The atoll has inspired her next book, Midway, which will again bring together the political and personal. It explores our collective environmental shame – “If you are going to write about guilt you write about albatrosses, Baudelaire’s albatross, Coleridge’s albatross” – and the “dubious cultural shame” of being a middle-aged woman on her own, “the whole crazy cat lady thing”, although in her case the cat is a parrot. “Even though I feel my life is very fulfilled and I feel creatively fulfilled and have the deepest friendships, I still feel somehow I didn’t do it properly,” she reflects. “So I want to interrogate that a bit.”
Above all, the book is going to be nothing less than a contemplation on the end of the world, “in a proper eschatological sense”. Hopefully, she says, there will be some jokes in there too. As she learned as a historian: “If you are going to write about something huge the only way to do it is to focus on something tiny and then spool out from that place.”
