We Loved It All A Memory of Life

– A Time Must-Read Book of 2024
– A Booklist Editors' Choice
– A Washington Post Notable Nonfiction Book of 2024

"A profoundly evocative ode to life itself, in all its strange and wondrous and imperiled forms."
– Caitlin Gibson, The Washington Post

"[A] wonderful and rewarding book."
– Dale Jamieson, Science

"[Lydia Millet is] as honest in her reflections on love, motherhood, and ambition as she is in capturing the terrifying realities of climate change. [We Loved It All] is a love letter to the earth and all who inhabit it, punctuated by sharp and lyrical prose."
– Annabel Gutterman, Time

"Best Book to Maintain Some Semblance of Faith in the Possibility for Goodness and Beauty in the World [...] an elegy for what we've lost. [...] And yet, because of the reverence with which Millet holds the world's wonders, and the love that courses through these essays, you cannot help but feel as though hope lives and great things are always possible, as long as we draw breath."
– John Warner, Chicago Tribune

"Brimming with wit and imagination."
– Nicole Chung, Esquire

"Millet's awe of nature is catching, even as it lives alongside the grief of our everyday destructions."
– Eliza Smith, Literary Hub

"A love letter to the earth and all who inhabit it, punctuated by sharp and lyrical prose."
– Annabel Gutterman, Time

"A recalibrating mix of memoir, facts, critique, and passages of elegiac beauty."
– Booklist, starred review

"In turns heartbreaking and inspiring, We Loved It All reminds us to hold every being dear at a time when we all need love more than ever."
– Amy Brady, Literary Hub

"We Loved It All casts a moving spell [...] [it is] emphatically beautiful at the line level and deeply insightful at an ecological level."
– Megan Mayhew-Bergman, Scientific American

"A rigorous, evocative, brilliant bow to life."
– Terry Tempest Williams, author of Erosion: Essays of Undoing

"We Loved It All is at once lyrical and densely packed, intimate and all-encompassing. It beautifully captures the current moment, in all its terrors and possibilities."
– Elizabeth Kolbert, author of The Sixth Extinction

"I love reading Lydia Millet, delight in the pithy observations of her all-seeing eye, and suspect her many admirers will be smitten with this deep-time story of our immersion in Earth's wild creatures and our hapless modern attempts to escape nature."
– Dan Flores, author of Wild New World and Coyote America

"Lydia Millet's novels have always worked on me like a drug; her tenderly sardonic voice and the command of her uncanny narrative velocity keep me turning pages like burning through a bag of chips without stopping to lick the salt off my fingers. We Loved It All will break your heart."
– Jonathan Lethem, author of Brooklyn Crime Novel

"An altogether unique book that allows you to watch a gorgeous mind at work. There is, quite apart from the magic of her writing, not a single page where you won't learn something new. We Loved It All will leave you breathless."
– Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, author of Lost Companions and When Elephants Weep

"[A] profoundly affecting meditation on what it means to live through climate change. [...] In scintillating prose, Millet makes a passionate case that humans must own up to their responsibilities to each other and the natural world. [...] Mournful and piercingly beautiful, this will stick with readers long after they finish the last page."
– Publishers Weekly, starred review

"In her first work of nonfiction, [Millet] steps into the light, sharing personal stories and her informed observations of the extinction crisis [...] [We Loved It All is] a recalibrating mix of memoir, facts, critique, and passages of elegiac beauty."
– Donna Seaman, Booklist (starred review)