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February 20, 2026
from We Loved It All: A Memory of Life
by Lydia Millet
“To me it doesn’t seem like a stretch for us to see our parenting...as a duty of care that reaches beyond the present.”—Lydia Millet
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Lydia Millet writes books of fiction and her story collection Love in Infant Monkeys was a Pulitzer Prize finalist, but her most recent book, We Loved It All: A Memory of Life, is nonfiction. It collects three long-form personal essays into what Caitlin Gibson calls “a profoundly evocative ode to life itself.”
We Loved It All is one of those beautiful, all-encompassing essay collections we admire at The Humble Essayist. Each essay wanders over a wide-range but the writing—intelligent, witty, and honest—pulls us forward, and in the end the many threads bear fruit in a theme about loving all life in a world threatened by mass extinction, loving bigger, loving better.
She writes short paragraphs, so I have had to cheat a bit by selecting a Passage of the Week in lieu of the Paragraph of the Week.
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Passage of the Week
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All that we really have to know is the need of all the young—the young beasts and the seedlings, along with the young we get to call our own.
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It's the young, these days, who ask us for mercy and wait for us to answer. Ask that we act in their names instead of our own. Ask that we tell ourselves a better story than the one about winning and losing, about conquering and subsuming. A story that embraces the past along with the future, the powerless and speechless along with the loud and the blustering.
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Even a story, say, that invites us not to want to be better than. But to want to be good.
—Lydia Millet
Commentary
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Lydia Millet’s cunningly designed collection begins with her family—our families—and the frustrating but ultimately fulfilling task of parenting. It expands over the course of three long essays to include loving the entire family of living things, even the hideously- faced anglerfish, to save life on the planet. To love bigger. To love better. She fears that such loving is not in our natures—mass extinction “is the ghost of the future”—and We Loved It All can be read as an elegy to all we love, but she doesn’t give up hope for “a better story.” She puts it this way: “To me it doesn’t seem like a stretch for us to see our parenting...as a duty of care that reaches beyond the present.” Let’s make a deal, she proposes. “What if we said our parenthood is not the lonely consecration of our own, of what emerged from us, but also of the many they depend on? What if we turned, in a dawning instant, and saw ourselves for what we are—the parents of the world to come?”
—THE
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Announcements
New Feature
The Humble Essayist Book Club
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A book club for essayists? Yes! Several times a year The Humble Essayist will devote an entire month of features to a book by one major essayist or an issue of a magazine and we invite you to read along. Our first book will be George Orwell: Selected Essays (Oxford). We will run the features during the month of September and encourage you to comment on it online. More to come.—THE
The Beloved Republic Recognized
by the PEN Award Series
The Beloved Republic has been selected for the Longlist for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay.
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PEN International is a worldwide association of writers, founded in London in 1921 to promote friendship and intellectual co-operation among writers everywhere. The association has autonomous International PEN centres in more than 100 countries.
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Other goals include emphasizing the role of literature in the development of mutual understanding and world culture; fighting for freedom of expression, and acting as a powerful voice on behalf of writers harassed, imprisoned and sometimes killed for their views.
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See the trailers below to learn more about the book.
The Beloved Republic by Steven Harvey
Available at Bookstores and Online
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See more at the author's website and check out our video trailers here.
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The Humble Essayist Press
Closes Book Publication Arm
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The Humble Essayist Press has always needed to stay humble in its ambitions, and with the publication of our final book, Time's Passage by Robert Root, the passage of time has brought the book publication arm of the Humble Essayist Press to an end. Its editors have set off on other composing and editing projects with much appreciation and admiration for the texts that THE Press was allowed to bring into the world. We hope those books continue to have readers and to those authors we urge, “Write on.” Thanks so much for giving us what you did.
All of the press's publications are still available. You can find them here. The Humble Essayist will still carry on and continue to feature the Paragraph of the Week.
