i eat the stars book cover

I eat the stars, by Sarah Wilson. I listened to her podcast “wild” a few years ago, and I kept seeing this book in my mastodon and blogs I read.

This is a book about her journey through accepting the metacrisis, a very first person account of her struggle of giving up green hope and what came after that.

It reads like an existentialist quest to make sense of the post hope world, grabbing ideas from everywhere while trying to stay true to herself in a world that can’t be fully understood.

Trying to explain the structure of this book is difficult because some of the chapters go a bit backward in the narrative, but roughly I would describe as:

  1. On losing hope

and a few loops of:

  1. Describing collapse
  2. Some solutions or observations
  3. Feelings and resolutions

I believe the first 3 chapters on losing hope (1) are the strongest, perhaps because they resonated with me. But I also believe they were a bit stronger as a narrative.

The bulk of the book is about describing collapse (2), but it keeps going forwards and backwards between describing it, ways it makes people feel(4), ways that people deal with them (3). These chapters are a bit uneven and sometimes repetitive because a previous chapter discussed similar ideas already.

Another reason it reminds me of existentialist writing is the number of references it contains. I think that her guests in her podcast and the research that she did really shine, but they also make the lack of structure stand out even more.

Despite the structural issues, there are many interesting ideas and references. I really liked the moloch chapter describing the game theory that keep us digging the hole. The degrowth chapters are a great summary. Some of the “rising to the moment” chapters feel honest, and overall I got a sense of optimism post hope that she manages to communicate through the words.

There are two other things that stand out: The first one is that this is a broad text as it covers many approaches, in particular on being wiser about collapse. The second thing is that on making the case of abandoning hope and living after it, it is the most compelling by far.

The framing of abandoning hope and that being a positive thing is, in my opinion, the most valuable thing I got out of this book. This is in contrast with more “degrowth” books that focus on the technical aspects or the necessity of it.

I haven’t finished reading the book “Hospicing modernity” , but I think it is a good reference point to compare given how similar their post-hope goals are. This book is considerably easier to read, more engaging and direct. Hospicing modernity feels like an academic that has experienced most of these things with many people and is ready to share frameworks to deal with it. It is a harder read and some of the frameworks don’t quite land for me, but more complete in many ways.

I would recommend this book for people that are going through a “post-green hope” and need a bit of optimism or a way forward.