Hope is extremely important, but it will come later. When your house is on fire you don’t start by sitting down at the kitchen table and telling the family how nice it will be once you’ve finished renovating and building the add-ons. When your house is on fire you call 999, you waken everyone you can and you crawl towards the front door.’ [loc. 1803]
Our House Is On Fire: Scenes of a Family and a Planet in Crisis was written by Greta Thunberg, her mother Malena Ernman (the primary narrator), her father Svante and her sister Beata. The personal is political, and the microcosm of Greta's family -- her own, initially undiagnosed autism, her sister's ADHD, her mother's international opera career, her father's youthful habit of memorising airline timetables -- is the more immediate aspect of the book. It's an intimate and honest account of the sheer difficulty of living with, and finding a diagnosis for, a young girl whose psychiatric problems are inextricably entwined with her growing understanding of the headlong rush towards ecological catastrophe. The family theorise that the girls' mental health issues are part of a web of issues that disproportionately affect women and the highly sensitive: that the mental health epidemic, with its facets of loneliness, isolation, depression and inability to adjust to the modern world, is the result of prioritising wealth and power over the natural world and the human mind.
I found the 'family' chapters, the story of how they reimagined and redefined and renegotiated their lives together, moving and relateable: the sections on climate change didn't feel as thoughtful or as well-presented. Possibly because, like most people, I've heard them all before -- sometimes literally, in that there are phrases that recur in Greta's speeches -- and possibly because they are written in oratory style: many short sentences, building on one another. There isn't much in the way of solid fact here, but that's fine because we all know where to find it: however, I would have liked slightly more supporting science.
Read for the 'a woman who inspires you' element of the Reading Women Challenge 2020: I really struggled with this rubric because I found it hard to identify 'famous' women who I find inspirational. I'm amazed and impressed by Greta, though, and I am inspired by her message (nobody is too small to make a difference) and her forthright delivery of it.
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