An emerging genre of climate memoirs searches for narratives that will not only convince readers of the crisis at hand but galvanize them to do something about it.
,” last year—is a persistent cultural obsession, the negative image of Silicon Valley techno-optimism. Fiction has the virtue of allowing us to imagine alternate futures—its speculative power is, it is sometimes asserted, where new ideas might emerge. But as artists and entertainers continue to dream, our nightmare crises continue to multiply; futurism can be a talisman for warding off problems that are already here.
This introspection, the bedrock of memoir, gives us a self-aware and self-critical voice, but Sherrell, one senses, is restless in this safe, if expansive, interiority. To write clearly about climate change will always involve reaching out into collective experience, and so the heart of Sherrell’s book is not a diary but a letter.
As a narrative structure, Sherrell’s letter to the future takes uncertainty as its premise but also its engine: what existence would we hope for if they did? “I am not asking here whether I should have you, but what I owe you if I do,” Sherrell writes. Sharing our anxieties about this future is the beginning of reimagining it:
This ongoing—perhaps never-ending—effort brings to mind the notion, sometimes attributed to Simone Weil, that attention, “taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer.” Prayer is inscribed in the form of memoir, at least from the time of, who might be said to have written the first one. Like the climate memoirists, Augustine was confronted with the difficulty of speaking about things already understood by his audience—in his case, by God.
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