Lizzie Benson slid into her job as a librarian without a traditional degree. But this gives her a vantage point from which to practice her other calling: she is a fake shrink. For years, she has tended to her God-haunted mother and her recovering addict brother. They have both stabilized for the moment, but Lizzie has little chance to spend her new free time with her husband and son before her old mentor, Sylvia Liller, makes a proposal. She's become famous for her prescient podcast, Hell and High Water, and wants to hire Lizzie to answer the mail she receives: from left-wingers worried about climate change and right wingers worried about the decline of western civilization. As Lizzie dives into this polarized world, she begins to wonder what it means to keep tending your own garden once you've seen the flames beyond its walls.
year: 2020
call number/section: 1000
subjects: librarians, fiction, family life, family, fiction, working mothers, helping behavior, disasters, psychological fiction, psychological fiction
Editions
Offill, Jenny
Alfred A. Knopf (2020)
Lizzie Benson slid into her job as a librarian without a traditional degree. But this gives her a vantage point from which to practice her other calling: she is a fake shrink. For years, she has tended to her God-haunted mother and her recovering addict brother. They have both stabilized for the moment, but Lizzie has little chance to spend her new free time with her husband and son before her old mentor, Sylvia Liller, makes a proposal. She's become famous for her prescient podcast, Hell and High Water, and wants to hire Lizzie to answer the mail she receives: from left-wingers worried about climate change and right wingers worried about the decline of western civilization. As Lizzie dives into this polarized world, she begins to wonder what it means to keep tending your own garden once you've seen the flames beyond its walls.
Schools: 3
Offill, Jenny
Lizzie's work in the library of a university where she was a once-promising grad student is overshadowed by her side hustle answering letters for "Hell and High Water," a podcast hosted by her old mentor, characterized by doom and gloom. Lizzie is supposed to be answering these letters as an unofficial shrink, but as her own life as a wife and mother begins to suffer from her obsession with disaster psychology, writing notes of hope to the podcast correspondence becomes harder and less fulfilling.
Schools: 0