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Ill Nature
Most of us watch with mild concern the fast-disappearing wild spaces or the recurrence of pollution-related crises such as oil spills, toxic blooms in fertilizer-enriched forests, and violence both home and abroad. Joy Williams does more than watch. In this collection of condemnations and love letters, revelations and cries for help, she brings to light the price of complacency with scathing wit and unexpected humor. Sounding the alarm over the disconnection from the natural world that our consumer culture has created, she takes on subjects as varied as the culling of elephants, electron-probed chimpanzees, vanishing wetlands, and the determination of American women to reproduce at any cost. Controversial, opinionated, at times exceptionally moving, Ill Nature is a clarion call for us to step out of our cars and cubicles, and do something to save our natural legacy.
192 pages, Paperback
First published February 1, 2001
30 people are currently reading
1072 people want to read
About the author
Joy Williams
78 books886 followersWilliams is the author of four novels. Her first, State of Grace (1973), was nominated for a National Book Award for Fiction. Her most recent novel, The Quick and the Dead (2000), was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Her first collection of short stories was Taking Care, published in 1982. A second collection, Escapes, followed in 1990. A 2001 essay collection, Ill Nature: Rants and Reflections on Humanity and Other Animals, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism. Honored Guest, a collection of short stories, was published in 2004. A 30th anniversary reprint of The Changeling was issued in 2008 with an introduction by the American novelist Rick Moody.
Her stories and essays are frequently anthologized, and she has received many awards and honors, including the Harold and Mildred Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Rea Award for the Short Story.
Her stories and essays are frequently anthologized, and she has received many awards and honors, including the Harold and Mildred Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Rea Award for the Short Story.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 58 reviews
April 11, 2019
This is a collection of brilliantly written, often funny but just as often (maybe more) painful essays on a variety of topics. Williams has a lot of valuable insight into ecological issues and her essay about her one acre of land in Florida was worth the entire collection. But then, so were many other of the essays. The one about her dog made me cry out loud. And her essay about writing--the process and the vision of it was of particular interest to me.
There are so many essays I want to mention--just about all in fact. I was lukewarm about hunting before reading her on this topic--not for it for myself but not especially worked up about it. She got me worked up!
Williams' prose, in her fiction and here as well, is always amazingly well-crafted and to the point. Her passion here in these essays is intense and enlivening. It made me realize how often I numb myself to a terrifying reality. It's a definite must-read but don't count on an easy time of it.
There are so many essays I want to mention--just about all in fact. I was lukewarm about hunting before reading her on this topic--not for it for myself but not especially worked up about it. She got me worked up!
Williams' prose, in her fiction and here as well, is always amazingly well-crafted and to the point. Her passion here in these essays is intense and enlivening. It made me realize how often I numb myself to a terrifying reality. It's a definite must-read but don't count on an easy time of it.
January 4, 2021
Readers familiar with Joy Williams’ fiction may be surprised at what they find in this collection of her essays. Many of them lack the subtlety and nuance that characterize her stories and novels. As Williams herself notes in the closing piece 'Why I Write', the style she developed for her essays 'was unelusive and strident and brashly one-sided.' Personally, I’ve long admired Williams for her fiction, and these essays have now elevated her standing even more in my mind.
Though most of these essays were initially published elsewhere, a theme of animals (including humans, typically portrayed as the villains) unites the collection. There is some of what in these types of collections I would often deem 'obligatory filler'—short pieces exclusive to the collection—if it weren’t that there is nothing Williams writes that I would consider to be filler. Her prevailing tone is blithely sarcastic with a dash of mordant wit. Fair warning, as well, to readers who do not support animal rights, as several of these are intended, in Williams’ words, 'to annoy and trouble and polarize' around this topic.
Here are a few selections from her armory of vitriol:
Hunting:
In summary, this collection of essays is likely to either alienate existing fans of Joy Williams’ fiction or further endear them to her. I don’t see much room for middle-ground reactions.
Though most of these essays were initially published elsewhere, a theme of animals (including humans, typically portrayed as the villains) unites the collection. There is some of what in these types of collections I would often deem 'obligatory filler'—short pieces exclusive to the collection—if it weren’t that there is nothing Williams writes that I would consider to be filler. Her prevailing tone is blithely sarcastic with a dash of mordant wit. Fair warning, as well, to readers who do not support animal rights, as several of these are intended, in Williams’ words, 'to annoy and trouble and polarize' around this topic.
Here are a few selections from her armory of vitriol:
Hunting:
Hunters like categories they can tailor to their needs. There are the 'good' animals—deer, elk, bear, moose—which are allowed to exist for the hunter’s pleasure. Then there are the 'bad' animals, the vermin, varmints, and 'nuisance' animals, the rabbits and raccoons and coyotes and beavers and badgers, which are disencouraged to exist. The hunter can have fun killing them, but the pleasure is diminished because the animals aren’t 'magnificent.'(Not that she doesn’t also have a sense of humor about it):
Camouflaged toilet paper is a must for the modern hunter, along with his Bronco and his beer. Too many hunters taking a dump in the woods with their roll of Charmin beside them were mistaken for white-tailed deer and shot. Hunters get excited. They’ll shoot anything—the pallid ass of another sportsman or even themselves.Destruction of the Everglades:
Ninety percent of the wading bird population has disappeared in fifty years, and gradually (quickly) 'one of the rarest places on earth' (as it is so frequently described) located conveniently (unfortunately) one hour from Miami, has become a horror show of extirpated species. On land, a water park with no water; at sea, a sick marine estuary turning into a murky, hyper-saline, superheated lagoon.Animal rights activism (the longest essay):
The call for a new, less anthropocentric ethic, an awakening, never acknowledges the reality, the difficulty of the animals in a new order. Changing the status of animals is discounted as a peripheral, even unworthy, concern.And humanity’s insistence on continuing to procreate:
Babies, babies, babies. There’s a plague of babies. Too many rabbits or elephants or mustangs or swans brings out the myxomatosis, the culling guns, the sterility drugs, the scientific brigade of egg smashers. Other species can 'strain their environments' or 'overrun their range' or clash with their human 'neighbors,' but human babies are always welcome at life’s banquet. Welcome, Welcome, Welcome—Live Long and Consume!There are, too, a few less caustic entries. One of my favorites pairs a reflection on sharks with a poignant examination of the life and death of Plasmatics vocalist and later solo musician Wendy O. Williams. Another describes the author’s efforts to preserve her one-acre property along a Florida lagoon in the face of inevitable encroaching development. She ends up building a ten-foot concrete-block wall to shield her ecological paradise from the increasingly busy bay access road. In the end when she has to move, she does manage to win a tiny victory for land preservation, and her tenacity in achieving that probably says more about her character than anything else revealed in the book. Finally, one of the later pieces pays tribute to a favorite dog who mysteriously turns against her.
In summary, this collection of essays is likely to either alienate existing fans of Joy Williams’ fiction or further endear them to her. I don’t see much room for middle-ground reactions.
August 5, 2020
4.5 rounded up
Highly readable collection primarily focusing on nature - hunting, safaris, The Everglades, animal testing, factory farming - with a essays on a handful of other topics too (Wendy O. Williams suicide, the Unabomber's cabin are two more memorable examples). My favourites were Hawk, which focuses on the aftermath of her beloved dog attacking her, and One Acre where she tells the story of the acre of land she buys in the late 60s in Siesta Key, Florida and "re-wilds". These are described as rants, and while at times they feel polemic they're written so well and in such a style that it's difficult not to feel won over by each and every argument Williams presents. Highly recommended!
For further reading: this 2019 article is a great review by Amy Hempel.
Highly readable collection primarily focusing on nature - hunting, safaris, The Everglades, animal testing, factory farming - with a essays on a handful of other topics too (Wendy O. Williams suicide, the Unabomber's cabin are two more memorable examples). My favourites were Hawk, which focuses on the aftermath of her beloved dog attacking her, and One Acre where she tells the story of the acre of land she buys in the late 60s in Siesta Key, Florida and "re-wilds". These are described as rants, and while at times they feel polemic they're written so well and in such a style that it's difficult not to feel won over by each and every argument Williams presents. Highly recommended!
For further reading: this 2019 article is a great review by Amy Hempel.
July 23, 2011
Joy Williams is angry and unrepentant, but also kind and sad. Though her primary topic here is the environment, or rather, what humans have done to the environment, mostly in ignorance, she also discusses the suicide of Wendy O. Williams, lead singer of the 80's punk band, the Plazmatics; the mauling she received from her beloved dog, Hawk; and Ted Kaczynski's cabin. In each of her essays, Williams expresses a deep curiousity (sometimes bordering on bafflement) and, more important, questions conventional wisdom, qualities any essay writer should have. Williams pushes this questioning to the extent of wondering why people continue to have babies in the face of a collapsing ecosystem. Hunters, real estate brokers, and eco-tourists will probably not feel welcomed by Williams, and at times even I became uncomfortable with her more strident declarations. But, more often than not, Williams comes across as a writer so in love with the world that she cannot bear to see it treated as it is, a sentiment similarly expressed when she writes about the decision to put down her dog who has inexplicably become violent. Speaking of her own essay writing style, Williams states, "It was unelusive and strident and brashly one-sided. [My essays] were meant to annoy and trouble and polarize. . ." Williams neglects to add that her essays reflect a deep passion for our planet, and her occasionally strident tone is meant to stir similar passions in her readers, and I cannot help but admire and respect her brave, uncompromising viewpoints.
February 14, 2008
I am teaching a course on writing about nature. We've read some gorgeous meditations on the beautiful earth, books that move me. And then there's Joy Williams, who simultaneously makes me laugh out loud and shake my head in agreement--even when she's doing things like attacking folks who have children (and I'm one of them.) Williams is pissed off about what we've done to the environment, and this book is one well-written, Molly Ivins-razor sharp poke in the eye essay after another. I can't recommend it highly enough.
The other day, driving through town, I saw a bumper sticker that reminded me of this book. It said: "At least the war on the environment is going well."
The other day, driving through town, I saw a bumper sticker that reminded me of this book. It said: "At least the war on the environment is going well."
January 21, 2014
A beautiful, often tragic book for environmentalists looking for some cathartic rage and can stand a little cognitive dissonance.
Joy Williams is as angry as I want to be and often am about our disconnection from and carelessness toward the environment. I disagree with her on her views toward hunting, given that I live in a state where it is not uncommon for people to hunt for protein as an extension of the slow-food movement and where hunters are dedicated conservationists calling for shorter seasons and increased research in order to save beleaguered and diseased elk herds. However, I admire Williams' fearlessness in her anger given that environmentalists, and women writers especially, are often told that their anger is hysterical and inconvenient.
Joy Williams is as angry as I want to be and often am about our disconnection from and carelessness toward the environment. I disagree with her on her views toward hunting, given that I live in a state where it is not uncommon for people to hunt for protein as an extension of the slow-food movement and where hunters are dedicated conservationists calling for shorter seasons and increased research in order to save beleaguered and diseased elk herds. However, I admire Williams' fearlessness in her anger given that environmentalists, and women writers especially, are often told that their anger is hysterical and inconvenient.
August 17, 2016
Library book.
As I sit and write this review across the street 5 houses are being demolished to make way for 23. Not a scrap of life remains on the lots because that would impede profit. Those doing the construction work will not be able to afford to live there. The developers and planners live some where else more classy. Those of us still living here are seen as potential development sites.
I agree with 99% of what the author writes. Many of today's norms are fatuous clichés, propped up by marketing. I can feel her frustration and anger too. She says it in a way that can make even those in agreement feel small and inadequate in their efforts to change things. I felt a bit hopeless on finishing.
For me her own ego seemed to loom so large as to get in the way of what she writes. Rants can clear the air but rarely solve a problem. To be fair she does subtitle the book "Rants and Reflections" so she is not necessarily offering solutions.
Humans are destroying the planet for profit and comfort. Overpopulation is beyond belief. There are countless people living in the most extreme poverty, while a small number prosper beyond imagining.
Those of us in between have an impact. Anyone who drives, travels, especially by air, buys anything shipped even from a small distance, eats, reads a book via paper or internet is inextricably entwined in the web of today's dysfunction. All actions have an effect both positive and negative. How do we alive right now make a difference? Not one of us lives without contradictions. The best we can do is try to have fewer and be mindful of those we do have.
I felt that those who are new to the ideas and concepts in the essays may not hear past her tone.
Those who don't care won't care, will even scorn what she says as not true.
As I sit and write this review across the street 5 houses are being demolished to make way for 23. Not a scrap of life remains on the lots because that would impede profit. Those doing the construction work will not be able to afford to live there. The developers and planners live some where else more classy. Those of us still living here are seen as potential development sites.
I agree with 99% of what the author writes. Many of today's norms are fatuous clichés, propped up by marketing. I can feel her frustration and anger too. She says it in a way that can make even those in agreement feel small and inadequate in their efforts to change things. I felt a bit hopeless on finishing.
For me her own ego seemed to loom so large as to get in the way of what she writes. Rants can clear the air but rarely solve a problem. To be fair she does subtitle the book "Rants and Reflections" so she is not necessarily offering solutions.
Humans are destroying the planet for profit and comfort. Overpopulation is beyond belief. There are countless people living in the most extreme poverty, while a small number prosper beyond imagining.
Those of us in between have an impact. Anyone who drives, travels, especially by air, buys anything shipped even from a small distance, eats, reads a book via paper or internet is inextricably entwined in the web of today's dysfunction. All actions have an effect both positive and negative. How do we alive right now make a difference? Not one of us lives without contradictions. The best we can do is try to have fewer and be mindful of those we do have.
I felt that those who are new to the ideas and concepts in the essays may not hear past her tone.
Those who don't care won't care, will even scorn what she says as not true.
August 16, 2008
Joy Williams’ nature essays present the stark nature of reality in the 21st Century. She often is caustic in her assault, abandoning any room in which the reader can be absolved from guilt and relax, even for a moment. Her prose, while very well written is off-putting. She is passionate about her subject matter, but her militant approach left this reader, an environmentalist, feeling attacked.
March 26, 2008
She rant so nice and sharp that I cry a little.
July 26, 2023
As she admits in the final essay, “Why I Write,” she wanted in her essays to be shrill and one sided and annoying. She is. Mostly. There are glimmers of something different, and I enjoyed those more- they came often at the middle length, interestingly, rather than the very short and very long. The very short essays often didn’t say much (they lacked the intensity of her short short stories); the long essays seemed simply to harangue and say the same thing again and again. The mid-length essays found a bit more balance and breath. I especially liked her essay about her house in Florida because it was about cultivating her own strange little space away from things and it was filled with obscure delight rather than vituperative biting. Her very short essay on the seasons also was a notch above. At other places the book unpleasantly poisonous, but it wasn’t impossible to force myself through simply because it’s also kind of interesting to read that much rage and hate and disgust in such literary hands (she’s like a character in a William Gass novel).
July 29, 2025
Dated but still worthwhile. Her more global analyses are pessimistic to the point of ignorance, but the more specific, personal essays about her dog Hawk and her acre of land in the Florida Keys were really beautiful and reminded me of Didion.
Sort of classically short-sighted but in a way that I don't mind: she's principled when it comes to animals, against killing of all kinds, for any reason. I don't agree with this but I like authors with real beliefs, especially difficult and merciful ones.
Sort of classically short-sighted but in a way that I don't mind: she's principled when it comes to animals, against killing of all kinds, for any reason. I don't agree with this but I like authors with real beliefs, especially difficult and merciful ones.
May 9, 2019
As always with a book of essays, some will hit harder than others. Many of these essays hit me (especially at the start and end), and hit me hard. Joy Williams is scorching, scathing, scalding. I needed this book.
June 18, 2017
Fans of JW's fiction should read this hellacious collection of essays for a different kind of but just as powerful head-on collision with her mind.
October 25, 2021
Sinners in the hands of an angry God. Brutal and really funny!
December 31, 2016
So these were intense.
I think my favorite thing about most of these was how much research she had clearly done. These are labeled as rants and she is definitely ranting but every rant is very thoroughly researched. It's impressive because who wants to do so much research into topics that are infuriating? But it's necessary to argue your case. I also liked her word choices and sentence structure. I found myself inspired to write my own essays about topics that are meaningful to me.
My favorite essays were probably One Acre (beautiful and descriptive - I felt like I lived there and I was encouraged to follow my dream to make my own One Acre somewhere one day) and Hawk (heart wrenching but beautifully written). I want to read the longer version of Sharks. Save the Whales, Screw the Shrimp; Safariland; The Killing Game; and The Case Against Babies were informative and amusing. The one I had the hardest time with was The Animal People mainly because it hit pretty close to home and I am still struggling about my own personal feelings on that issue.
Finally, Why I Write was inspiring for a young writer like me. I loved her brutal honesty and her lack of sugar coating.
I think my favorite thing about most of these was how much research she had clearly done. These are labeled as rants and she is definitely ranting but every rant is very thoroughly researched. It's impressive because who wants to do so much research into topics that are infuriating? But it's necessary to argue your case. I also liked her word choices and sentence structure. I found myself inspired to write my own essays about topics that are meaningful to me.
My favorite essays were probably One Acre (beautiful and descriptive - I felt like I lived there and I was encouraged to follow my dream to make my own One Acre somewhere one day) and Hawk (heart wrenching but beautifully written). I want to read the longer version of Sharks. Save the Whales, Screw the Shrimp; Safariland; The Killing Game; and The Case Against Babies were informative and amusing. The one I had the hardest time with was The Animal People mainly because it hit pretty close to home and I am still struggling about my own personal feelings on that issue.
Finally, Why I Write was inspiring for a young writer like me. I loved her brutal honesty and her lack of sugar coating.
September 3, 2019
"Beautiful, menacing and slightly out of control."
Death and suffering are a big part of writing. A big part. (To paraphrase and turn upon the very gifted Joy Williams; see page 49.) And you can't waste satire or pure hardcore ridicule on targets unworthy of the name. You've got to go after the people who kill animals, and you can't spare anybody. Sure it's duck soup to take aim at the National Rifle Association and the few Big Game Machos left in the world. Duck soup. And the sickie scientists who lobotomize chimps and torture rabbits just to see how long they can take it, their white coats starched and pressed, their nimble fingers taking copious notes. These targets are too easy. In the final analysis you gotta get the burger eaters, every one of them, not just the Super-Sized that waddle into the Burger King or the suburban Mommas sneaking out of the Krispy Kreme, bags of donuts like warm puppies under both arms, mouths stuffed. No, you've got to get the photo safari people who kill merely with their privileged, ignorant, dilettante PRESENCE in jungleland, a lily-livered affront to nature, over-tipping the guides and spilling martinis and overexposed film onto the purity of the veldt.
At any rate, this is the Joy Williams rant, and what I say is rant on, Voltaire!
This collection of magazine essays begins with "Save the Whales, Screw the Shrimp" in which Williams goes after the wishy-washy, faux lovers of nature, addressing them (in effect) as hey "you" with the "Big Gulp cups." Next is a short-short about rhesus monkeys being raised for laboratory research on an island charmingly called "Key Lois" (Laboratory Observing Island Simians). Williams follows this with "Safariland" in which she makes fun of the photo safari experience, reducing it to a kind of Disneyland with mosquito netting.
So far Joy Williams is just satirizing. Next comes a particularly brutal short-short on wildebeests, how they can't migrate to water during the dry season as they have for millions of years because there's a cattle fence that keeps them from the water they can smell. Williams is particularly vivid as she describes thousands of them up against the fence dying of thirst. But she's only warming up. In the next piece, "The Killing Game" and in a later piece, "The Animal People" we experience the full monty of Joy Williams unleashed. Now her writing becomes (as she describes it in the final essay entitled "Why I Write") "unelusive and strident and brashly one-sided." Her words are "meant to annoy and trouble and polarize, and they made readers...half nuts with rage and disdain." (pp. 209-210)
I believe it. I too love the animals, but I'd bet protozoa to primates that she'd find my efforts sadly lacking and my attitude wimpishly laissez faire.
I guess the best way to demonstrate the intent and style of this remarkable book is to just quote Joy Williams. Here's the opening lines of "The Case against Babies":
BABIES, BABIES, BABIES. There's a plague of babies. Too many rabbits or elephants or mustangs or swans brings out the myxomatosis, the culling guns, the sterility drugs, the scientific brigade of egg smashers. Other species can "strain their environments" or "overrun their range" or clash with their human "neighbors," but human babies are always welcome at life's banquet. Welcome, Welcome, Welcome--Live Long and Consume!
Joy Williams really is a kind of earthy Voltaire, a kind of meat cleaver (as opposed to rapier) Voltaire, a kind of take no prisoners master of satire, burlesque, ridicule and just plain old verbal assassination.
But she raises a profound and demoralizing question: what IS going to happen to all the animals that we claim to love so much? Both Joy Williams and I know. Only those fully compatible with humans (dogs, cats, aquarium fish) or those we can't do anything about (rats, mice, crows, sea gulls, sparrows) will survive. Joy knows this and she's angry. Her anger shows. But she's also resigned and that shows too. I know this not merely because of her tone but because of what she writes on page 209: "Nothing the writer can do is ever enough."
The denouement of the book (strangely it has one; Joy Williams is an artist) comes in the penultimate essay, "Hawk." Here we are stunned to learn that "Hawk," her German shepherd dog, whom she referred to as "my sweetie pie, my honey, my handsome boy, my love," whom she would kiss fondly on the nose, turned on her one day as she was leaving him at the vet and savagely bit into and ripped at her breast and then gnawed her arms, and had to be not destroyed, but given euthanasia and cremated.
I don't know what to say about this benumbing turn. Really I think Joy Williams is an artist whose inner artistic nature rises over and above her normal consciousness and tells us the truth in a way ordinary consciousness never could; and even here in a collection of non-fictional essays she has consciously or unconsciously employed the techniques of the master story teller that she is, and left us with a queasy sense of the madness of life while demonstrating that there is so much beyond our understanding.
This extraordinary book should be read not so much for the overpowering arguments against our misuse of animals, or for the undeniable demonstration of our "ill nature," but for the perfect power of her words. Anyone with any pretension toward mastery of language ought to read Joy Williams. In doing so we too might learn to write, as she does, in a manner that is "beautiful and menacing and slightly out of control." (p. 210)
--Dennis Littrell, author of “Novels and Other Fictions”
Death and suffering are a big part of writing. A big part. (To paraphrase and turn upon the very gifted Joy Williams; see page 49.) And you can't waste satire or pure hardcore ridicule on targets unworthy of the name. You've got to go after the people who kill animals, and you can't spare anybody. Sure it's duck soup to take aim at the National Rifle Association and the few Big Game Machos left in the world. Duck soup. And the sickie scientists who lobotomize chimps and torture rabbits just to see how long they can take it, their white coats starched and pressed, their nimble fingers taking copious notes. These targets are too easy. In the final analysis you gotta get the burger eaters, every one of them, not just the Super-Sized that waddle into the Burger King or the suburban Mommas sneaking out of the Krispy Kreme, bags of donuts like warm puppies under both arms, mouths stuffed. No, you've got to get the photo safari people who kill merely with their privileged, ignorant, dilettante PRESENCE in jungleland, a lily-livered affront to nature, over-tipping the guides and spilling martinis and overexposed film onto the purity of the veldt.
At any rate, this is the Joy Williams rant, and what I say is rant on, Voltaire!
This collection of magazine essays begins with "Save the Whales, Screw the Shrimp" in which Williams goes after the wishy-washy, faux lovers of nature, addressing them (in effect) as hey "you" with the "Big Gulp cups." Next is a short-short about rhesus monkeys being raised for laboratory research on an island charmingly called "Key Lois" (Laboratory Observing Island Simians). Williams follows this with "Safariland" in which she makes fun of the photo safari experience, reducing it to a kind of Disneyland with mosquito netting.
So far Joy Williams is just satirizing. Next comes a particularly brutal short-short on wildebeests, how they can't migrate to water during the dry season as they have for millions of years because there's a cattle fence that keeps them from the water they can smell. Williams is particularly vivid as she describes thousands of them up against the fence dying of thirst. But she's only warming up. In the next piece, "The Killing Game" and in a later piece, "The Animal People" we experience the full monty of Joy Williams unleashed. Now her writing becomes (as she describes it in the final essay entitled "Why I Write") "unelusive and strident and brashly one-sided." Her words are "meant to annoy and trouble and polarize, and they made readers...half nuts with rage and disdain." (pp. 209-210)
I believe it. I too love the animals, but I'd bet protozoa to primates that she'd find my efforts sadly lacking and my attitude wimpishly laissez faire.
I guess the best way to demonstrate the intent and style of this remarkable book is to just quote Joy Williams. Here's the opening lines of "The Case against Babies":
BABIES, BABIES, BABIES. There's a plague of babies. Too many rabbits or elephants or mustangs or swans brings out the myxomatosis, the culling guns, the sterility drugs, the scientific brigade of egg smashers. Other species can "strain their environments" or "overrun their range" or clash with their human "neighbors," but human babies are always welcome at life's banquet. Welcome, Welcome, Welcome--Live Long and Consume!
Joy Williams really is a kind of earthy Voltaire, a kind of meat cleaver (as opposed to rapier) Voltaire, a kind of take no prisoners master of satire, burlesque, ridicule and just plain old verbal assassination.
But she raises a profound and demoralizing question: what IS going to happen to all the animals that we claim to love so much? Both Joy Williams and I know. Only those fully compatible with humans (dogs, cats, aquarium fish) or those we can't do anything about (rats, mice, crows, sea gulls, sparrows) will survive. Joy knows this and she's angry. Her anger shows. But she's also resigned and that shows too. I know this not merely because of her tone but because of what she writes on page 209: "Nothing the writer can do is ever enough."
The denouement of the book (strangely it has one; Joy Williams is an artist) comes in the penultimate essay, "Hawk." Here we are stunned to learn that "Hawk," her German shepherd dog, whom she referred to as "my sweetie pie, my honey, my handsome boy, my love," whom she would kiss fondly on the nose, turned on her one day as she was leaving him at the vet and savagely bit into and ripped at her breast and then gnawed her arms, and had to be not destroyed, but given euthanasia and cremated.
I don't know what to say about this benumbing turn. Really I think Joy Williams is an artist whose inner artistic nature rises over and above her normal consciousness and tells us the truth in a way ordinary consciousness never could; and even here in a collection of non-fictional essays she has consciously or unconsciously employed the techniques of the master story teller that she is, and left us with a queasy sense of the madness of life while demonstrating that there is so much beyond our understanding.
This extraordinary book should be read not so much for the overpowering arguments against our misuse of animals, or for the undeniable demonstration of our "ill nature," but for the perfect power of her words. Anyone with any pretension toward mastery of language ought to read Joy Williams. In doing so we too might learn to write, as she does, in a manner that is "beautiful and menacing and slightly out of control." (p. 210)
--Dennis Littrell, author of “Novels and Other Fictions”
March 30, 2009
This was a mix of essays that included ones I really enjoyed, another few that were interesting, another that got me all fired up about the environment, another that made me cry, and another that wished I could talk to the author in person. I did not care for her style of writing.
November 12, 2015
I loved the angry, alarmed, intemperance of many of these essays, which writers won't usually allow themselves even when alarm is the only rational response to, for example, the despoliation of the Everglades. My favorites here were "Animal People" and "Hawk."
February 12, 2016
Not easy to read, necessary to read.
January 13, 2024
Picked up this book after seeing the author’s name mentioned in Tao Lin’s Leaving Society and this particular volume on Lin’s end of the year of books he read in 2023.
I’d never heard of Joyce Williams before, but this collection of essays, ostensibly about ecology, nature, etc appealed to me. I probably agree with most of Williams’ views expressed within about how human beings continue to be a scourge on the natural environment, and how we have, despite all our past and ongoing “progress” can’t seem to temper our desires to the consume and conquer everything we come across. From the get-go, however, Williams settles into a polemical mood, and barely lets up for the length of the book. At several points I was overcome by the sensation that I was reading a transcription of a George Carlin style rant - so much so was the rage and passion Williams feels about these topics practically spluttering off the page. A few of the more vitriolic essays often resort to listing human beings various ecological sins in an attempt to paint a sort of Boschian portrait of the hellscape the earth has become at our doing. I’ve never loved reading things that I simply agree with and that don’t offer me any novel nuance or intellectual challenge on a topic, and that was mostly the problem here. Maybe times have changed and the points Williams is making here just don’t seem so radical anymore, what with mass extinction and global warming all but certain at this point.
There were two essays in this collection that are excellent. The first is when Williams tells the saga of the property she owned in the Florida Keys for 30+ years. The valiant effort she made to create natural oasis amongst soulless development is really cool and her description of her home set me dreaming about the way I’d like to have my house in the future (if I ever have one). The second essay that really bowled me over was the one about her dog Hawk. I had to sit my book down for several long minutes after and stare into space to mulled over a bit the bleak and poignant beauty of this one, the contradictions of being a pet owner, the crushing responsibility of taking care of another living thing, and the uncanny descriptions of the process for disposal of pet remains.
will eventually get around to reading something else by Williams.
I’d never heard of Joyce Williams before, but this collection of essays, ostensibly about ecology, nature, etc appealed to me. I probably agree with most of Williams’ views expressed within about how human beings continue to be a scourge on the natural environment, and how we have, despite all our past and ongoing “progress” can’t seem to temper our desires to the consume and conquer everything we come across. From the get-go, however, Williams settles into a polemical mood, and barely lets up for the length of the book. At several points I was overcome by the sensation that I was reading a transcription of a George Carlin style rant - so much so was the rage and passion Williams feels about these topics practically spluttering off the page. A few of the more vitriolic essays often resort to listing human beings various ecological sins in an attempt to paint a sort of Boschian portrait of the hellscape the earth has become at our doing. I’ve never loved reading things that I simply agree with and that don’t offer me any novel nuance or intellectual challenge on a topic, and that was mostly the problem here. Maybe times have changed and the points Williams is making here just don’t seem so radical anymore, what with mass extinction and global warming all but certain at this point.
There were two essays in this collection that are excellent. The first is when Williams tells the saga of the property she owned in the Florida Keys for 30+ years. The valiant effort she made to create natural oasis amongst soulless development is really cool and her description of her home set me dreaming about the way I’d like to have my house in the future (if I ever have one). The second essay that really bowled me over was the one about her dog Hawk. I had to sit my book down for several long minutes after and stare into space to mulled over a bit the bleak and poignant beauty of this one, the contradictions of being a pet owner, the crushing responsibility of taking care of another living thing, and the uncanny descriptions of the process for disposal of pet remains.
will eventually get around to reading something else by Williams.
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February 16, 2024I'm reading through Lithub's 365 Books to Start Your Climate Change Library, a reading list in four sections (Classics, Science, Fiction & Poetry, and Ideas). This book is #5 of Part 1: The Classics and #44 overall.
The writing in this one is largely angry & acerbic in tone, which is not generally the type of climate writing I enjoy – not because that's not a completely understandable response to the state of things (even over 20 years ago when this was written, though my personal preference is something closer to depression/despondency), but instead because I just don't think it reads very well. However, some of the essays toward the end of the book about her house in Florida ("One Acre") and her dog ("Hawk") are really touching.
The writing in this one is largely angry & acerbic in tone, which is not generally the type of climate writing I enjoy – not because that's not a completely understandable response to the state of things (even over 20 years ago when this was written, though my personal preference is something closer to depression/despondency), but instead because I just don't think it reads very well. However, some of the essays toward the end of the book about her house in Florida ("One Acre") and her dog ("Hawk") are really touching.
December 12, 2018
This book is way ahead of its time. If I were teaching again I’d definitely use some of the essays in here for CNF. It’s amazing to read this almost 20 years after it’s publication and how much worse some of these issues have become and/or some of them have evolved. Fucking love the anti-hunting essay. Audubon was a dick. Florida is weird. Still curious about how dogs can turn on a dime. We have put so many more animals in danger thru our consumption. Williams tone might scare off some, but the writing is as gorgeous as it is honest. Reminds me of writing by Eileen Myles and Patti Smith. Can’t wait to read her novels.
December 4, 2020
This is a collection of material that has appeared in various magazines, and some of it can be read with enjoyment, but not all of it. While there is nothing wrong with Joy Williams' assessment of the tragedy of human depredation of nature, the unrelenting bitterness of her attack makes her argument unpleasant to read at length. Her meditation on the strange emotional experience of being savagely bitten by a well loved pet, though a much smaller issue, turns a more poignant key. I look forward to reading her fiction.
July 9, 2023
This was my third foray into the works of Joy Williams and by far the most comprehensible, her works of fiction being somewhat bizarre, to say the least. Her rants in this short essay collection are quite scathing in their condemnation of humanity in general and of the denizens of the WEIRD (Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic) world in particular, “The Case against Babies” being a particularly pointed example. I would recommend this book to people of an ecological bent who are on the more pessimistic end of the spectrum.
December 31, 2023
Pretty great collection of essays here. I came to this after adoring Williams’ collected short stories, The Visiting Privilege, last year, and this has only solidified my admiration of her writing and voice (despite these being quite different from her fiction). The essay “Hawk” on her dog and the one about her plot of land in the Florida Keys are true standouts. Lucky for me, I have more Joy Williams on my shelf for next year. 4/5
April 2, 2025
Joy Williams is my favorite writer. If I ever become a Christian or a vegetarian, it will have been in large part due to her. This tragic, horrifying, polemical lament (to refer to it as “a collection of essays” would be absurdly belittling) for the world we’ve destroyed is as vital as any of her fiction work. I got it as a gift for my boyfriend, then got myself another copy and two more besides for other friends, because dammit I want to proselytize
October 3, 2019
Essays that challenge everything you think you understand
This is my first read of Joy Williams. It will not be my last. The last essay alone on the soul of a writer is worth the price of the book. Her keen awareness of life in all its complexity takes the reader into unchartered paths of ethical conundrums.
This is my first read of Joy Williams. It will not be my last. The last essay alone on the soul of a writer is worth the price of the book. Her keen awareness of life in all its complexity takes the reader into unchartered paths of ethical conundrums.
January 18, 2022
Started in October, but started over and was able to breeze through it in a couple days. Read some of the essays in a creative nonfiction class during my undergrad, so I was excited to read the rest of the collection, since I didn’t when I borrowed a professor’s copy years back. Lots to consider. Very insightful. Equally inflammatory. Agreed with a lot but not everything. Worth checking out.
August 6, 2024
I wish I could give this collection of essays thousands of stars. Easily one of the best things I’ve read in the last few years. Smart, honest, heart-breaking, and unafraid. I have a literary crush on this book. It's perfect.
Rick Bass said it perfectly: "reading Joy Williams is like falling down into some blue subaqueous place of mesmerizing wonder."
Rick Bass said it perfectly: "reading Joy Williams is like falling down into some blue subaqueous place of mesmerizing wonder."
June 23, 2021
A very self-conscious writer. Williams tortures every thought, every sentence until it squeaks. She seems to have a paranoid fear of boring her audience. Paradoxically, that's precisely what she did in my case.
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