Bad things were happening every day, to be certain.
It’s just that there were so manyother, non-society-threatening elements at play, too.
Most of us didn’t even know the termdoomscrolling, much less use it regularly to rehash our evenings.
Credit: Emily Tobey; Vintage
One could say, even, that Jenny Offill was a preeminent doomscroller.
The author, whose work includes the lauded 2014 novelDept.
All along I’ve had this other doomer streak, about encroaching fascism.
That was a slightly quieter element in the book, but it’s definitely there.
At the time they just felt like someone’s strange personal point of view.
Of course, they were probably listening to, and getting it from, Info Wars.
Out of all the unsettling topics in the book, what keeps you up at night the most?
I kind of alternate between several topics that keep me up at night.
That was very funny to me.
She wants to keep seeing it as something that’s quite a bit in the future.
I actually think that I felt more dread and more fatalismbeforeI wrote the novel than afterward.
Your last novel,Dept.
of Speculation, followed a marriage collapsing, which is a very specific but highly emotional plot point.
Do you have a sense of whether that novel orWeather, elicits more reactions in your readers?
I now know about the affairs people have had people whose names I don’t even know.
I’ve noticed this with my students, too, that they absolutely think the way Lizzie does.
Going back to the comparison to my last two novels,Dept.is a very interior book.
I knew I wantedWeatherto be more outward-facing.
That’s why I made Lizzie a librarian.
The increments of time are subject to the elements.
In all your time researching forWeather,what was the most outrageous doomsday prepper purchase you made?
I have built, hilariously, quite the doomsday library.
They’ve made it through by building small communities where people are looking after each other.
At the beginning of the pandemic, though, I did order a lot of dry goods.
[Laughs]
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