Weather

(M)y brother tells me a story about his NA meeting. A woman stood up and started ranting about antidepressants. What upset her most was that people were not disposing of them properly. They tested worms in the city sewers and found they contained high concentrations of Paxil and Prozac. When birds ate these worms, they stayed closer to home, made more elaborate nests, but appeared unmotivated to mate. “But were they happier?” I ask him. “Did they get more done in a given day?”

Weather is the story of a Lizzie Benson, married, with a young son, working in a library, though not a certified librarian, and her life in the world just before America's most recent election and just after. Lizzie goes to work part-time for her friend who runs a podcast about end time living.

Weather is told through hundreds of little shared conversations, jokes, aphorisms, and historical incidents. It's bleak—Lizzie's brother is an addict and she is his main source of support—but it's also wildly funny.

A conversation between Lizzie and her brother:

Afterward, we walk in the park. He's met someone maybe. But he doesn't think it's going to work out. She's too different from him. It takes me a while to figure out they haven't even been on a date yet. “You don't want to date someone like you, do you?” I ask him. Henry laughs. “God, no.”

A few days later, I yelled at him for losing his new lunch box, and he turned to me and said, Are you sure you're my mother? Sometimes you don't seem like a good enough person.

“Many of us subscribe to the same sentiment as our colleague Sherwood Rowland. He remarked to his wife one night after coming home: “The work is going well, but it looks like it might be the end of the world.”