Book Review

Christy Tending’s High Priestess of the Apocalypse: A Memoir of Disobedience brings together thirty-nine short essays on climate grief, environmental activism, and becoming a parent in fraught times. These pieces, presented in a variety of formats, range from lyrical to instructive, from reminiscent to angry. Central themes of political protest and organizing carry us on an elliptical journey from her home state of Maryland, to logging sites in Canada, to Oakland, California where she now resides.

In the introduction, Tending asks, “How do we inspire ourselves into action in the face of hopelessness designed to keep us complacent?” In these pages, you won’t find direct solutions or platitudes to fix this rapidly changing planet. You will find one person’s unique and abiding resilience, her desire to fight institutions at the risk of peril, and, most compelling of all, her strength to question her own choices. She states, “My intention is not to speak for the climate movement, but to refract some light through the experience of my political life.”

Tending deftly loops around, re-examining topics from different angles. This stylistic choice feels, rather than repetitive, like a necessary underscoring, as if she is locking in her points, much like she might affix a banner or a cement barrel to a barricade in her line of work. Many pieces are written in second person, creating a sense of intimacy, and, at times, implication. In “Not Legal Advice” (which first appeared in Milk Candy Review) and “Arrestee Support Form,” it is as if we are co-conspirators, and we should therefore be prepared for tear gas and spending some time in jail.

We sense that Tending is grappling with her own inability to do everything, the impossibility to make the world safe for her son, and for us, too. The book is as much about what she has tried to accomplish, and what she couldn’t. In one particularly vivid piece, “The Ones for Luck,” Tending reminisces about an idyllic horse paddock in Maryland where she spent her adolescence. Unfortunately, it was demolished twenty years ago and replaced with a McMansion development. She writes, “I don’t remember how I reconciled being so busy blocking logging roads in Canada or campaigning to protest Indigenous rights in Indonesia that I failed to protect this one tract. I don’t remember how I’ve ever justified picking my battles.”

In “How to Freehand a Banner,” Tending reiterates this concept of limitation. “Decide on your slogan,” she instructs. “Here is what we want, your banner will say. There will not be room to explain why the things we want are sacred, what they mean to our hearts . . . The banner does not have the space to explain all of this.”

Similarly, when Tending looks into the face of an ex-lover in “The Trouble with Little Violence” (which first appeared in Autofocus), she is searching “for a shred of what wasn’t there.” This recurrent acknowledgment of what’s missing harkens something more universal: We, as a society, are missing the cues, the hints, our planet’s cries for help. People like Tending are hearing the call, but are the rest of us listening? While Tending does point fingers at corporate America, she doesn’t shame her readers. Still, we can’t avoid considering our own complicity in our planet’s demise.

Note, however, that in Tending’s world, what’s missing from our actions, our protest signs, and our stories doesn’t necessarily represent defeat or ineffectuality. In fact, it can be the opposite. In “Memoir is Erasure Poetry,” she tells us that in the process of writing she is “cutting most of it away until what is left feels true and kind and real,” and that there is an argument for “withholding a story to strip it of its power.”

Part manifesto, part activist manual, part poetic rumination, High Priestess of the Apocalypse places us in the hands of a self-proclaimed “capable nerd” with a deep respect for Earth and a willingness to risk almost everything to protect it. Tending’s writing reverberates with the work of Rebecca Solnit and titles like Lessons for Survival by Emily Raboteau (Henry Holt and Co., 2024) and Everything That Rises by Brianna Craft (Chicago Review Press, 2023).

Tending takes us through a complicated and long-overdue breakup, her bouts of self-destruction, and lands, in the later essays, on domestic life with her son, her cats, and the tender moments with her husband, a fellow anarchist. Motherhood forces her to add a new layer into her belief system and lifestyle as a disruptor; her son, we see clearly, has provided his own beautiful disruption.

What’s most admirable here is Tending’s vacillation between confidence and uncertainty. In “I Sleep Just Fine,” she writes, “I did not set out to be the villain any more than I set out to be the hero. I move from love, and the rest is logistics . . . But the logistics, it turns out, are my zone of particular genius.” While Tending knows her strength, she often finds herself in a state of questioning. It is in her admissions that she is “winging it,” in her faltering, her nods to complication, where she reveals her accumulated wisdom. “This book draws on twenty-five years of Buddhism, twenty years of direct action experience and seven years of parenting, and a pervasive feeling that I still have no idea what I’m doing.”

For those of us who have never filled out an arrestee police form or built a concrete barrel for blockades, but may have instead fought other political fights involving different complications and disappointments, Tending’s words are an inspiration and a balm. Her experiences and this artful rendering are a testament to the necessity of pushing against power systems, and also a testament to the individuals, like Tending herself—each with their beating hearts—who comprise a movement.

Tending doesn’t pretend to have all the answers, but she assures us (and herself) (and her son) that she “will hold all of it with both hands. One for soothing, one to fight.”