Our House Is on Fire: Greta Thunberg’s manifesto wants us to despair

Our House is on Fire

Author: Malena Ernman, Greta Thunberg, Beata Ernman, Svante Thunberg

ISBN-13: 978-0241446737

Publisher: Allen Lane

Guideline Price: £16.99

In August 2018, a girl with plaits sat on a blue cushion outside the Swedish houses of parliament holding a sign that said “skolstrejk för klimatet” – our world has not been the same since. The global school strike movement started on Greta Thunberg’s second day of protest, when a boy named Mayson sat down next to her. From then on, she has been joined by tens of thousands of other children all around the world.

Written primarily by Greta Thunberg’s mother, Malena Ernman, with sections by her father, Svante, and younger sister, Beata, Our House is on Fire: Scenes of a Family and a Planet is an unflinching look at both her family cosmos and the civilisation that it is embedded within.

The book was first published as Scener ur Hjärtat (Scenes from the Heart) in Sweden in 2018, the day before Greta rode her bike to her first school strike. Our House is on Fire is written in anticipation of a much wider audience and an awareness of a very different context, with Greta now a household name. Malena Ernman is a celebrity in Sweden, a successful opera singer. Now for most us, she is better known as Greta’s mother. Both books trace the long road and turmoil that led to the beginning of the story we are more familiar with.

Malena’s opera career takes the family all over Europe, a new city every month. They live an idyllic, bourgeois life of fin-de-siècle apartments and summers in Aix-en-Provence. The family is thrown into chaos when, aged 11, Greta stops talking to anyone outside her family. She cries all the time and can be comforted by no one but Moses the labrador. She can suddenly only eat certain foods: gnocchi, rice and avocado. It can take her two hours and ten minutes to eat five pieces of gnocchi. Malena and Svante struggle to respond – Greta screams for 40 minutes because in an outburst of panic, they tell her if she doesn’t eat more, she will die.

The family struggles to get appropriate medical help. They have difficulty finding a school that can accommodate their daughters’ needs, and it seems that Greta will fall between the cracks. It is alarming that even in Nordic countries mental health support and awareness is so severely lacking.

Eventually the Thunberg-Ernmans gain a diagnosis for Greta: high-functioning Asperger’s syndrome with obsessive compulsive disorder. But soon after the relief from Greta’s diagnosis, Beata, whose own conditions have been hidden by the crisis of her older sister, starts to present symptoms of her own. Malena begins to understand her daughters’ conditions as inextricable from the alienation and contradictions of modern life. Recalling her own teenage bulimia, and drawing on her diagnosis with ADHD at the age of 45, she points to the steep rise in mental health cases in recent decades and draws an explicit link between their drastic increase across society, and our dawning awareness of the alarming state of the planet.

Greta’s condition gives her a particular sensitivity to these contradictions. This is the source of her emotional turmoil, hitting just as she grows out of the solipsism of childhood. Her Asperger’s makes her see things exactly as they are. And how could life go on just as normal, with a plastic gyre in the ocean? Why is nobody doing anything about the plastic gyre in the ocean? Her tumult is compounded as she starts to understand herself as the only person really dwelling on the plastic gyre in the ocean. Perhaps it is this loneliness that stops her talking to others.

But what if, at the very same time that an awareness of the planet’s plight is starting to cripple us, it is also offering a life-raft, it is creating individuals with superpowers? Melana sees our modern psychiatric afflictions as a “symbiosis” – evidence of our deep, ongoing connection with a planet that is hurting. We are burned-out people living on a burned-out planet. Perhaps the earth has given us these superpowers at this time, and we have a last opportunity to harness them. Melana’s ADHD allows her to learn a whole script in a matter of hours, even as it cripples her in social contexts. Beata’s OCD makes her an intuitive, fluid dancer, and she dances without leaving the house all her hours of waking. And Greta’s Asperger’s makes her the perfect advocate for the living world.

In the media, in public, there are the many Russian dolls of Greta – Greta as a sage, Greta as salvation, Greta as a symptom of a fucked-up world, Greta as a teenager with selective mutism and an eating disorder. She lives inside those shells of selves seemingly more comfortably than a person without her Asperger’s diagnosis would. She has that “superpower”.

She struggles in the intricacies of social engagements, but she knows all of the facts and interlinking concepts that we fumble to keep a hold of, and using media as a platform to communicate this information is natural and simple to her. For lots of us social media is too real, and it amplifies the stickiness of social interaction tenfold by promising to hold on to everything you say and do forever. But Greta seems to intuitively understand, like her mother, its power and utilisation.

“I want you to take out your phones and film what I’m saying. Then you can put it on social media”, she says to a crowd she is giving her first ever speech to.

And likewise celebrity. Melana has written what is a polemical, a manifesto, smuggled in under the cloak of a celebrity memoir. It is cunning and clever. We are ushered along with tidbits of what we want, we are given full-frontal views through their living-room window. But there is always a level of irony to this. We look between the curtains clutching peanuts and they, mid act, meet us with a sardonic stare. It is a confrontation: we see you looking, while you carry on as normal, and retweet our daughters’ posts. Mid-way there is a revision for the English publication. Melana recounts telling Greta that from feedback, things start to get a bit boring around scene 49 of the book. Could they add more autobiography?

“No . . . this is a book about the climate and it’s supposed to be boring. I don’t care. The readers will just have to put up with it,” Greta replies.

I myself am firmly in the Greta-as-sage camp – I am one of the ones wailing and applauding like a zoo sea lion at whatever she has to say, but at the same time I say it is problematic to hold her up as some mythical figure. She is, quite ordinarily, a teenage girl whose Asperger’s allows her to cut through the crap that inhibits most of us from speaking too strongly or explicitly or taking drastic action on the climate crisis. This book is gratifying in that it makes the mythical very, very normal.

There will be those that come looking for confirmation of their less enthusiastic impressions. Who’s behind her fame? Show us the puppet strings! Is it her parents? A PR company? Are they putting too much pressure on her? Is this all too revealing?

This, of course, is predicated by the idea that a 15-year-old girl can’t think for herself. Which is laughable really – you can’t know many teenage girls, if you doubt their power and single mindedness. And her exposure has been, you will leave the book convinced, good for her. She has struggled from selective muteness to talking in front of the United Nations, from being unable to leave the house because of a crippling eating disorder, to sailing across the Atlantic on an electric yacht. As the book goes on, her energy builds and builds, propelling her towards her historic strike. She’s smiling. She’s talking to strangers. She’s eating a plate of vegan pad thai offered to her by Ivan from Greenpeace.

And united, the whole family has found a new purpose, a new way of making their superpowers work. It is, in a way, their calling, their responsibility to tell their transitional story. To open the door to their burning house, and then to compel us to join them.

We are, the vast majority of us, climate change deniers, as much as we might hate to think it. I see myself as a person who is trying to tread gently on the planet. I don’t eat meat. I’ve been involved in environmental activism. I write about environmental issues. But am I really acting with feverish conviction on what the scientists are telling us? Since the original publication of the book in 2018, we have had a monumental shift in the discourse around the climate crisis. But talk is not action, and the emission curves are still turning upwards. People are still dying from environmental pollution. The insects are still being murdered.

The weft that Malena makes, between mental health and planetary health, is sealed off with her insistence on diagnosis. Never mind the boomer claim that a diagnosis is a self-fulfilling prophecy. She affirms that a diagnosis is the first real step to taking action, and that this is as true for her family and their mental health, as it is true for the state of the planet. Never mind the hand-wringers who will argue that an honest diagnosis is dangerous, might petrify people to the extent that they just accelerate towards doom. No, Malena is convinced that once we realise why we are feeling the way we do, we will start to feel better, more in control, as they did. “Perhaps we will never be fine but we can always get a little bit better, and there is strength in that. There is hope in that.”

The Ernman-Thunbergs hate the “hope” sentiment that clings feebly to the tail of so much environmental thought. They don’t want us to be hopeful that a solution will be found to our crisis. They want us to despair. But conversely, forgivingly, that’s where we will find our reserves. “It’s the crisis itself that is the solution to the crisis”, because the frenzy that is a symptom of us breaking down at least shows we are coming to terms with the issues. We can, actually, do very well in crises, we can show the best of ourselves. Someone falls down in the street, and people clamour to help.

It will take nothing less than a revolution, yes. But one can only start when there is a rush of those willing to take the first loping steps. We are left reminded, the future is ours to choose. It’s time for us to take our place on the stage, then. It’s time for us to come out from behind the curtains, dust the peanut skin off our hands.