As I write, in September of 2020, I am among billions of people across this planet attempting to shelter in place in order to control the spread of the novel coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2. This virus is generally thought to have entered the human population through close contact with bats, perhaps with wildlife-livestock acting as intermediaries. Such contact has been made inevitable by the dramatic expansion of human populations and the consequent encroachment of human settlements into other species’ territories. Enacting the increasingly complex entanglements of human and more-than-human realms and revealing the high costs of often only partially anticipated anthropogenic transformations of the planetary environment, the current global pandemic is a phenomenon distinctly of the Anthropocene. In this context, the approach to autobiography that Allison Cobb takes in her hybrid text Plastic: An Autobiography (Nightboat Books, 2021) makes powerful sense. For, unlike most Western autobiographies, hers is not the story of individual development within an exclusively human society. Implicit in its organization and contents is the recognition that a person can no longer imagine her/his/their life story as the tale of a relatively autonomous, self-determining being. Instead, as Cobb’s title and her methods indicate, we in the twenty-first century— a period I have elsewhere dubbed the self-conscious Anthropocene—must understand our life stories and our identities as inextricable from the histories of the objects and species around us, and also inextricable from human technology, which is bound up in military and imperial histories as well as changing environmental conditions. The life stories of even the most privileged and protected humans are intertwined with the movements of vulnerable refugee populations, with the suffering of oppressed groups, and with the adaptability or non-adaptability of more-than- human species. We need to understand our lives as thoroughly entangled with those of the creatures whose environmental conditions humans have in recent decades so drastically altered, and with the substances as well as the machines that humans in the industrial age have invented. Among the most crucially influential, toxic, persistent, and pervasive of those substances is plastic.