Midway

Summary

The atoll has inspired her next book, Midway, which will again bring together the political and personal. It explores our collective environmental shame—“If you are going to write about guilt you write about albatrosses, Baudelaire’s albatross, Coleridge’s albatross”—and the “dubious cultural shame” of being a middle-aged woman on her own, “the whole crazy cat lady thing,” although in her case the cat is a parrot. “Even though I feel my life is very fulfilled and I feel creatively fulfilled and have the deepest friendships, I still feel somehow I didn’t do it properly,” she reflects. “So I want to interrogate that a bit.”

Above all, the book is going to be nothing less than a contemplation on the end of the world, “in a proper eschatological sense.” Hopefully, she says, there will be some jokes in there too. As she learned as a historian: “If you are going to write about something huge the only way to do it is to focus on something tiny and then spool out from that place.”