Manjula Martin has withstood a lot in her life over the past few years.
The author suffered a personal health crisis after the removal of her IUD went wrong, and was in considerable pain when, in 2017, she moved to Sonoma County with her partner. Not long after the move — on the night of their housewarming party — the Sonoma County Complex fires broke out.
Things didn’t get much easier after that. In 2020, Martin, still dealing with chronic pain, spent the early days of the pandemic tending to her garden, but had to evacuate her home when more wildfires broke out.
She writes about all of these experiences in “The Last Fire Season: A Personal and Pyronatural History,” out now from Pantheon. The book incorporates memoir, natural history and ecology, and has drawn positive reviews from critics, including Jennifer Szalai of the New York Times, who praised it as “powerful,” “grounded,” and “surprising.”
Writing the book was no easy task. “It was not cathartic and it was difficult,” Martin says. “I don’t have any sort of romantic notions about suffering for your art, and I also don’t have any romantic notions of art as therapy. Writing is not therapy.”
Martin answered questions about “The Last Fire Season” via telephone from her home in West Sonoma County. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.
Q. Can you talk about how you arrived at the title of the book?
At some point during the fire season of 2020, I realized I would probably want to write about it. Once I had decided to write the book, I was jokingly referring to it as “The Last Fire Season” because it literally was the last fire season. Then I was like, “That’s actually a really good title.” The title is, unfortunately, not asserting that we will not have any more fires. Instead, it is talking more about this idea that folks are talking about in California that there’s not really any such thing as a fire season anymore. Fire danger and fire weather can be year-round because of the effects of extreme weather caused by climate change. And anyone who lives in a fire-prone place is already aware of that.
But there’s also a second, and to me more important, meaning to it, which is this idea that thinking of fire as a season means it’s something that is passing, something that will go away: basically, right now fire is here, but it will leave and then it will not be fire time anymore. But actually I think there’s a need for us to really change our understanding of fire itself. Fire is actually a part of these ecosystems. It’s a part of the planet. It’s intricately linked to human life and human evolution, and it’s not going anywhere. And in fact, it has more of a right to be here than I do. So that’s sort of the other meaning of that is that also maybe we should be thinking of fire a little bit differently and understanding that it actually has a role to play in our lives.
Q. You make that point in the book, that people associate fire with death and destruction, but there are actually very important things that it does.
It’s both things, right? Wildfires can be very destructive and horrible and scary. But also the ecosystems of the west are fire-adapted. They need fire to stay healthy and to do their cycles of regeneration. It’s both of those things. And the wildfires that we’ve seen in the past 10 years on the West Coast are far more destructive than wildfires or intentional fires have been in the past. So in many ways people don’t really know how ecosystems are going to respond to these types of fires. There are a lot of brilliant people studying it right now. But it’s all of those things: fire is bad and scary, and fire is also good and necessary.
Q. You write candidly about your health crisis in this book. Did you know when you were starting the book that you wanted to tell both of these stories in tandem?
I was experiencing both of those things at the same time, and as I began to think about writing about them, I was working separately on a piece about my health, and then I was sort of toying with the idea of writing an essay about fire. Then my agent said, “That should be a book,” and that’s how we’re here today. As I was writing this, I was learning and thinking a lot about these larger systems that are involved in climate change, the ways in which humans have had a large-scale effect on the planet, mostly through fossil fuel production, which is mostly capitalism.
I was thinking about the cycles of harm that we inflict upon the natural world, and then the natural world inflicting things back on us. And then it’s a back and forth of injury and renewal, and I was really struggling to come to terms with what had happened to my body and the fact that it wasn’t something that was expected and it wasn’t an easy thing to explain. It was a very seemingly random sequence of events that led to very severe injury, and I realized that existed within a larger system, a for-profit healthcare system, in which people fall through the cracks, sometimes a diagnosis is missed.
So I had a moment where I realized that those two things are similar. I was out in my garden one day and working on my roses, and I had these memories of other times I’ve been working in my garden, and really sort of feeling ambivalent about my role as a gardener and as a human. I just had this moment of realizing, “Oh, this garden is literally physically connecting me to the ecosystem that I live in, and it’s connecting my body more closely to that ecosystem.” So it’s a physical connection, and then it’s also a relationship. It’s a less literal connection. It can be a microcosm of the way that people relate to the natural world, although it’s not always.
As a writer, I have often struggled with metaphors around nature and fertility. I’m a little bit sick of the idea of nature symbolizing reproduction, which happens a lot, particularly in people grappling with the prospect of change. It’s a lot about reproduction and a lot about offspring. And as a person who wasn’t having children, didn’t plan to have children, and then physically couldn’t have children after my medical crisis, I was kind of over that. I was like, what would happen if we uncoupled the natural world from reproduction? What kind of space would that open up intellectually, emotionally, and physically?