin Hannah’s The Four Winds, and I’m so glad I did. Hannah’s novel follows one family who winds up leaving their home farmland as migrants, Grapes of Wrath style. Through this book, I got to fully dive into the “mom protecting children through terrible circumstances” narrative, in a way that was more comforting than I expected. Like watching Lange’s Migrant Mother photograph come to life and tell me every choice she made and why, and feeling it all make sense. What do you choose when you have no choices? Who do you meet along the way? What is awful, what is beautiful? I don’t want to think about what it would be like to live in a shanty town, but I feel like my mind has expanded a little because I allowed my mind to linger there in fiction. I feel a little more sure that we all have what we need inside of us to move through something big and bad, even though it is the last thing we want to do.

Large-scale collapse is a riveting setting for a novel. It equalizes characters, subjects everyone to the same overwhelming sets of challenges, and then the humaness and poetry is able to weave through that over-story. A lot of modern literary fiction is critiqued because “nothing happens” — you can’t say that about a novel set in collapse! The stakes are high, and those high stakes motivate everyone! It’s exciting! And unsettling. Communal fear, communal challenge, communal generosity or cruelty. Difficult weather does not discriminate. I’m working on a more in-depth essay (for one of my favorite publications, Image Journal) about an excellent Dust Bowl novel I read recently called The Antidote by Karen Russell — I’ll just share a single quote from it here because it pertains so much to what I’m thinking about here: “The great consolation of difficult weather is that we live in it together.”

Just before my dust bowl reading spree, I read Julia Armfield’s new novel, Private Rites, which is a family drama very similar to the 2023 film His Three Daughters (a film I loved, btw) but set in a future where the climate devastation is that it pretty much never stops raining — effectively the opposite of the dust bowl but just as horrible. A water bowl, causing global flooding and infrastructure and food system failure, with new solutions unable to keep up. I found this setting to be darkly fascinating (I had never thought about this kind of climate castastrophe!), and I especially loved that at times the book’s perspective jumped from the sisters to the city itself, allowing the collective to “speak” its sorrows.

That’s an imagined future, but we have real cataclysm in our past. I have found historical fiction to be a strange friend in the past few months. I mentioned The Vaster Wilds in the essay I wrote about survival fiction a few weeks ago — any preconceived notion I had or didn’t have about the experience of early colonists was swiftly kicked out from under me and replaced with the sheer scream of this story. The collapse of a new world. The collapse of displacement. The whole time I was reading it, I kept saying to myself, “I had no idea.” And I listened to another Kristian Hannah audiobook before The Four Winds, this one set in the Vietnam War — The Women. There’s really nothing like a very well researched historical novel to vividly show you how little you know of history — or how patchy the story you were told is. Had I ever even learned about the Vietnam War in any meaningful way? Collapse of war, collapse of post traumatic stress. A novel offers the chance to live it, to embody one person’s vivid perspective. It whisked me back to my American Girl doll fanaticism from my childhood. My over-identification with Kit and Samantha and Felicity. And, when I was a little older, the Dear America books. I learned about America through these character’s eyes. In some ways, that’s all I learned about America. History textbooks offer so little to the imagination, and I need all the help I can get.

The past isn’t the only place to confront our fears of collapse, though. Just last night in the midst of the power outage, I finished reading an incredible debut novel by Emma Pattee, Tilt. In this novel, Annie is nine months pregnant with her first baby trying to buy a crib at IKEA when a huge earthquake hits Portland, Oregon. She spends the rest of the novel traveling through the city on foot trying to find her husband in the wreckage, and remembering her life. Oh my gosh, this novel has shocked me — I think because this disaster is so recognizable, and so terribly possible. People have been talking about “the big one” forever. I pray it never happens. But what if it does? To a whole city full of people? Children, adults, pregnant women? This novel GOES THERE, and I feel honestly stunned by it. It sounds horrible, and it honestly kind of is, but it’s written with such care and tenderness that I feel very comfortable recommending it. Here, another inoculation. Annie is a deeply lovable protagonist (at least for me) and this novel felt like a gentle place to wander through wreckage that we are only barely separated from. For now, for now, our lives are so tender, so real. Remember that. I used to think it was dangerous to imagine disasters. Now, I think it’s not only safe but helpful. To imagine the life inside the disaster and, possibly, the life afterward too.

Maybe it’s time for me to read happier novels in which nothing horrifying happens?! Lol, we’ll see where the wind blows me. Stay safe, friends. History is wild and we are inside of it! But maybe not quite yet. I just started reading Land of Milk and Honey by C Pam Zhang, which imagines yet another form of climate collapse — this time a pervasive eternal smog crippling the food system. The protagonist is a young chef who longs for all the foods that used to exist. The twist in this book is that the chef escapes to work at none other than a billionaire’s secret mountaintop compound where (surprised) they’ve somehow managed to grow things that are long gone in the rest of the world! Stockpiles of every wonderful food. It seems wonderful, but all the signs are there that it isn’t so simple. The chef escapes collapse, but at what cost? That’s what this book seems to be keen to explore. The consolation of difficult weather is that we live in it together — but what if you don’t? What if you’re suddenly spared, and alone? What then?

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You can find all the books I mention in this essay here, on Bookshop!

I wrote about reading survival fiction in February — similar but different. Lol, I really need to find some happy go lucky books! If you only read one book from that list, read The Wall. Seriously, I think it changed my life forever.

Note: Book links are affiliate links, so I’ll make a tiny bit of money if you purchase from links, so that’s a great way to support me in a small way if you choose to buy one of the books I mention!

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amy