A movement born without a face tends to acquire one. Since August 2018, when 15-year-old Greta Thunberg began a solo “school strike for the climate”, the teenager has become the unlikely face of climate activism. Our House Is On Fire is, among many other things, the story of how and why Greta came to be sitting on the pavement outside the Swedish parliament with a home-made placard. The book is co-authored by Greta, her mother Malena Ernman (the primary narrator), her father Svante, and her sister Beata. It is an urgent, lucid, courageous account.
“The personal is political” was a rallying cry for 1960s demonstrators, and the slogan applies neatly here. The first quarter of Our House Is On Fire describes events in 2011, when Greta sank into depression and the family’s expectations went “off-script” – for good. She “was slowly disappearing into some kind of darkness and little by little, bit by bit, she seemed to stop functioning. She stopped playing the piano. She stopped laughing. She stopped talking … She stopped eating.”
