A marriage, told in fragments: notes, observations, aphorisms, overheard conversations, quotations from philosophers and astronauts. The wife is a writer. Her husband has an affair. The novel is about the collapse and possible reconstruction of a life built on a particular idea of love.
Lizzie Benson is a librarian, a mother, a sister to a difficult brother in recovery. Her former mentor, a climate scientist, asks her to answer listener mail for her podcast on environmental collapse. The novel moves between Lizzie's domestic life and the approaching catastrophe — climate anxiety as the ambient condition of contemporary American life.