Immemorial
Lauren Markham has made a life with words. Her journalistic career centers on human migration and climate change, hard-to-describe crises that move slowly to the collective and very fast to the individual. She has won awards for her ability to capture these stories in language. In Immemorial, however, she is at a loss for words.
Markham’s new book is a sharply focused memoir of the struggle to communicate the individual cost of civilizational problems, particularly climate change. It chronicles a writer’s search for a word to capture the feeling of wanting individually to memorialize the world we are losing while also knowing that we are not collectively doing what is in our power to save it.
Markham’s skill as a writer highlights the inarticulability of her subject. She displays prodigious curiosity as she stitches together inspirations ranging from the neologism-coining Bureau of Linguistical Reality, Vietnam Veterans Memorial designer Maya Lin, Slovenian artists reclaiming a WWII-era prison, and her own pregnancy in the aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic.
