Lydia Millet is an acclaimed novelist, the author of more than a dozen books, but like many writers, she still holds a day job—in her case, as a staffer at the Center for Biological Diversity. In her first nonfiction book, We Loved It All: A Memory of Life (Norton, 2024), Millet welds a novelist's lyricism to an activist's passion to create a genre-bending work packed with wisdom. We Loved It All is one part personal history to two parts meditation as the author blends recollections of family, friends, and lovers with musings about humans' often murderous behavior toward other species.

An anecdote about the challenges of raising mindful children in the age of ever-present screens leads to a disquisition on the legacy of the Romantic-era geographer and naturalist Alexander von Humboldt and his "holistic and rhapsodic view of nature." A memory about her father, an Egyptologist, spills into a rumination about the power of visual media, the tug of religion, and how "graven images" shape our view of the world. Millet puts her heart on the page, but most of the time her prose is wry, sardonic. "Climate doomsaying," she writes, "can feel like a psy-ops of despair." At one point, she quips, "Like Victorian children, the plants are seen but not heard."

As the shards of memory and associations ricochet off one another, Millet's larger point becomes clear: We are nothing more than the sum of our relationships, to one another and to the other living beings with whom we share the planet.