She’s got a bum knee, an aging mother with infected and crumbling teeth whose generosity to the less fortunate exceeds her small “fixed income,” and a classicist husband who couldn’t get an academic job so ended up designing educational video games. Her “#1 fear is the acceleration of days” parenting her young son, Eli, involves “trying to undo the rush” of his growing up in a culture of ambitious striving and a cutthroat educational system. Soon she is contending with an onslaught of letters, from left-wingers terrified about climate change to right-wingers certain the end of the world is near.īut if Lizzie is a competent and compassionate caretaker, she’s also anxious and struggling, oppressed and exhausted. So when Sylvia, an expert on climate change who’s launched a podcast called “Hell and High Water,” asks her to take on the job of answering her e-mail, the position seems like a natural fit. Used as an expert, a confessor, a “fake shrink” by her patrons, her neighbors, and her family members, Lizzie is used to doling out advice, bolstering depressives, assuaging fear, solving problems.
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