CANR
WORK TITLE: Atavists
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://www.lydiamillet.net/
CITY: Tucson
STATE:
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY: American
LAST VOLUME: CANR 328
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born December 5, 1968, in Boston, MA; daughter of Nicholas B. (an Egyptologist) and Saralaine (an editor) Millet.
EDUCATION:Attended Université Paul Valéry, 1987-88, and London School of Economics and Political Science, 1989; University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, B.A. (summa cum laude), 1990; Duke University, M.E.M., 1996.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer and editor.
MEMBER:Phi Beta Kappa.
AWARDS:PEN (USA) Award for Fiction, 2003, for My Happy Life; Pulitzer Prize finalist, Columbia University, 2010, for Love in Infant Monkeys; John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, 2012; Award of Merit, American Academy of Arts and Letters, 2019, for Fight No More; National Book Award shortlist and named one of the top ten best books of 2020, New York Times, both 2020, both for A Children’s Bible; named one of the top ten books of fiction published in 2022, Publishers Weekly, 2022, for Dinosaurs.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
American author Lydia Millet preceded her career in fiction by collecting academic distinctions at the University of North Carolina and Duke University and then by working in Los Angeles as a copy editor on such magazines as Busty Beauties and Hustler. She made an auspicious debut in 1996 with her novel Omnivores. Since that debut, Millet has gone on to write over a dozen more well-received novels for adult readers as well as a series for children. She then made her first foray into nonfiction in 2024. The winner of the PEN Award for Fiction, Millet has also been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award and a recipient of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship in 2012.
Writing in the online Electric Lit, Lily Meyer termed Millet an “exceptionally funny writer, but her sense of humor is nothing compared to her capacity for empathy.” Meyer added: “Her books glow with it.” In a Slate online interview with fellow writer Jenny Offill, Millet commented on her creative ambition, noting that she tries not to “measure my success against the success of others.” Millet continued: “That way lies abomination. Work-wise, I try not to repeat myself too often. And I have to love whatever I’m doing. At least, while I’m doing it. If I can’t find a way to love it, I let it go. Kind of the opposite of the popular homily. My motto is, if you love something, don’t set it free.”
Omnivores concerns the wayward life of an eighteen-year-old eccentric named Estee Kraft, who escapes her mad-scientist father for an equally bizarre yuppie lifestyle in Los Angeles. The darkly comic novel was both hailed and dismissed, sometimes in the same review. “Feisty but sometimes awkward” was the way a Publishers Weekly writer characterized Omnivores. Millet’s dystopian view of modern America, the reviewer continued, slows down because of the “cartoonish behavior of its … characters.” Megan Harlan of Entertainment Weekly was less concerned by thematic points, applauding the novel’s “deft prose.”
In Omnivores, Estee is presented as a young woman of no pretense. When she leaves home and moves to Los Angeles, gets pregnant, and delivers a monstrous, omnivorous child, the book “almost feels like another novel,” noted Stephen Smith, writing in Quill & Quire. MetroActive reviewer Michael Mechanic found that the author’s novel combines “humor, violence and cultural criticism” in a way that makes Millet’s novel “thought-provoking reading.”
Millet’s 1999 novel surfaced with the attention-getting title George Bush, Dark Prince of Love: A Presidential Romance. The story, which opens in 1989, hinges on a woman’s unexpected obsession with the newly elected forty-first president. Protagonist Rosemary, who already has a rap sheet and an elderly live-in boyfriend, relentlessly pursues the object of her affection, up to a fateful meeting at the White House. Along the way, Bush’s public gaffes are “milked for all they’re worth” said a Publishers Weekly reviewer. Each of the book’s chapters begins with “one of President Bush’s memorably maladroit remarks,” noted the Publishers Weekly critic, who said that the novel contains “some real belly laughs.”
In 2002, Millet published her next novel, My Happy Life. The main character in this work is also a troubled woman, one who has grown up in extremely trying circumstances. She was abandoned as a baby and abused in various foster homes. Millet’s nameless character ends up incarcerated and then confined to an abandoned psychiatric hospital, but through all of this pain she maintains an unusual innocence and positive outlook on her life. At the same time, she begins a search for the baby who was taken from her. Overall, My Happy Life garnered positive reviews from readers and critics. Many enjoyed the author’s talent for exposing a complex character. The book is a “miracle of linguistic compression laced with venomous irony,” wrote Donna Seaman in a review for Booklist. Others found that Millet tells a story both unusual and relatable. The book marks a “courageous and memorable achievement” for Millet, observed a Publishers Weekly contributor. Millet went on to achieve tangible critical acclaim for My Happy Life by winning the 2003 PEN (USA) Award for Fiction for the book.
In 2005, Millet followed up My Happy Life with the novel Oh Pure and Radiant Heart. Ann, a librarian living in New Mexico, dreams about the deceased Manhattan Project physicists Robert Oppenheimer, Enrico Fermi, and Leo Szilard, and somehow wills them back into existence. Ann discovers the three near her home one day and convinces her husband, Ben, to welcome them into their home. Together, they then journey to Los Alamos and Hiroshima to view the consequences of the creation of the atomic bomb. Critics again responded positively to Millet’s novel, finding that the author was able to adeptly create a believable story out of an idea that is highly unusual.
Oh Pure and Radiant Heart contains “lyrical realism, brilliantly engineered fantasy, and madcap yet keen satire,” noted a Booklist contributor. Likewise, other reviewers found that the author addresses deep concerns and issues yet keeps the tone of the novel lighthearted at times and brilliantly written. Millet’s novel is a “shattering and beautiful work,” wrote Jennifer Reese in a review for Entertainment Weekly.
In Everyone’s Pretty, published in 2005, pornographer Dean Decetes is an alcoholic and a credit card thief, and he is addicted to sex with prostitutes. He freeloads off his unmarried sister, Bucella, who has a group of followers at the office. Her next-door neighbor humiliates her daughter, a math genius, until the daughter runs away from home. The girl later hooks up with the editor of Dean’s pornographic magazine, completing a circle of unrelated people who are nevertheless connected.
Jarret Keene, writing in Tucson Weekly, remarked that Millet “isn’t going to outsell Dan Brown any time soon with such a grimly disturbing outlook on life. Yet Everyone’s Pretty is so transgressive, so wildly and beautifully dark, that it’s like a breath of fresh air in a stale literary environment overrun with too-clever postmodernists. Sure, Millet may end up a cult author like her peers, but, hey, that’s a pretty damn good spot to be in.” Ayse Papatya Bucak, reviewing the book in online Reading for Writers, said that “ Everyone’s Pretty is full of strange characters behaving badly and is written largely in scene with dialogue that you probably won’t hear on the street (it’s stylized, it’s weird, it’s very very crisp and funny).”
In 2008, Millet published How the Dead Dream. A loner who goes by the initial “T” finds solace in earning money and grows up to be a successful real estate developer in Los Angeles. His mother moves in with him after separating with his father and unravels throughout the book. T gains and then loses a girlfriend, the first person who understood him. His own psychological troubles then guide him to break into endangered animal cages at the zoo after hours to quench his need to feel close to them.
Poornima Apte, reviewing the book in Mostly Fiction Web site, said that “the book’s direct message—about how humans are accelerating the extinction of species around the world—is one that most people who pick up How the Dead Dream will already be keenly aware of. One worries that Millet’s brave if somewhat preachy effort will probably not reach its intended audience. Millet’s real success lies in showing how humans are truly alone despite our best efforts to the contrary.” Becky Ohlsen, reviewing the book in BookPage Online, found that “it’s to Millet’s credit that the reader’s sympathy never flags, that the suffering of a selfish, greedy fortune-builder remains heartwrenching.” Ohlsen called the narrative voice an “intelligent” one, expressing “sharp-humored charm.” Valerie Miner, writing in the Boston Globe, described the novel as “a quirky, discursive portrait of one man’s evolving consciousness about success, love, kinship, and planetary responsibility. In this provocative odyssey, as in her previous novels, Millet mingles the rational, absurd, and supernatural.” St. Louis Post-Dispatch contributor Amy Woods Butler noted: “Where some have criticized her work for being too pious in its social and environmental agenda, readers will find no preaching here.” A contributor to Publishers Weekly stated: “At once an involving character study and a stunning meditation on loss,” How the Dead Dream “unfolds like a beautiful, disturbing dream.”
Millet’s short story collection Love in Infant Monkeys: Stories was one of three finalists for the 2010 Pulitzer Prize. The darkly humorous stories feature individuals, many of them celebrities, and their singular encounters with animals. Among them are Madonna shooting a pheasant on her English estate but failing to kill it, Noam Chomsky rhapsodizing on hamster condominiums, and Jimmy Carter sparing the life of a “killer rabbit.” Other stories include Thomas Edison being haunted by Topsy, the elephant he electrocuted, and David Hasselhoff’s dachshund-induced musings on death. The title story tells of a scientist conducting experiments in which infant monkeys are separated from their mothers.
Booklist critic Donna Seaman posits that Millet’s aim is to contrast “human narcissism and hubris with motherhood and the profound work of caring for the vulnerable.” While a Kirkus Reviews critic remarked that “drawing closer to our animal cousins seems to have robbed Millet of her once-prodigious capacity to depict … Homo sapiens,” a Publishers Weekly reviewer felt that “Millet’s stories evoke the spectrum of human feeling and also its limits.”
In 2011, Millet published Ghost Lights, a sequel to How the Dead Dream and the second book in a trilogy that concludes with Magnificence. Ghost Lights is told from the perspective of Hal Lindley, a buttoned-up IRS employee and husband to Susan, the second-in-command to real estate developer T, who has disappeared in Belize. Hal worries about his paraplegic daughter, Casey, and agonizes over the accident that resulted in her condition. Hal’s world is further rocked when he discovers that Susan is having an affair with paralegal Robert, and he surprises his wife by heading to Belize to track down T, a journey that will forever alter him.
“Millet is operating at a high level in Ghost Lights, and the book provides a fascinating glimpse of what can happen when the self’s rhythms and certainties are shaken,” wrote Josh Emmons in the New York Times. “That edge of intelligence and humor is enough to satisfy, but the book suffers a bit from its mid-series status,” wrote Carolyn Kellogg in a review for the Los Angeles Times. In some ways it seems to be waiting, like Hal, for the next thing to happen.” Seaman remarked in Booklist: “Millet is darkly comic and neatly lacerating in this fast-moving, psychologically intricate tale, … stunning and devastating.”
Millet has also produced a series for children called “Dissenters.” The series opens with The Fires beneath the Sea and continues with The Shimmers in the Night. The books feature Cape Cod thirteen-year-old Cara Sykes and her siblings as they are drawn into an eco-fantasy involving mythical creatures and global warming.
Calling The Fires beneath the Sea “a lush and intelligent opener for a topical eco-fantasy series,” a Kirkus Reviews critic asserted that “Millet’s prose is lyrically evocative.” School Library Journal reviewer Kathy Kirchoefer called the same book “a well-done beginning, with some riveting moments and frightening escapes, to what should prove to be a popular series.”
The series concludes with The Bodies of the Ancients in which the Sykes family are finally hoping for a nice, quiet Cape Cod summer. However, the final battle over climate change is brewing. The Cold One is finally reaching the apex of its evil plans. The Cold One has been scheming beneath the surface of the ocean for centuries to create global warming in order to take over the Earth’s surface. Now it is up to Cara and her siblings to stop these machinations—including the theft of a nuclear submarine—and save the planet.
A Kirkus Reviews critic offered a varied evaluation of The Bodies of the Ancients, noting: “Pacing is dense, rushed back stories feel inorganic, and characterizations are loose—but relationships are tender.” The critic concluded: “Memorably unusual but haphazard.” Writing in the Daily Hampshire Gazette Web site, Steve Pfarrer observed: “Along with their mother, the three siblings will have to use all their resources to win this final battle against climate change.”
In 2014, Millet published Pills and Starships, a dark, apocalyptic tale that presents a future world destroyed by global warming. Humans are migratory and constantly in search of water and food. Procreating is illegal, and the teenagers of the time are used to living this type of life. When her parents set off for an end-of-life retreat, Nat is left to survive on her own. Diary entries help her make sense of the political and social corruption around her, but only her strength can help her survive it. Overall, critics did not respond favorably to Pills and Starships. A Kirkus Reviews contributor noted: “Detail may be the lifeblood of fiction, but storytelling is its pumping heart; without it, this all-premise effort is DOA.”
In 2015, Millet followed up with Mermaids in Paradise, which centers on a Caribbean honeymoon that turns into a couple’s nightmare when a mermaid sighting brings forth every available media outlet. There are noticeable traces of humor in Mermaids in Paradise, which Millet addressed in a Salon online interview with Jenny Offill: “Reviewers were certainly more opposed to my earlier, broader satirical efforts than the novels I’ve done recently. But about bias in general, I’ve puzzled over the divide between how funny vs. ‘serious’ literary books are received, at least here in the United States. Can it be as simple as, the literary establishment can’t easily interpret humor as having a particular message, so it tends to discount humor categorically?” Critics responded more favorably to Mermaids in Paradise than to the darker 2014 work. Laura Miller, writing in the Salon online, noted: “Millet is what’s conventionally called a ‘serious’ writer; her work is formally adventurous, literary in style and her short story collection Love in Infant Monkeys was short-listed for the 2010 Pulitzer Prize. But unlike a lot of literary writers, she’s not afraid to make us laugh. In fact, there are times when you look at the way human beings conduct themselves in this world, and honestly, what else can you do?” And Rene Steinkejan, writing in the New York Times Book Review, commented: “In her most original way, Millet dares us to examine how we ever know when to be ‘hard core,’ or when it’s safe to let down our guard. It’s a testament to her novel’s power that these mermaids retain their mystery, and that the ending of Mermaids in Paradise is one of the most luminous and unsettling in recent fiction.”
Millet’s 2016 novel, Sweet Lamb of Heaven, is a “meditation on language, a Rosemary’s Baby-style horror story, a political thriller, and—as if that weren’t enough—one of the best explorations of motherhood I’ve ever read,” according to Offill, writing in Slate online. Similarly, Meyer, in an article for the Electric Lit Web site, termed it an “exploration of good and evil, of language, and of motherhood; it’s high literary fiction.” The novel is a first-person narration of Anna, who lives in Alaska with her coldly ambitious husband, Ned. Anna gives birth to a daughter who they name Lena, and following the birth, Anna begins hearing voices. She tells no one of this and eventually the voices subside. However, her life with Ned, a sociopathic businessman who is planning to for political office for the first time, becomes intolerable, and eventually when Lena is six, Anna takes her daughter and flees her marriage. With Ned tracking them, Anna and her daughter finally find refuge in a rundown motel on the coast of Maine whose case of guests may not be who or what they seem. Ned finds wife and daughter and demands they return so that he looks like a good family man to the voters, but Anna now finally understands the voices that she was channeling and how evil Ned really is.
Sweet Lamb of Heaven earned praise from numerous reviewers. Writing in Booklist, Donna Seaman felt that the author “transforms a violent family conflict into a war of cosmic proportions over nothing less than life itself.” A Kirkus Reviews called the work “a top-notch tale of domestic paranoia that owes a debt to spooky psychological page-turners like Rosemary’s Baby yet is driven by Millet’s particular offbeat thinking.” A Publishers Weekly contributor echoed that sentiment, commenting: “This is a page-turner from a very talented writer, and the result is a crowd-pleaser.”
High praise also came from Washingtonpost.com reviewer Lisa Zeidner, who wrote: “[Millet’s] ambitious new novel, Sweet Lamb of Heaven, is part fast-paced thriller, part quiet meditation on the nature of God. … Millet deserves to be celebrated for staking out territory in which the novel can ruminate about current scientific developments. But that makes her work sound dry or polemical, which it is decidedly not. It’s exuberant and playful. That Millet can smuggle her original insights into a structure featuring a rollicking kidnapping plot and deliciously well-drawn characters makes her achievement even more remarkable.” New York Times Online critic Laura Lippman further commended the novel, noting: “ Sweet Lamb of Heaven confounded me, delightfully so. … I have little patience with literary novels that claim to have the propulsive momentum of a thriller, yet Millet pulls it off. … It is Anna’s voice—cool, intelligent, passionate, contradictory—that makes this novel so affecting. … How I missed it when it was gone, how I yearned for it to speak to me again.” Likewise, Los Angeles Times Online reviewer Laird Hunt observed: “We have a real thriller on our hands … part of a higher-stakes game being played by Millet, one that will ultimately, unabashedly touch on time, beauty, horror, God, demons and the very nature of being. By novel’s end … the stakes have been raised through the roof.”
(open new)Fight No More is a collection of short stories that centers on the primary character, Nina, a real estate agent. She deals with a range of problems of her clients’ lives. In a review in New York Times Book Review, Marisa Silver mentioned that “Millet’s boldly playful and intellectually charged body of work combines lightning bolts of emotional acuity, moments of precise poetry and subversively dark comedy along with investigations of existential ideas and real-world concerns. The ambitions of her latest are no less far-reaching.” Booklist contributor Donna Seaman claimed that Millet’s “writing is razor-edged, her comedy at once caustic and compassionate, and her insights agile as she contrasts rich and poor, house and home, delusion and love.”
The novel, A Children’s Bible, centers on a group of kids and teens who fend for themselves while their parents drink themselves into a stupor on a summer holiday. The group finds a well-stocked farmhouse and takes shelter from a bad storm. Narrator Evie is angry that her parents cannot effectively deal with climate change, while her younger brother, Jack, wonders if the Bible holds any answers to their climate-related problems.
Writing in New York Times Book Review, Jonathan Dee stated: “To Jack, the Bible is an old book found in a decaying summer house, an artifact to try to make sense of, a missive from some lost world. With brilliant restraint, Millet conceives her own low-key ‘bible’ the same way. It’s not a history, not a tract or a jeremiad; the truth it bears is not going to overwrite the future.” Dee clarified: “It’s a tale in which whoever or whatever comes after us might recognize, however imperfectly, a certain continuity: an exotic but still decodable shred of evidence from the lost world that is the world we are living in right now.” A Kirkus Reviews contributor called it “a bleak and righteously angry tale determined to challenge our rationalizations about climate change.”
In Dinosaurs, Gil moves to Arizona from New York to leave behind a failed relationship. There, he finds much human cruelty. He counters this with friendship and good memories. Reviewing the novel in Christian Century, Allison Backous Troy noticed that “Gil observes his neighbors with the same protective gaze he gives the birds; he is unassuming and open, but fierce in his love for the friends (both animal and human) that have become his. Not because he wants to own something, or to win, but because he ‘gives a shit.’ Because he cares for them and, finally, for himself.” Writing in New York Times Book Review, Sigrid Nunez pointed out that “Millet keeps thwarting the reader’s expectations of drama, and offers instead a subdued portrait of a wounded middle-aged man’s journey toward wholeness.” Nunez also remarked that “Millet may have thought that, in a time of widespread hatred, bigotry and violence, this is the kind of fiction we need: a comforting story about decency and simple human goodness. But she doesn’t avoid the well-known problem of how to make goodness compelling. Of course, the mind itself can be a sphere of spectacular drama, but Gil is no thinker, and in place of depth he has the kind of cluelessness that virtuous fictional characters are often given.”
Writing in Spectator, Adam Begley commented that “Millet deploys a radically stripped-back prose style, as bare and plain as the dry, sandy river bed behind Gil’s house. The sentences are short. Paragraphs, too. A paucity of verbs.” Begley reasoned that “Gil compels attention because he has the freedom to do as he likes–and chooses to observe and to care. Adapt and live.” A Kirkus Reviews contributor observed that the author “enfolds thematic and psychological depths in elegant, deceptively simply prose.” The same critic found the novel to be “another life-affirming work from a writer who always carves her own literary path.”
We Loved It All: A Memory of Life is Millet’s first book of nonfiction. Millet offers personal views on the state of the planet and how humans are destroying it. In a review in Earth Island Journal, Alex Tzelnic mentioned that “Millet is not one to put a veneer on our circumstances, or the way her own personal trajectory has led to a reinterpretation of them. One of the startling aspects of her book is the way she shifts between objective assessment of our current predicament to unabashed appreciation for the creatures amongst us … to a subjective, emotional view of her own complicity in their undoing.” Booklist contributor Donna Seaman observed that Millet writes with “a recalibrating mix of memoir, facts, critique, and passages of elegiac beauty.” A contributor to Publishers Weekly concluded: “Mournful and piercingly beautiful, this will stick with readers long after they turn the last page.” A Kirkus Reviews contributor described it as being “a philosophically tinted testament to the challenge of loving animals in an epoch defined by extinction.”
The short story collection, Atavists, centers on two families. The fourteen stories alternate between Buzz and Amy and their kids, Liza and Nick, as well as the single mother, Helen, and her daughters, Mia and Shelley. All are unhappy about the direction the country is going in, but the parents lament their kids’ lack of ideology. Writing in the New York Times Book Review, Fiona Maazel remarked that “most of these stories do not stand on their own — they aren’t meant to — which puts a lot of pressure on their cumulative power to stir in readers both the dread and joy of being alive (this being, IMO, the bar that fiction needs to clear to be great). Atavists succeeds on the dread, less so on the joy.” Booklist contributor Seaman observed that “these thought-provoking, surprising, charming, and deeply moving stories illuminate who we are at our core.” A Kirkus Reviews contributor found the collection to be “sharply observed, beautifully rendered, and heartbreaking.”(close new)
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, January 1, 2002, Donna Seaman, review of My Happy Life, p. 811; January 1, 2006, review of Oh Pure and Radiant Heart, p. 6; September 15, 2007, Donna Seaman, review of How the Dead Dream, p. 32; September 15, 2009, Donna Seaman, review of Love in Infant Monkeys: Stories, p. 31; September 15, 2011, Donna Seaman, review of Ghost Lights, p. 25; October 1, 2014, Donna Seaman, review of Mermaids in Paradise: A Novel, p. 34; April 1, 2016, Donna Seaman, review of Sweet Lamb of Heaven, p. 24; May 15, 2018, Donna Seaman, review of Fight No More, p. 20; March 15, 2024, Donna Seaman, review of We Loved It All: A Memory of Life, p. 36; April 1, 2025, Donna Seaman, review of Atavists, p. 29.
BookPage, May 1, 2016, review of Sweet Lamb of Heaven, p. 5.
Boston Globe, March 16, 2008, Valerie Miner, review of How the Dead Dream.
Children’s Bookwatch, March 24, 2015, review of Pills and Starships.
Christian Century, May 1, 2023, Allison Backous Troy, review of Dinosaurs, p. 96.
Earth Island Journal, June 22, 2024, Alex Tzelnic, review of We Loved It All, p. 55.
Entertainment Weekly, June 28, 1996, Megan Farlan, review of Omnivores, p. 101; July 8, 2005, Jennifer Reese, review of Oh Pure and Radiant Heart, p. 72.
ForeWord, April 27, 2020, Michelle Anne Schingler, review of A Children’s Bible.
Good Housekeeping, March 24, 2015, Molly McCloskey, “Beautiful Creatures,” p. 77.
Kirkus Reviews, October 15, 2007, review of How the Dead Dream; September 15, 2009, review of Love in Infant Monkeys; April 15, 2011, review of The Fires beneath the Sea; September 1, 2011, review of Ghost Lights; June 15, 2012, review of The Shimmers in the Night: A Novel; June 1, 2014, review of Pills and Starships; September 1, 2014, review of Mermaids in Paradise; March 1, 2016, review of Sweet Lamb of Heaven; November 15, 2016, review of The Bodies of the Ancients; April 1, 2018, review of Fight No More; March 1, 2020, review of A Children’s Bible; July 151, 2022, review of Dinosaurs; February 15, 2024, review of We Loved It All; March 1, 2025, review of Atavists.
Library Journal, January 1, 2008, Joy Humphrey, review of How the Dead Dream, p. 86; September 1, 2009, Cristella Bond, review of Love in Infant Monkeys, p. 110; September 1, 2011, Christine DeZelar-Tiedman, review of Ghost Lights, p. 102; September 15, 2014, Beth Andersen, review of Mermaids in Paradise, p. 69; April 1, 2016, Barbara Hoffert, review of Sweet Lamb of Heaven, p. 85.
Literary Review, September 1, 2011, Rene Steinke, interview with Millet, p. 160.
Los Angeles Times, December 11, 2011, Carolyn Kellogg, review of Ghost Lights.
Metro Santa Cruz (Santa Cruz, CA), August 29, 1996, Michael Mechanic, review of Omnivores.
New Yorker, January 19, 2015, Laura Marsh, review of Mermaids in Paradise, p. 75; July 25, 2016, Andrew Martin, review of Sweet Lamb of Heaven, p. 65.
New York Times Book Review, March 9, 2008, Adelle Waldman, review of How the Dead Dream, p. 22; November 27, 2011, Josh Emmons, review of Ghost Lights, p. 24; January 2, 2015, Rene Steinkejan, review of Mermaids in Paradise; June 10, 2018, “Lydia Millet,” p. 7; August 12, 2018, Marisa Silver, review of Fight No More, p. 9; May 10, 2020, Jonathan Dee, review of A Children’s Bible, p. 9; October 30, 2022, Sigrid Nunez, review of Dinosaurs, p. 14; May 25, 2025, Fiona Maazel, review of Atavists, p. 8.
Publishers Weekly, February 26, 1996, review of Omnivores, p. 81; November 29, 1999, review of George Bush, Dark Prince of Love: A Presidential Romance, p. 52; October 29, 2001, review of My Happy Life, p. 32; October 8, 2007, review of How the Dead Dream, p. 36; September 15, 2009, review of Love in Infant Monkeys, p. 28; August 8, 2011, review of Ghost Lights, p. 23; August 11, 2014, review of Mermaids in Paradise, p. 42; December 14, 2015, review of Sweet Lamb of Heaven, p. 53; January 20, 2020, review of A Children’s Bible, p. 38; February 26, 2024, review of We Loved It All, p. 53.
Quill & Quire, May 1, 1996, Stephen Smith, review of Omnivores, p. 27.
St. Louis Post-Dispatch, January 27, 2008, Amy Woods Butler, review of How the Dead Dream.
San Diego Union-Tribune, January 27, 2008, Wendy L. Smith, review of How the Dead Dream.
San Francisco Chronicle, January 27, 2008, Andrew Leland, review of How the Dead Dream, p. M3.
School Library Journal, August 1, 2011, Kathy Kirchoefer, review of The Fires beneath the Sea, p. 112; March 24, 2015, Michaela Schied, review of Pills and Starships, p. 82; March 24, 2015, Katherine Koenig, review of Pills and Starships, p. 135.
Spectator, October 15, 2022, Adam Begley, review of Dinosaurs, p. 37.
Times Literary Supplement, September 12, 2008, Ben Jeffrey, review of How the Dead Dream, p. 21.
Tucson Weekly, August 4, 2005, Jarret Keene, review of Everyone’s Pretty.
Village Voice, January 8, 2008, James Hannaham, review of How the Dead Dream.
Washington Post Book World, January 6, 2008, Ron Charles, review of How the Dead Dream, p. 4.
ONLINE
Biological Diversity, http://www.biologicaldiversity.org/ (April 18, 2015), author profile.
BookPage, http://www.bookpage.com/ (August 19, 2008), Becky Ohlsen, review of How the Dead Dream.
Bookslut, http://www.bookslut.com/ (August 19, 2008), John Zuarino, author interview.
Booth, https://booth.butler.edu/ (May 3, 2024), Jonathan Mann, “A Conversation with Lydia Millet.”
Daily Hampshire Gazette, http://www.gazettenet.com/ (February 9, 2017), Steve Pfarrer, review of Bodies of the Ancients.
Electric Lit, https://electricliterature.com/ (March 3, 2017), Lily Meyer, “Lydia Millet on Good, Evil and the Future of the Literary Thriller.”
Entertainment Weekly, http://ew.com/ (April 29, 2016), Isabella Biedenharn, review of Sweet Lamb of Heaven.
Literary Hub, https://lithub.com/ (May 11, 2020), Kristin Iversen, “Lydia Millet Wonders Why We’re Not Panicking More;” (April 22, 2025), Jane Ciabattari, “Lydia Millet on the Challenges of Writing in the Here and Now.”
Los Angeles Times Online, http://www.latimes.com/ (April 28, 2016), Don Bartletti, review of Sweet Lamb of Heaven.
Lydia Millet website, http://www.lydiamillet.net (October 18, 2025).
Morning Edition, https://www.npr.org/ (April 2, 2024), Leila Fadel, “Pulitzer Prize Finalist Lydia Millet Publishes Her First Nonfiction Book.”
Mostly Fiction, http://www.mostlyfiction.com/ (February 23, 2008), Poornima Apte, review of How the Dead Dream.
New York Times Online, https://www.nytimes.com/ (April 26, 2016), Laura Lippman, review of Sweet Lamb of Heaven.
Orion, https://orionmagazine.org/ (April 30, 2024), Lisa Wells, “Nonfiction as a Choice: An Interview with Lydia Millet.”
Reading for Writers, http://readingforwriters.blogspot.com/ (August 3, 2006), Ayse Papatya Bucak, review of Everyone’s Pretty.
Salon, http://www.salon.com/ (November 11, 2014), Jenny Offill, interview with the author; (November 24, 2014), Laura Miller, profile of the author; (May 5, 2016), Laura Miller, review of Sweet Lamb of Heaven; (June 7, 2016), Lily Meyer, “An Interview with Lydia Millet and Jenny Offill.”
Washingtonpost.com, http://washingtonpost.com/(April 25, 2016), Lisa Zeidner, review of Sweet Lamb of Heaven.
Lydia Millet has written more than a dozen novels and story collections. Her novel A Children's Bible was a New York Times "Best 10 Books of 2020" selection and shortlisted for the National Book Award. In 2019 her story collection Fight No More received an Award of Merit from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and her collection Love in Infant Monkeys was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2010. She also writes essays, opinion pieces, book reviews, and other ephemera and has worked as an editor and staff writer at the Center for Biological Diversity since 1999. She lives in the desert outside Tucson with her family.
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Lydia Millet
Millet at the 2016 Texas Book Festival
Millet at the 2016 Texas Book Festival
Born December 5, 1968 (age 56)
Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.
Occupation Writer
Education
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (BA)
Duke University (MA)
Genre
American fiction
Environmental fiction
Notable works
A Children's Bible (2020)
Magnificence: A Novel (2012)
Love in Infant Monkeys (2009)
My Happy Life (2002)
Notable awards
Pen Center USA Award
John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship
American Academy of Arts and Letters Literature Award
Website
lydiamillet.net
Lydia Millet (born December 5, 1968) is an American novelist. Her 2020 novel A Children's Bible was a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction and named one of the ten best books of the year by the New York Times Book Review.[1] She has been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Salon wrote of Millet's work, "The writing is always flawlessly beautiful, reaching for an experience that precedes language itself."[2]
Biography
Millet was born in Boston, Massachusetts and raised in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, where she attended the University of Toronto Schools. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in interdisciplinary studies, with highest honors in creative writing, from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a master's degree from Duke University. Formerly married to Kieran Suckling, Millet lives in Tucson, Arizona with her two children. She holds a master's in environmental policy from Duke University's Nicholas School of the Environment and worked for Natural Resources Defense Council for two years before joining the Center for Biological Diversity in 1999 as a staff writer.[3]
Career
Millet is best known for her dark sense of humor, stylistic versatility, and political bent. Her first book, Omnivores (1996), is a subversion of the coming-of-age novel, in which a young girl in Southern California is tormented by her megalomaniac father and invalid mother and finally sold in marriage to a real estate agent. Her second, George Bush, Dark Prince of Love (2000), is a political comedy about a trailer-park woman obsessed with the 41st American president.
My Happy Life (2002)
Brief but weighty, her third book, My Happy Life (2002), is a poetic, language-oriented work about a lonely misfit trapped in an abandoned hospital, who writes the poignant story of her life on the walls. It is narrated by, as The Village Voice glowing deems her, "an orphan cruelly mistreated by life who nevertheless regards her meager subsistence as a radiant gift." Despite the horrors that amount to her life, she still calls herself happy. Jennifer Reese of The New York Times Book Review commented on Millet's new approach to the treatment of the literary victim, saying "Millet has created a truly wretched victim, but where is the outrage? She has coolly avoided injecting so much as a hint of it into this thin, sharp and frequently funny novel; one of the narrator's salient characteristics is an inability to feel even the mildest indignation. The world she inhabits is a savage place, but everything about it interests her, and paying no attention to herself, she is able to see beauty and wonder everywhere."
Everyone's Pretty (2005)
Millet's fourth novel, Everyone's Pretty (2005), is a picaresque tragicomedy about an alcoholic pornographer with messianic delusions, based partly on Millet's stint as a copy editor at Larry Flynt Publications. Sarah Weinman of the Washington Post Book World called it "both prism and truth" "With a sharp eye for small details, a keen sense of the absurd and strong empathy for its creations," Millet creates a kaleidoscope of quirky characters. The New York Times Book Review called her fifth novel, Oh Pure and Radiant Heart (2005), an "extremely smart…resonant fantasy." It brings three of the physicists responsible for creating the atomic bomb to life in modern-day New Mexico, where they acquire a cult following and embark on a crusade for redemption.
How the Dead Dream (2008)
How the Dead Dream is "a frightening and gorgeous view of human decline," according to Utne Reader. It features a young Los Angeles real estate developer consumed by power and political ambitions who, after his mother's suicide attempt and two other deaths, begins to nurture a curious obsession with vanishing species. Then a series of calamities forces him from a tropical island, the site on one of his developments, onto the mainland where he takes a Conrad-esque journey up a river into the remote jungle. Eye Weekly summarized this black comedy, noting "American culture loves its stories of hubris, downfall and ruin as of late, but it takes a writer of Millet's sensitivity to enjoy the way down this much."
Love in Infant Monkeys (2009)
Love in Infant Monkeys is a short story collection featuring vignettes about famous historical and pop culture icons and their encounters with other species.
Ghost Lights (2011)
Her 2011 novel, Ghost Lights, made best-of-the-year lists in The New York Times and San Francisco Chronicle and received strong critical attention. The novel stars an Internal Revenue Service bureaucrat named Hal — a man baffled by his wife's obsession with her missing employer. In a moment of drunken heroism, Hal embarks on a quest to find the man, embroiling himself in a surreal tropical adventure (and an unexpected affair with a beguiling German woman). Ghost Lights is beautifully written, engaging, and full of insight into the heartbreaking devotion of parenthood and the charismatic oddity of human behavior. The Boston Globe called it "[An] odd and wonderful novel", while the Cleveland Plain Dealer wrote, "Millet is that rare writer of ideas who can turn a ruminative passage into something deeply personal. She can also be wickedly funny, most often at the expense of the unexamined life."
Ghost Lights was the second in an acclaimed cycle of novels that began with How the Dead Dream in 2008. The third, Magnificence (2012) completes the cycle.
Magnificence (2012)
Magnificence introduced Susan Lindley, a woman adrift after her husband's death and the dissolution of her family. Embarking on a new phase in her life after inheriting her uncle's sprawling mansion and its vast collection of taxidermy, Susan decides to restore the extensive collection of moth-eaten animal mounts, tending to "the fur and feathers, the beaks, the bones and shimmering tails." Meanwhile, an equally derelict human menagerie – including an unfaithful husband and a chorus of eccentric old women – joins her in residence. In a setting both wondrous and absurd, Susan defends her legacy from freeloading relatives and explores the mansion's unknown spaces. Jonathan Lethem, writing for The Guardian, called it "elegant, darkly comic…with overtones variously of Muriel Spark, Edward Gorey and J. G. Ballard, full of contemporary wit and devilish fateful turns for her characters, and then also to knit together into a tapestry of vast implication and ethical urgency, something as large as any writer could attempt: a kind of allegorical elegy for life on a dying planet. Ours, that is." The book was nominated for a Los Angeles Times Book Prize.
Shimmers in the Night (2012)
The September 2012 release of Shimmers in the Night was the second in The Dissenters, an eco-fantasy series for young adults. Beginning with The Fires Beneath the Sea, the plot follows two young siblings as they search for their mother, a shapeshifting character who is fighting against forces who wants to make the planet over in their own image.
Pills and Starships (2014)
Pills and Starships is a young adult novel set in "a dystopic future brought by global warming."
Mermaids in Paradise (2014)
Mermaids in Paradise tempers the sharp satire of Millet's early career with the empathy and subtlety of her more recent novels and short stories. In a send-up of the American honeymoon, "Mermaids in Paradise" takes readers to the grounds of a Caribbean island resort, where newlyweds Deb and Chip — the opinionated, skeptical narrator and her cheerful jock husband — meet a marine biologist who says she's sighted mermaids in a coral reef. Karen Russell wrote "leave it to Lydia Millet to capsize her human characters in aquamarine waters and upstage their honeymoon with mermaids. I am awed to know there's a mind like Millet's out there – she's a writer without limits, always surprising, always hilarious."
Sweet Lamb of Heaven (2016)
Sweet Lamb of Heaven, published by W. W. Norton & Company in May 2016, blends domestic thriller with psychological horror, following a young mother's flight from her cold and unfaithful husband. As her husband's pursuit escalates to criminal levels, she and her six-year-old daughter go into hiding in a run-down coastal motel where the other guests may have unimaginable secrets of their own.[4] The Los Angeles Times has praised the novel as "a real thriller...part of a higher stakes game being played by Millet, one that will ultimately, unabashedly touch on time, beauty, horror, God, demons and the very nature of being,"[5] while The Washington Post called the book "exuberant and playful...featuring a rollicking kidnapping plot and deliciously well-drawn characters."[6]
Fight No More (2018)
Fight No More: Stories, published in June 2018, was named a best book of the year by Library Journal.[7]
A Children's Bible (2020)
A Children's Bible, published in May 2020, follows a group of twelve children on a forced vacation with their families at a sprawling lakeside mansion. When a destructive storm descends on the summer estate, the group's ringleaders decide to run away, leading the younger ones on a dangerous foray into the apocalyptic chaos outside. In The Washington Post, critic Ron Charles called the novel, "a blistering little classic."[8]
Dinosaurs (2022)
Dinosaurs: A Novel, published October 2022, follows a lonely, wealthy heir as he moves from New York City to Phoenix, Arizona after a bad breakup. There, he befriends his next-door neighbors, becoming a confidante to the parents and a friend and trusted babysitter for the two children. He spends his time volunteering at a local women's shelter and wrestling with his breakup and the possibility of future romance in middle age, while also learning about birds that populate the area – which are the descendants of "dinosaurs" referenced by the title.[9]
Publishers Weekly named it one of the top ten books of fiction published in 2022.[10]
Awards and honors
In 2012, Millet received a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.[11]
In 2020, The New York Times named A Children's Bible one of the top ten best books of 2020.[12]
In 2022, Publishers Weekly named Dinosaurs one of the top ten books of fiction published in 2022.[13]
Awards for Millet's writing
Year Title Award Category Result Ref.
2003 My Happy Life PEN Center USA Literary Award Fiction Won
2005 Oh Pure and Radiant Heart Arthur C. Clarke Award — Shortlisted
2009 Love in Infant Monkeys Salon Book Award Fiction Won
2010 Pulitzer Prize Fiction Finalist
2012 Magnificence Los Angeles Times Book Prize Fiction Finalist [14]
National Book Critics Circle Award Fiction Finalist [15]
2019 Fight No More American Academy of Arts and Letters Literature Award ? Won [16]
2020 A Children's Bible National Book Award Fiction Shortlisted [17]
2021 Aspen Words Literary Prize — Longlisted [18]
James Tait Black Memorial Prize Fiction Shortlisted [19]
Bibliography
—— (1996). Omnivores: A Novel. Algonquin Books.
—— (2000). George Bush, Dark Prince of Love: A Presidential Romance. Touchstone.
—— (2002). My Happy Life. Henry Holt and Company.
—— (2005). Oh Pure and Radiant Heart. Soft Skull Press.
—— (2005). Everyone's Pretty: A Novel. Soft Skull Press.
—— (2008). How the Dead Dream. Counterpoint.
—— (2009). Love in Infant Monkeys. Soft Skull Press.
—— (2011). Ghost Lights: A Novel. W. W. Norton & Company.
—— (2012). Magnificence: A Novel. W. W. Norton & Company.
—— (2014). Mermaids in Paradise: A Novel. W. W. Norton & Company.
—— (2016). Sweet Lamb of Heaven: A Novel. W. W. Norton & Company.
—— (2018). Fight No More: Stories. W. W. Norton & Company.
—— (2020). A Children's Bible: A Novel. W. W. Norton & Company.
—— (2022). Dinosaurs: A Novel. W. W. Norton & Company.
—— (2023). Lyrebird. Picture Books, Gagosian.
—— (2025). Atavists: Stories. W. W. Norton & Company.
Lydia Millet
USA flag
Lydia Millet is the author of several novels including the gloriously titled George Bush: Dark Prince of Love, and My Happy Life, winner of the 2003 PEN-USA Award for Fiction. During the early 1990's she was a sub-editor at magazines such as Hustler, Busty Beauties and S.W.A.T. She lives in the desert outside Tucson, Arizona, with her husband and daughter.
Genres: Literary Fiction, Young Adult Fantasy
Series
How the Dead Dream
1. How the Dead Dream (2007)
2. Ghost Lights (2011)
3. Magnificence (2012)
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Dissenters
1. The Fires Beneath the Sea (2011)
2. The Shimmers in the Night (2012)
3. The Bodies of the Ancients (2016)
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Novels
Omnivores (1996)
George Bush (1999)
My Happy Life (2002)
Everyone's Pretty (2005)
Oh Pure and Radiant Heart (2005)
Pills and Starships (2014)
Mermaids in Paradise (2014)
Sweet Lamb of Heaven (2016)
A Children's Bible (2020)
Dinosaurs (2022)
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Collections
Love in Infant Monkeys (2009)
I'm with the Bears (2011) (with others)
Fight No More (2018)
Atavists (2025)
Lydia Millet is the author of more than a dozen novels and story collections. Known for her dark humor, idiosyncratic characters and language, and strong interest in the relationship between humans and other animals, Millet was born in Boston and grew up in Toronto, Canada. She now lives outside Tucson, Arizona with her family, where she has worked as an editor and writer at the Center for Biological Diversity since 1999. Sometimes called a "novelist of ideas," she won the PEN-USA award for fiction for her early novel My Happy Life (2002); in 2010, her story collection Love in Infant Monkeys was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and another collection, Fight No More, received an award of merit from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2019. Her recent novel A Children's Bible, about the intergenerational traumas of climate change and extinction, was a National Book Award finalist and one of the New York Times Best 10 Books of 2020.
Lydia Millet Wonders Why We’re Not Panicking More
The Author of A Children's Bible Talks to Kristin Iversen About
End Times, Smug Liberals, and Good Teens
By Kristin Iversen
May 11, 2020
“I have a terrible memory,” Lydia Millet told me. She said this, or some variation of it, maybe three times during our phone conversation on an afternoon in mid-April. I was in New York City, watching a mask-wearing crossing guard stand in front of the empty-for-weeks elementary school across the street from my apartment; she was at home in Arizona, looking out, she said, into her yard, “at the desert flowers, all spring-like, just waving in the wind.”
I believed Millet, of course, about having a terrible memory, and about not quite recalling what it was that first inspired her to write her latest book, A Children’s Bible. But, having just read the novel—a dark skewering of America’s comfortable elite set in the midst of an environmental apocalypse that captures perfectly both the terror and the tedium of large-scale disaster—I should have realized that Millet’s self-described spotty recollection of its genesis hardly mattered. A Children’s Bible feels less like something wholly imagined and born out of nowhere, and more like the urgent telling of an as-yet-unseen reality that was just now taking shape around us. In other words: Why does it matter if you can recall the past when it appears you have the ability to remember the future?
Lydia Millet is a reader’s author. This isn’t just because she’s prolific; although it does help that anyone lucky enough to just now be discovering Millet’s work will delight in learning that she has written over a dozen books in the last two decades, offering ample material in which to get lost. But also, readers love knowing things that nobody else knows, and Millet feels like the literary world’s best kept secret—as much, anyway, as an author who has been a finalist for the Pulitzer can be considered a secret. And just like there’s a visceral satisfaction in sharing deeply felt secrets, there’s a particular kind of pleasure that comes with mentioning Millet’s name to anyone else familiar with her work, and then spending the rest of your conversation comparing which among her books are your respective favorites: The novels or the stories? Those tackling climate change or the one about L.A.’s rapacious real estate scene? The unhinged parody about the one-term president or the unhinged parody about the pop icon shooting pheasants in Prada boots? And then there’s the one with the mermaids.
Part of the joy in diving deeply into Millet’s work is that it stirs up such questions. Her books are provocative in that rarest of ways: They feel fully free, unleashed from any understanding or expectation of what they’re supposed to be. Despite, or maybe because of, their wildness, their refusal to conform, Millet’s books remain accessible; her writing feels generous, like it’s opening up possibilities of new ways to think and to be—and, really, now is not the worst time to consider new ways of thinking and being.
“Maybe it’s trite to say, but you don’t feel freedom intensely unless you don’t have it,” Millet said to me, as we spoke about the banal exigencies that come with staying home all the time. “We don’t use freedom in the best ways when we have it. We tend to use it in tragic and ugly ways; we use freedom to do and use and consume however we desire.”
“The culture that we have—the literary, intellectual culture—seems far less inclined than the scientific culture has been to grapple with what are profound existential questions that absolutely affect everything that we do.”
We hadn’t really been talking about the coronavirus pandemic—Millet said, “I don’t know that I’m going to say anything particularly brilliant on the subject of Covid-19”—but rather about the long sections of A Children’s Bible in which the characters are forced by environmental catastrophe and societal collapse to shelter-in-place. And yet, of course we were also talking about the pandemic, not only how it had been so quick and brutal in exposing the rampant social, racial, and economic inequalities in this country, but also the ways in which it revealed things that Millet has been exploring in her work as a writer and an environmental activist for years, things that indicate just how ill-prepared we are for the disaster at-hand, and any disasters still to come.
“I’ve felt astonished by our apparent inability to panic as a culture,” Millet told me, wondering over our country’s collective refusal to take climate change seriously. “Our sort of frozen, inarticulate, ambient smugness about everything. Our selfishness; the way we set our sights so defiantly on our personal matters to the exclusion of everything else.”
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Millet’s astonishment is reserved mainly for America’s adults, the generations of decision-makers who have willfully ignored the looming specter of environmental collapse in favor of focusing on their own immediate needs. At 51, Millet might be part of the same generation as the parents in her novel, but she doesn’t share their predilection for ignoring climate change; she has a master’s degree in environmental policy from Duke University and has been involved with the Center for Biological Diversity, a non-profit organization that works toward protecting endangered species, for decades. She understands why young people are so angry about being ignored, about having no future.
“Before I had even heard of Greta Thunberg, I’d seen in my life the schismatic divide between generations about these things,” Millet said. “So I wanted to write about some kids who were disgusted by their parents, but were forced to be with them—in a mansion.”
A Children’s Bible begins as a fairy tale, in a now-lost Eden: “Once we lived in a summer country.” Piled into the still-spectacular home of former robber barons are a motley assortment of families, but the real tribal distinctions have nothing to do with blood, and everything to do with age. The kids—mostly teenagers, but some adolescents—are in one camp, the parents in another; the simmering contempt of the kids for their parents is met with, well, nothing. The parents are far too wrapped up in themselves, concerned with their own immediate pleasures, to care all that much that their children have disowned them.
No Eden lasts forever, if it ever really existed in the first place, and this one is doomed to fall in a storm of biblical proportions. There is a flood, there are animals saved in pairs, there is wandering in a desert of sorts; a child is born in a barn; there are angels. And there is ample evidence of how differently children and adults will react when threatened with extinction: The children fight back, as best they can. The parents give in. As Evie, the teenager narrating the novel, observes, these adults have long “insisted on denial as a tactic. Not science denial exactly—they were liberals. This was a denial of reality.”
There is an uncanny aspect to reading A Children’s Bible; it’s hard not to think, at least occasionally: What did Lydia Millet know and when did she know it? Because it can feel almost too incisive, a sharp-as-a-knife satire that cuts to the bone, and then keeps going all the way through. And no aspect of it feels more devastating than the depiction of all those dissolute adults, who see the walls of their paradise forming a crumbling prison around them, but are determined to do nothing about it other than take more drugs and become more self-centered, until their bodies are as sick as their souls, even as they seem convinced that all they have to do to endure the apocalypse is wait it out and pretend like everything is normal. It’s hard not to see them reflected in the people who, in the midst of the pandemic, attempt to maintain their routines as much as possible, look for ways to be ever-more productive, and continue living life as normal, just waiting for their favorite bars to reopen. The shape of these emergencies is different, but the insistence on prioritizing a standard of living that doesn’t make sense anymore is hauntingly similar.
“Maybe it’s trite to say, but you don’t feel freedom intensely unless you don’t have it.”
“I mean, I could not survive this pandemic without wine or whatever,” Millet said, laughing. “But, the self-indulgence of being able to be hedonistic—purely hedonistic—in the face of emergency… We have a cultural narcissism that the kids in this novel are reacting against.” Though, she pointed out, “that narcissism doesn’t hold a candle to that of, say, our fearless leader.”
It’s this cultural narcissism that Millet is most effective at dismantling in A Children’s Bible, and it’s notable because this isn’t the expected dismissal of the gun-toting, “re-open” protestor type who has emerged during our current pandemic. Instead, she takes direct aim at the reality-denying liberals; the type not unfamiliar to anyone who lives in New York City or LA or who went to a small liberal arts college or who has ever been to a literary event. They have been on Millet’s mind for a long time.
Millet told me that when she first moved to New York, and found herself surrounded by “culture producers,” she was “kind of amazed by how relentlessly humanist everyone was… and how relentlessly interested in exclusively the human self the entire culture seemed to be. And not only the human self, but the personal self, with just a few exceptions. It seemed so dedicated to myopia, you know?”
“The culture that we have—the literary, intellectual culture—seems far less inclined than the scientific culture has been to grapple with what are profound existential questions that absolutely affect everything that we do—or should affect everything we do,” Millet said. “It’s not exactly scientific denial, but an ontological denial, a denial of the awkward and urgent weight of these matters. New York generally feels more like Europe to me than the rest of the country, but still is more insistently, stubbornly, inwardly focused, more inwardly human… The embrace of science and education and knowledge has become almost completely opportunistic, absolutely determined by the needs of the self rather than by any objective standards.”
This refusal to look beyond the self to find entertainment or inspiration and to only selectively listen to what scientists have to say about what’s happening in the world is questionable in the best of times, but, as the pandemic has made undeniably clear, we have not been living in the best of times for a while—if ever. And now, the mass delusion that so many privileged people have participated in, this idea that we’re all the protagonists in our life stories, is falling apart.
“I mean, I could not survive this pandemic without wine or whatever.”
This isn’t, according to Millet, a cause for despair. But it is a call to action. “If you have the luxury of fighting, you should fight,” she said. “I think that’s what especially was the spark of the bitterness in the voice of the child, the narrator of this book. It’s the idea that [the parents] didn’t even have it hard. It’s never against those who were scraping out a living, it’s always about the ones who had the luxury of being able to do something. It’s how I felt a little in my twenties, seeing people of privilege in New York, and also in the LA art world and book world, operate with this level of entitlement and unconcern. It made me angry.”
That anger is in the book, but there’s also a rationality to it, a matter-of-factness, that can feel almost tender in the face of so many horrors. The manner in which the children confront the end of their world varies—they are often scared, they are occasionally wistful, they are profoundly disappointed.
“Do you blame us?” asked a mother. Pathetic-sounding.
“We blame you for everything.”
But, the children don’t take it personally. They understand that it’s not about them, not exactly. At least, not any more. This is what makes A Children’s Bible, and what makes all of Millet’s work, feel so radical: There is sentimentality there, but she is sentimental for more than just humans. She cares about the world in a holistic way.
“As I get older, I get more sentimental and more emotional, not less,” Millet told me. “And more captivated by the future.” But rather than softening Millet’s message, this emotion has only made it more acute. She knows that there is no point in pretending that mere survival is enough; leave that to the ultra-wealthy who plan to ride out any future storms siloed away in underground bunkers or aboard their private yachts. For the vast majority of us, survival must be a starting point to learning how to live anew.
“It’s hard to negotiate,” Millet told me, laughing at how absurd it can feel to navigate such ponderous topics without veering into didacticism. And it can perhaps especially feel that way when a book that grapples with an existential crisis is also full of the darkest of humor imaginable. (I mean, there’s nothing either funnier or more tragic than an Ecstasy-fueled cuddle puddle of middle-aged parents ignoring the tree that just speared through their roof.) “It’s difficult,” she continued, “because you don’t want to undercut what you’re doing, and the easiest way to undercut something serious is with humor.”
Millet’s humor here feels pure and reckless, a reminder of both the absurdity and necessity inherent to preparing for certain catastrophe; reading A Children’s Bible can feel like running at full speed toward the edge of a cliff. You know you’ll fall once you have nothing but air beneath you, but you still want to see how long you can keep moving. It’s exhilarating. It’s art, not just for These Times, but for always.
“You know,” Millet said to me, toward the end of our phone call, at which point we’d taken so many turns that it was hard to remember quite where we’d started, only that there’d once been a beginning. She was expanding on what it was that made her angry about all those ultra-humanist cultural producers she’s met, and said that, to them, “art is decoration rather than desperation.” Millet laughed. “That’s a sound bite, but it’s kind of a pretentious sound bite.” She paused, and continued, “But it should come out of desperation, the best art usually does.”
Nonfiction as a Choice: An Interview with Lydia Millet
On the writer's new memoir 'We Loved It All' and storytelling without the artifice of filters
By Lisa Wells and Lydia Millet
April 30, 2024
THE WRITER Lydia Millet is often described in reviews as “funny,” her wit “devastating.” Both are true, and I’ll add that like a lot of funny people, her humor is born of inconvenient truths.
With more than a dozen novels, she’s covered a lot of ground and attracted a bunch of accolades. But aside from a handful of book reviews and incisive op-eds in the New York Times, she hasn’t published nonfiction. These op-eds, by the way, are worth a read. Devoted to exposing the hypocrisy and depravity of politicians who, for example, would sell off sacred land through midnight budget-riders, or claim to be fighting the climate crisis while permitting domestic oil production to reach an all-time high. These articles (and her recent novels) are informed by her work at the Center for Biological Diversity in Tucson, Arizona, where she’s held a day job writing copy for twenty-five years, a lunch pail activist in the fight against extinction. Her nonfiction debut, We Loved It All, goes at the threat of extinction directly. It is described as both an “anti-memoir,” and a memoir of life—of her life, and the lives of many imperiled species with whom we share the planet. As I prepared to talk to Lydia about her newest book, my foremost question was why? Why risk venturing into a new genre, and one that requires such nakedness? Why bother in the era of autofiction, where so much revenge gets done these days in the handy guise of invention? Her response: She was courting exposure, risk, in order to “sort things through without the artifice of filters.” An answer I found at once satisfying and unsurprising from this consistently no-bullshit artist.
– Lisa Wells
Lisa Wells: To start, how did you end up writing a book of nonfiction? I’ve read your nonfiction criticism, but what prompted you to write We Loved it All in the vein of memoir?
Lydia Millet: Writing fiction, you always have plausible deniability. In fiction you can worm out of any kind of prescriptive message that seems to hover behind the text just as you can distance yourself from the characters and events: No, that character’s not my terrible ex-boyfriend! He’s completely made up!
I wanted to write something straight and, frankly, earnest. And try to make lucid, for myself, certain opinions about desires and problems I have. Which are also some other people’s desires and problems. Including the choice to have children and the quandary of how to not rob them of hope while also not failing to communicate to them the desperateness of our global position.
There’s an “I” in this book but there’s also a “we” that was a deliberate choice, because first, I think our culture needs to tell more stories about “us” and fewer stories about “me,” and while it’s always a risk to write about a collective—because “we” can never be everyone or pretend to be everyone, and some readers may mistake the “we” in a book for a presumptuous monolith—I think it’s a risk that needs to be taken. In this book the “we” is a demographic I belong to in the country I live in.
I barely feel capable of thinking without writing. And I was partly just wishing to think through matters of extinction and climate change and storytelling and see how I might lace them together. To sort things through without the artifice of filters.
Lisa: It’s not a straight memoir in any sense. There’s a layer about your life, then these intergenerational layers about your kids and your family of origin. And then, of course, all of these wonderful and terrible vignettes about the other species you’ve encountered in your work. It all compiles and coheres in a way that resembles life, if not linearly. So I wonder how you approached the construction?
Lydia: Originally it was much longer, sort of a sprawling bestiary. I had to weed out—and I felt really guilty doing it—but I had to weed out so many critters. And plants: the book has too few plants in it and I regret that. But I had to be the mercenary as I was cutting it down because it had started to feel like the homemade encyclopedia of animals my brother made when we were kids. It got whittled down so it wouldn’t overwhelm.
I also cut out a lot of my own life. Because the original structure was to tell of personal encounters, and every time I mentioned an animal or plant in my scene-setting—even a common household plant like a Ficus or the lilac bush in our yard or the maples on our street—I’d go into a disquisition on its natural history. So it became a bit of a junk pile of anecdotes. I had to find some way to try to distill it. I read your book Believers when I’d been writing this for a couple of years and was so delighted to find a sensibility I was really at home with. It can be hard to find things in the culture that combine a rigorous aesthetics of language with the concerns that we’re articulating. A lot of times when I read about animals those accounts are written with either a sort of generic journalistic tone or National Geographic tone. And neither of those are bad, but it does feel like American culture, in particular, has lagged in connecting mass extinction with human identity. In places like the United Kingdom, for example, there’s a more mainstream understanding that extinction threatens everything that’s best about Homo sapiens as well as the complex of nature itself.
Want to read more from Lisa Wells?
Check out her essay ““Promised Lands” here.
Lisa: I know you don’t want to frame it in ethical terms, but personally, I think it’s kind of a dodge if you don’t have any skin in the game. But when you do you let your subjectivity in, you risk getting spanked for it.
Lydia: That’s a clean way to put it.
Lisa: It’s interesting to learn that you had to cull so many plants and animals from the final draft. I think the reader will probably feel those missing pages in the book, not as absence, but as a kind of ghostly subtext. There are so many wonderful creatures present in the book. Like the worms who learn a task, have their heads cut off, then regrow their heads, but can still remember how to do the task.
Lydia: Planarian flatworms, yes. Those guys!
Lisa: And the courtly male octopuses that hand their packet of a sperm to the females willing to accept it! That was so wonderful. I think Adam Phillips said art should increase the available store of reality, and I feel like that’s what this book does. Are the creatures in the book favorites of yours through your work at the Center for Biological Diversity, or just from being a lover of the greater-than-human world, or was this novel research for the book?
Lydia: Well, you go down rabbit holes. And some of this animal knowledge is just ambient. Everywhere, in media, you can find charismatic vignettes about animal life. Since, I don’t know, the seventies or maybe even the sixties and nature shows…but back in those days you had to be a hoarder or constant library-goer to have access to the kind of nature footage. Now we can bring up in a second.
Some of the splendor of the internet of animals is illusion, of course. For that same internet of animals is destructive and exploitative, enabling much of the wildlife trade, for example. Still, a vast bestiary exists that we can touch on. And then there are the scientists who love a single species, a single subspecies, a single population of a critter, and they’re so delightful too, these biologist-geeks dedicated to one organism. I love them so much. In the book, I mentioned an anglerfish guy. Dr. Theodore Pietsch.
There has to be an unknown world out there. There have to be unknown woods that are beyond our grasp. Creatures we haven’t yet met.
Lisa: I think your comment was: you don’t love anglerfish, but you love the man’s love of anglerfish.
Lydia: And it’s not that I don’t love them, but let’s face it, they’re on the homely side. It’s worth a google. There’s a male anglerfish who’s a parasite on the female, so tiny he’s like a pimple on her comparatively giant body. And his tiny body is composed of mostly testes. The world is full of poignancy.
Lisa: I’m suspicious of writers overvaluing their impact, but it does seem like one of the possibilities of following your own kind of idiosyncratic delight, in this way, is that you’re communicating the beauty but also the strangeness and fundamental otherness of those creatures. It bears the potential to penetrate the callus and excite an otherwise numb reader who maybe wouldn’t normally give a shit. Was that part of your hope?
Lydia: Yeah, I hold it to be self-evident that we need our own ignorance to be alive. I don’t mean willful ignorance, just that we have a deep need for these huge lacunae in our knowledge, to have a reason to get up in the morning. There has to be an unknown world out there. There have to be unknown woods that are beyond our grasp. Creatures we haven’t yet met. Obviously, empirically, it seems impossible that we would ever live in an entirely described universe. But I also think that as we erase diversity, we shrink. We shrink that intact universe more and more and limit our options for unknowability.
Our curiosity is crucial to who we are. I think where our curiosity meets what it does not yet know, what it has not yet encountered, that’s where life is really vivid and where we are ourselves are splendid—in that position of wanting to know and not yet knowing. And with a denuded natural world, we foreclose those possible future moments of love and glory for ourselves as sentient creatures. The existence of otherness gives us a will to live, whether or not we know it.
The book cover for Lydia Millet's We Loved it All. It features a tree holding up a platform of earth from which a tree sprouts
Delve into this exploration of memory, existence, and meaning today!
Lisa: I’ve wondered if the renewed obsession with extraterrestrials, and even psilocybin, is an attempt to recuperate mystery somehow. It feels to me like a hunt for…I don’t mean novelty in the cheap sense, but—
Lydia: In the most capacious way. I think that’s right. There are so many forms into which we can project that desire for neural novelty. And some of them are purely fantastic. Some are about consciousness alteration, and some are just about what exists in the world. I have nothing against consciousness-altering, but I think self-manipulation shouldn’t always be where we have to go. We should be able to explore beyond ourselves and find beings that exist on their own terms. Fully outside our brains.
It’s a hellscape, the idea that all we might have for adventure could be the alteration of our own minds and selves. The version of the future where all we have for richness and life is what we create with technology is a grim picture, not only for the other creatures, but for us.
Lisa: It strikes me that you would have to have experienced a kind of transcendent encounter with the greater-than-human world to even know what the counterpoint is. I sometimes wonder, and I don’t mean this in a “kids these days” way, even amongst my cohort, even the pre-iPhone people—I don’t know how many people have had the opportunity. I was lucky, and it seems like you were too.
Lydia: I think you can find it in such small things when you’re a kid. Tell me if you think I’m wrong, but my observation has been, kids are not that impressed by epic landscapes. They’re much more impressed by the face of a cat. That has to do partly with how their brains are working and growing and with the fact that you need time to be able to experience the sublime.
In a show I was watching recently, one of the many interstellar-type scenarios that abound right now, the world had sadly exploded or whatever, and there was a spaceship out there containing the human multitudes. Then they get thrown off course and will never reach their destination, so all they have is the ship. Which contains a VR theater that everyone goes into in where beautiful landscapes of Earth are evoked. And of course, they’re set to music, and people are experiencing these as though they still exist, these beautiful mossy woods when really there are none left.
But how would that even register with them as meaningful? If they’d never been in the woods in their bodies? You have to live through those moments so that the sight or smell or sound of something establishes a kind of interior deep time you can return to.
Lisa: There’s a continuity of recollection.
Lydia: Right. For us to feel a sense of timelessness or awe, I think we have to have walked in those woods before. It’s in the relationship to memory.
Lisa: It’s funny because it’s sci-fi, but it’s actually a decent description of our current moment. It’s like the mossy woods still exist, but many people only encounter them on a screen.
Lydia: Say we’re urban people and we don’t leave the city very much—still, the idea that there are forests out there that might be roadless, with unexplored reaches…this is another subject, maybe, but the existence of wildness is important to many of us. Just the existence of it, even if we don’t identify as nature people. The notion that not every square foot is penetrated by humans is crucial to a healthy psyche.
The existence of wildness is important to many of us. Just the existence of it, even if we don’t identify as nature people. The notion that not every square foot is penetrated by humans is crucial to a healthy psyche.
Lisa: I don’t know that I’ve thought about the problem in terms of imaginative loss, in quite that way. It makes me want to ask, what else do you think is missing from the conversation around climate change and species loss?
Lydia: There’s a reference in the book to a bestselling climate author who rightly stresses the urgency of fighting climate change but in the same breath decries attempts to grant personhood rights to other lifeforms as ridiculous. And I think he’s very wrong on that point and in fact quite typical of the kind of paternalistic human exceptionalism that got us into this mess in the first place.
Granting the right to life to other animals and to plants, along with rivers and forests, is a brilliant idea. It’s still just emerging in national and international law, but it comports with the religions and cultures of many Indigenous peoples. And believing in the inherent superiority of humankind over other forms of life is on a direct continuum with colonialism and white supremacy. It doesn’t compete with social justice, as this writer implied in his book—it’s part of social justice.
Lisa: Granting is a legal term, but it seems to me that what you’re doing in that case is simply acknowledging reality. Acknowledging that other species have their own wills and designs beyond being subordinated to our “uses” for them.
On another note, I don’t know that it occurred to me as I was reading, but now that I hear you talk about this—it’s like that quality of mystery and adventure persisting in the world feels apiece with your eccentric family of origin. I don’t want to trivialize your family, but there’s something of the rambling, storybook, Wes Anderson-vibe in your description of childhood. Your parents have all these languages and pets and obscure interests and skill sets.
Lydia: That’s true.
Lisa: I wondered if that whetted your appetite for, or even established an expectation of, a kind of heterogeneity of expression. Peacocking for pleasure rather than the teleological view. You know what I’m saying? There’s a love of creaturely expression that is non-utilitarian and exists for its own sake.
Lydia: My mother has that love of creatures and my father had it too. He was such a 19th-century person…you might say Renaissance man, but for some reason that sounds pretentious to me. He just had such an odd diversity of tastes. They were unified in him somehow, but at the same time all over the place. I feel like this should be a time when all of us should be—at least in terms of the data streaming into us—diverse in our interests. But somehow, we’re not. Instead, we’re constantly reproducing our already-established selves in the content we receive.
Lisa: Through algorithms.
Lydia: Yeah, that feedback loop function. Instead of seeing the new, we see iterations of the same thing we preferred two years ago, whether we’re ten years old or forty. And it’s the ten-year-old part that’s more alarming. It’s more alarming to think that kids might be, without ever recognizing it, constraining their own interests.
The version of the future where all we have for richness and life is what we create with technology is a grim picture, not only for the other creatures, but for us.
Lisa: You write some about your kids in this book. I wonder how much species loss and climate change were on your radar when you decided to have kids? And if so, what was that calculation?
Lydia: Yeah, it certainly was. I think that I just overrode rationality. I have deep gratitude to those who choose not to reproduce. And yet I’m not among them. Of course, I adore my children, as we tend to, and wouldn’t wish them undone. But I think it’s a supremely irrational act to have children now. Yes, we often have a primal urge to reproduce, but there’s also a way in which it’s maladaptive to have children. It makes you easy prey. We see that in the natural world: you’re never more vulnerable as, say, a mother bird than when you’re feigning injury to draw a predator away from your nest. And all of us as parents are in that position of vulnerability. Certain demographics much more so than others.
People talk quite obliviously about the selflessness of having children, when really, that’s the land of opposites. It’s selfish at the beginning, in an arguably perverse way, because as soon as you commit that selfish act of having a kid you’re also forced into a position of daily self-abnegation. But that doesn’t mean it wasn’t selfish in the first place.
Lisa: One of the ways in which I think my own decision to have a child was selfish, and maybe this is true for a lot of people, and touches on what you’re saying about how you’re rewarded by the culture—a child solves the problem of meaning. Or at least part of the problem of meaning.
Lydia: Exactly. Yeah.
Lisa: So maybe meaning is where the emphasis should be, rather than putting it all on the child and the question of whether or not you have one.
It reminds me of a line that comes early in the book. You say, “What we actually need may be something less vague and more attainable; an embrace of the real over a constantly deferred ideal, an engagement with the precious and finite time given us.”
You’re talking there in contrast to “happiness.” It reminded me of something the analyst James Hollis said, and I’m paraphrasing, but he said people are always showing up in therapy asking, What do I have to do to be happy? And he tells them: Happiness might not be the point. Meaning is more to the point.
Lydia: Right.
Lisa: But yours is also good advice for activists. This is my long-winded way of saying that when we get so crushed and overwhelmed by objectively overwhelming problems, I think some of it has to do with our attachment to the feeling that the ideal is constantly deferred, by an onslaught of powers that prevent action from happening.
Lydia: Yeah, yeah. Thinking of things in terms of meaning is great. I think some people also get bogged down by really limiting, restricted notions of what meaning means. What meaning implies—does it have to imply God, does it have to imply a grand design or some linear purpose or something? No, is the answer to that.
If you can conceive of meaning in a way that is alive and vigorous and splendid… part of it is, we have these mainstream, tacitly accepted things to long for, happiness or love or freedom, that we never bother to define. It’s shocking how common it is, not to have had that recognition, that happiness isn’t really a thing. Contentedness might be a thing, but that version of happiness that also signals some kind of linear completion? That’s a chimera.
Lisa: I love how you phrased it. Meaning as vigorous aliveness.
It’s a privilege to feel and sense the world at all. The fact that we have these senses is just fucking awesome.
Lydia: It’s not an equivalency type of meaning. It’s not a definition type of meaning. It’s something else. I think that’s a good thing to say to people who ask about activism and hope.
It has to do with whether you’re able to feel fully where you are at this time and attach yourself to that with excitement. You get to be here. It’s a privilege to feel and sense the world at all. The fact that we have these senses is just fucking awesome.
Lisa: The senses, man. They fucking rule.
Lydia: They rule.
Lisa: Oh, speaking of, I wanted to ask about coldness. Early in the book, you say, after having children, you no longer found it possible to be cold. Can you tell me about the coldness? The ways that it did or did not serve your writing?
Lydia: When I was a young adult, say in my twenties, I had a certain kind of hard, dismissive skepticism of certain people. It was all about defining what I wasn’t, and who I wasn’t, say what books or music I didn’t like. You’re sort of defining yourself against what you reject when you’re younger, right? It’s normal. In writing, for me, that took the shape of writing satirical novels with a broad kind of humor and a shooting fish-in-a-barrel aspect. Where things are easy targets because your empathy is limited and it’s easy to be cruel in order to laugh. You’re usually taking aim at someone or something and objectifying them.
But also in my life, socially—it’s going to sound hokey or sentimental, but especially when my kids were really little, I would look at adults I would glancingly meet, that maybe I instinctively didn’t like, and think of them as a former child. With someone out there desperately wanting to protect that creature for their whole life. We’re all so vulnerable. Just former children. So I saw everything, for a while, through that maternal prism.
Lisa: You didn’t lose your skepticism entirely. I think this is the beauty of the balance you’ve arrived in. You still turn the knife of some terrible fact, but with love. You never lecture or pull your punches. I imagine it was a hard-won balance.
Lydia: Thank you for thinking that. Ultimately, I want my friends to be funny and I want to amuse myself to some degree. And if you completely lose the power to objectify, then you’re not going to be funny, and you’re not going to have funny friends. And people being funny is ultimately their redemption, isn’t it?
Lisa: I’m not sure, but I’m charmed by the suggestion… Okay, last question: Do you think writers have a place in the fight to stop the annihilation and if so, what is it?
Lydia: Probably to make the imagined manifest. To perform acts of language that extend our imaginations into a vaster time and space. And allow us to see beyond our own personal worlds into the lives and worlds of others.
A Conversation with Lydia Millet
Jonathan Mann
American novelist Lydia Millet has published more than a dozen award-winning and bestselling novels and short story collections. She is the recipient of several awards, including the Guggenheim Fellowship and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Literature Award. Her work often discusses the relationship between humans and animals, the crisis of extinction, and climate change. Her linked short story collection Love in Infant Monkeys was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in fiction. A Children’s Bible, published in 2020, was a finalist for the National Book Award and was named one of the ten best books of the year by The New York Times Book Review. Millet’s most recent novel, Dinosaurs, was named by Publishers Weekly as one of the top ten books of fiction published in 2022. In 1999, Millet joined the staff at the Center for Biological Diversity, where she still serves as a writer and editor.
On November 28, 2023, Millet visited Butler University in Indianapolis as part of the Vivian S. Delbrook Visiting Writers Series. She sat down with Booth to discuss her work, her love for animals, and the power of stories.
Jonathan Mann (JM): You’ve been referred to as both a novelist and a climate novelist. When did you begin writing, and when did your concern for the environment come about, respectively? When did these two interests begin to intertwine?
Lydia Millet (LM): Well, really, I've always loved animals. I've always been fascinated by animals, as most children are, right? Animals are how I came to what they call conservation or the environment. I've never liked the word “environment.” It always sounds dry and clinical. So, I came to it through a fascination with animals and animal stories and talking animals and all that stuff in childhood. And then I did a graduate program in environmental economics at Duke University’s School of the Environment. So that's how I sort of formalized that interest. And I've always written—I came from a book family. We didn't have a TV until I was twelve, and my father took us to the library every Saturday. We’d have these huge piles of books, and it was kind of a slog because it was a fifteen-minute walk to the library. We just all read voraciously as kids, and my father told us what he called “talk” stories, which we would illustrate. I used to write stories about princesses and illustrate them. They had, like, those conical hats and triangular skirts.
JM: (Laughs.) Yes, yes.
LM: I wrote a lot in high school. I went to a great high school with passionate teachers in Toronto called the University of Toronto Schools, which was kind of a hybrid private-public school. You tested into it, and I think tuition was, at that time, something like nine hundred dollars a year...
JM: Oh, wow.
LM: It was probably the hardest academic work I've ever had. We had great teachers, and they encouraged me to write. I wrote a lot in college at Chapel Hill, and I read all the time, though I didn't start reading diversely, really, like stuff that was beyond my comfort zone, until I was in my early twenties. I read some great things in college, but they were kind of canonical, generally. It wasn’t until after college that I started reading more diversely. It was still canonical but just a more European canon, like Beckett, Musil, Walser, and Bernhard.
JM: When did you write your first novel?
LM: I wrote my first novel in college, and it was my honors thesis. It was really—I'm sure—terrible. I think it was called The Stone Fountain. A copy still exists in the university library, where they keep a bound copy of everyone’s theses. My friend Jenny and I were on a trip to Chapel Hill a few years back and we went and asked for it at the library. It was there, but I was too horrified to look.
JM: So you didn't read it at all?
LM: No. (Laughs.) I mean, I think I looked at a page or two.
JM: So you see this early work of yours, and you maybe glance at it a little bit...
LM:...I was deeply pained and glanced away.
JM: So then how do you think your work has evolved from that point?
LM: I hope it's gotten better. I mean, I have a condition—and maybe many writers have this—but I feel alienated from many of my old books. It always seems, if I go back and look at them, that someone else has written them. I’ve gone from being fairly mannered in my syntax and lexicon to simpler. Shorter sentences, less affectation. For a while, at the beginning of my career, I was writing more satirical books, and now I’m not doing so much satire and trying to pare down a bit. I write more in broken sentences as I get older. The positive spin would be, maybe it's an evolution toward greater economy and lucidity. I mean, that's what I would hope for. You always hope to write a great book one day. On the other hand, it could be mental decay.
JM: On the subject of lucidity, I wanted to bring up A Children's Bible. You have your characters moving around in a world that they simultaneously know and don't know because of the ambiguity caused by external pressures. You give some privacy to the protagonist, and it’s interesting because typically we’re expecting to get everything—what the protagonist knows, the reader will know or figure out eventually. But you do give your protagonist privacy, and there’s some lucidity in that, right, with what you choose to reveal about the character and their world? Is there a reason for this approach or why you like this approach?
LM: That’s an interesting framing; no one has put it to me that way before. Privacy. I’m interested in creating characters by inference rather than direct description or exposition. Obviously, none of us wish for exposition, and I notice the more experience I have, the less I like to over-describe or, sometimes, even describe at all. (Laughs.) I'm also less and less interested in replicating things—or trying to replicate things—with prose that already exist in other media. For example, more and more I write dialogue with less and less physical description. But also, the diction of characters becomes the characters. Very rarely will you know, as a reader of something I’ve done, what a character looks like. It's not of interest to me.
JM: Would you say it's a part of trusting the reader or giving the reader some opportunity to create what they envision in their own mind’s eye?
LM: I'm not sure it's about trust. That implies I'm considering the reader when I'm writing, which I'm not. You know, if I were writing for TV, I would be considering my audience. But because I'm a fiction writer, I don't need to do that. So yes, I do also think that a book is more personal to the degree that we can imagine its landscape for ourselves, right?
JM: Yeah, that makes sense.
LM: The more I prescribe, or any writer prescribes, the physicality, for example, of the people—I think landscape is a little different—the more limited it becomes. The culture of the book becomes more self-limiting the more you define its terms. If you can get away with—as someone like Beckett does—with less specificity, you make space for others to exist on their own terms.
JM: No, that makes perfect sense.
LM: I like that as a reader…I have a new book coming out in April called We Loved It All, which is this odd hybrid thing, a memoir and not a memoir, but I kind of play a role in it. And in it I discuss the privacy of the mind and how, at once, necessary and astonishing it is.
JM: Yes, because oftentimes it feels like we don't have privacy, especially right now.
LM: The mind is the only refuge, and increasingly it may be being infiltrated. Of course, it’s always phenomenologically infiltrated…but the idea that others cannot actually steal our secrets from us, the idiosyncrasy and oddness of our personal thoughts that we get to keep and hoard...but that privacy also implies a great loneliness in our species, a great isolation where we want to be part of a community but are alone in our separate cognitive landscapes.
JM: You mentioned that you don't necessarily think of your audience when you're working on something, right? It sounds like you write for yourself, and, looking through some of your publications, you are not afraid of taking elements of genre work. For example, you've written some eco-fantasy YA before, Sweet Lamb of Heaven has horror and thriller elements, and even Mermaids in Paradise—mermaids are central to the book.
LM: Yeah, yeah. There's absurd or, like, phantasmagorical stuff in there. I wouldn't say magical realism.
JM: I'm curious. Is there a reason why you like to borrow from those elements, or is there an interest in them specifically? I know you mentioned that when you were younger, fairy tales were your first stories.
LM: I mean, I do love all that stuff. I still love children's literature today. Doctor Seuss is still one of my favorite writers. C.S. Lewis and Philip Pullman.
JM: Yeah, of course.
LM: I'm not worried by the violation of domestic realism or the narrow definition of domestic realism in the course of a book. I'm not sure if this is a particularly helpful description, but I like to introduce an element into a narrative that doesn't belong in it, that’s not organic to it. It seems almost like a rude interruption in the cosmology of the book, and I think sometimes that works with my books and maybe, historically, sometimes it hasn't. If the whole book is satirical to start out with, it's very easy to do that because you're not really asking, in my opinion, to truly suspend disbelief. You're just asking them to trust the authority of the narrator, which is not the same as suspending disbelief…I used to have this real division between my books where some were sort of, I’d say, satirical, and others were gentler or more solemn books and only had rare moments of levity. More recently, I've tried to kind of marry the two in books like A Children's Bible or Dinosaurs. The last really broad book I did, I think, was Mermaids in Paradise. It can be hard to pull off that introduction of an object that doesn’t belong, in a book. It's always a risk you take, and some readers don't like it.
JM: Of course.
LM: Some don't like it, and even I, as a reader, don't like it when it doesn’t work! When I see it as a kind of gratuitous magic. Like in a TV show like Lost, say, where you’re of sort strung along, believing that there's some grand design when really there isn't, as it turns out. You feel like you’ve been played for a fool, trying to analyze what’s just silly. If you're hinting to me that there’s a Magnificent Oz behind the curtain, then I want you to show me something behind the curtain.
JM: It sounds like you're saying, if you are trying to marry these two elements of the more realism with the more fantastical, maybe the writer needs to show some of that forethought, that planning, that went into it.
LM: Yeah, there needs to be a symbol system. Not an equation, exactly, but we need to sense that this wasn't just a random, episodic sequence of events. What held them together? I want there to be a ghost in the machine. A singular vision. So, I'm trying to marry humor, a bit of humor, at least a tiny bit of humor, with abstraction and serious intent. For example, in writing about matters of climate or extinction, maybe there’s a dimension of self-reflection or occasional lightness to make it less difficult to engage with them.
JM: A great transition to my next question: You write a lot about the climate, our relationship with animals, what we're doing to the earth—the negative effects of what humans do. How do you see your work engaging with the world or with a broader audience?
LM: Increasingly, I see my fiction as part of this sort of post-humanist project of trying to look beyond the human into the larger community of being and trying to understand, before it's too late, how crucial others of all kinds are to humanness and to the existence of human culture. What we define as beautiful, our aesthetics…to try to explore the magnificence beyond the human. Certainly, I'm not the only person interested in this, but as a culture, we’re still myopically humanist, even on the left, and even in our intellectual culture. In a way that, say, countries like England are not. England’s very culturally concerned with extinction, and we do have a lot going on here legally, in the conservation community, and in the scientific community, with extinction. But the way artists and writers engage is nascent in the US. Extinction is of prime importance to many writers in England and Europe, existential and metaphysical, and here we still, to some degree as creatives, see this as a boutique interest that doesn't concern our direct survival going forward. Yet it does. It concerns our direct survival and our quality of life on Earth.
JM: Do you think that your work is more than just trying to get the reader to think about these issues? Do you hope it’s more of a call to action?
LM: It’s always unfashionable to admit to any advocacy as a fiction writer. Of course, I’m an advocate in my job. But I guess I don't really know what an effective call to action sounds like. I guess I can't really claim to know how to produce that. I mean, I think if I did, I might have no problem with it, with advocacy and art. Some of the most psychically powerful symbols have been created as propaganda. But I don’t want to write fiction that’s a polemic. Or advertising.
JM: That's a kind of slippery slope there, right?
LM: Yeah. But I am interested in ideas and conveying ideas…
JM: ...but if your work does motivate someone?
LM: Maybe it could, in a roundabout way. I've become passionate about things because of books I read as a young person. It's rarely a direct translation of what the book was about, though.
JM: Books can inspire, but they don't necessarily . . . it's not just one book that motivates, it’s maybe several . . .
LM: Empathy, in general, is something books can offer and most art forms can offer. But the interiority of novels or poetry is distinctive. . . novels, I think more than anything, because they have these prolonged interior monologues that, theoretically, really allow you to inhabit the sensibility of someone who, for example, is already dead. In a way that's fairly explicit or granular. Poetry also can do this, of course. But I’ve always loved that if you're a lonely and thoughtful person, books can save your life.
Pulitzer prize finalist Lydia Millet publishes her first nonfiction book
April 2, 20245:11 AM ET
Heard on Morning Edition
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NPR's Leila Fadel speaks with climate change advocate and novelist Lydia Millet about her first nonfiction book: We Loved It All: A Memory of Life.
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LEILA FADEL, HOST:
When Lydia Millet started writing her first nonfiction book, she was focused on animals, treating it like an encyclopedia. But as she continued, she shifted to capturing moments of understanding, exploring our connection to the natural world. In her new book, "We Loved It All: A Memory Of Life," which is out today, Millet takes us from vignettes about animals in the natural world to contemplating how to raise children and be a genuinely good citizen during multiple existential crises. I spoke with Lydia Millet about her writing journey.
LYDIA MILLET: When I read a book, I'm always most delighted when I come upon a moment that surprises me, that seems like a window opening onto something I didn't see before or recognize...
FADEL: Yeah.
MILLET: ...Or understand. And I really wanted to, in this particular book, try to make sort of a small tapestry of those moments, this sort of play of light on shadow. And so it was kind of natural, even more natural than it might be for me with fiction, to write it in, like, a stream of pieces that were, like, sort of stepping stones across a across a river or something.
FADEL: Across a life.
MILLET: Across a life, yeah.
FADEL: You have always written fiction. What was the biggest change about going to nonfiction for the first time?
MILLET: With fiction, you always have plausible deniability, right? You can say no.
FADEL: It wasn't me.
MILLET: Yeah, right. It wasn't me. That novel isn't really about me or my sainted mother or my terrible ex-boyfriend. And actually, often that denial is true. But with this, I wanted to write something unfiltered, where I played things as straight as I could and didn't pull my punches and wasn't afraid to be too earnest or too heartfelt. And so what had really preoccupied me in the background for decades was this question of how to raise children and just how to be a genuinely good citizen in this moment of multiple existential crises - you know, how all of us can stay hopeful enough to be forces for generosity and kindness in the world but not - you know, not Positive Pollyannas who tip over into passivity or denial.
FADEL: It's interesting 'cause you write about objectively depressing things - right? - the abuse of animals for human beings' needs, the strangeness of raising a human in the most intimate way, only to have them leave you because that's what the world is. But there is a love and a satire in the writing. How do you do that?
MILLET: Well, first of all, I've never been one to be able to read books that didn't have some tiny sliver of humor in them...
FADEL: Yeah.
MILLET: ...Or cheerfulness. I think I can't help but sometimes reach for, you know, that moment of maybe it's satire or maybe it's just trying to mimic the sort of quiet wit that my father had or - but I always want there to be something to make us stand back, and humor does that, I think.
FADEL: Yeah. I mean, your books, and this book also, is so much about interconnectedness and community and our connections to nature. What happens when we sever our connections with nature?
MILLET: I think when we grow up, we're told by the culture and we even tell our own children, as we've been told by our parents, to put away childish things, and the love of animals has been seen as part of that realm of childhood. So very quickly as teenagers we go from being surrounded by animals - because, you know, animals are our songs. They're our clothing. They're our beds. We go really quickly from being surrounded by those other kinds of beings to putting up posters of celebrities on our walls. We go from identifying with other animals to idolizing and competing with other people. And I think if we reclaimed that love and fascination that we have for the others - not only animals, but also trees and plants and the landscapes they live in - what if we allowed ourselves to speak the love that we have for them and grieve for them when they're lost?
FADEL: So much about being a human is about being isolated, right? We're on our phones, and everything can be done without talking to anybody, without interacting with the world. I wonder how you think about that as you write this book that really does look at our interconnectedness and where we find community and the way we are with the world as human beings and what we've done to the world as human beings.
MILLET: Well, I think it's a kind of curious paradox, or at least a conundrum, because, I mean, technology clearly is so dangerous - right? - this Tower of Babel that proliferates seemingly infinitely and that alienates us from each other and from the rest of organic life, but at the same time can bring us so much closer. And it's also a curse. Like, having all this information is so overwhelming, and having all these stimuli and not knowing how to separate the real. So in a way, it can be paralyzing, and in another way, it gives us almost a form of omniscience.
FADEL: When you think about how to tell somebody what this book is about, because it's about so much, how would you describe it, and what are some passages and parts of the book that you look to and think, this is what I was trying to say?
MILLET: Well, first, it was about the animals, and then I understood that I wasn't really in a position to write an encyclopedia. It's more like a hymn or a prayer or some kind of sacred song. In a hymn or prayer, I mean, we have a presence within that, but it's not really about us. I want the book to be about those windows, the sort of moments of recognition and understanding that can suddenly crop up out of the background. I want it to be about maybe sometimes just being able to find, in the sentences, a glimpse of something you didn't see so clearly before.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
FADEL: That's Lydia Millet. She's the author of "We Loved It All: A Memory Of Life." Lydia, thanks so much.
MILLET: Oh, I was delighted to be here. Thank you so much.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
Lydia Millet on the Challenges of Writing In the Here and Now
Jane Ciabattari Talks to the Author of "Atavists"
By Jane Ciabattari
April 22, 2025
Read Lydia Millet’s fiction from her first novel, Omnivores (1996) to her new short story collection, Atavists, and you’ll trace an evolutionary arc of American culture from the Home Shopping Network to AI and LARP. There are consistencies through the years—climate change, bodybuilding, birds, dinosaurs, disjointed relationships, for instance—but her work never feels repetitive. Instead it feels inventive, as she keeps pushing further into her universe.
In stories, like “Artist,” Millet drills deep into the generational paradox. “Shelley was smart as a tack. But she was all about the spin…Somewhere, raising her girls, Helen had taken a wrong turn. Left out the part about morality.” When Helen suggests she take a progressive agenda with her talent agency clients, Shelley pushes back. “Mom. Noam Chomsky’s a dinosaur. And not even a ferocious T.rex, either. More of a brontosaurus. A lumbering plant-eater.”
Millet touches upon tech bros in her tale of the futurist, an academic who considers ethics “stodgy” and AI a “spiritual revelation.” His experience of glimpsing “a dense swoop of black dots that were birds” on a run in a port city in Europe becomes most meaningful to him when it is reiterated in a YouTube video: “Swallows. They formed and re-formed in graceful morphing shapes in the blink of a human eye. The video was captioned Celestial choreography. He’d understood it right away. The birds were barely alive. More like fragments of information in the sky. And then he’d had the feeling. Power. Euphoria. The smooth, hard glint of steel. Flesh into digits, wings into pixels. Blood and oxygen into will, will into majesty.”
Each new book is a revelation, as Millet spins her narratives through an original, satiric, often genre-bending lens. Her voice keeps getting sharper—simultaneously funnier and more painful. Our email conversation reached from my office in wildfire-prone Sonoma County to her home in the Sonoran desert near Tucson, where she works at the Center for Biological Diversity.
*
Jane Ciabattari: When did you start working on this new collection of stories, your third (after 2018 Fight No More, which won the American Academy of Arts and Sciences short fiction award and Love in Infant Monkeys, a 2010 Pulitzer Prize finalist that features weird animal stories about Madonna, Sharon Stone, and other celebrities)?
There are so many ways we use the suffix -ist, and I wanted to play with that.
Lydia Millet: About three years ago.
JC: How did you come up with the title? And what is its meaning to you? Did you write the linked stories around the concept of the title?
LM: Actually the original title wasn’t a word but a word fragment—“The -ists”—and that proved difficult for the hardworking people who have to talk about the book in order to help sell it. So I chose an alternate that is a word. Albeit a slightly obscure one. Atavists was the only -ist I could think of that connected to all the -ist characters in the collection. I like the word for its charged quality, its inherent conflicts and judgments, its dual application in biology and psychology/criminology. “Atavistic” refers both to a return to a primordial form, like when a vestigial gill shows up on a newborn, and historically to a supposed brutishness and violence of character. What a strange, dark abyss of a word.
JC: The stories are set post-pandemic, some as recently as 2025, it seems. What are the complications of writing stories so close to the now?
LM: Many! Everything changes so fast, everything new becomes old at a breakneck pace. These tales were written before the recent election, and so, in a sense, are already quaint.
JC: Why set the stories in Los Angeles? What does that represent to you?
LM: I’ve set a lot of my books in LA—I lived there for a few years at a formative moment in my 20s and most of my family lives there now. It’s still a place I spend time, full of friends and loved ones, which remains both familiar and strange. It used to seem to me, as Leonard Cohen sang about America, like the cradle of the best and of the worst. Or one of the cradles. Now I’m not sure exactly where the best is, in America. Maybe the forests and deserts and meadows. Maybe in the last of the wild places.
JC: Your characters cover a wide range of generations, professions, interests; you write of a therapist, a futurist, a dramatist, a fetishist, an artist, a terrorist, a mixologist a futurist, an insurrectionist, a cultist, and more. How did you select these categories, these areas of interest?
LM: Hmm. I wove toward them like a drunkard? There are so many ways we use the suffix -ist, and I wanted to play with that…it essentially means someone who advocates for something or believes in it, but can also just indicate the form of someone’s labor or their psychological tendency (say, narcissist). There’s a fluidity in -ist that’s interesting.
JC: How did you research these characters, who exist is such specific universes?
LM: Not much research here, at least not conscious. Impressions and exaggerations of people I’ve met, people I’ve not met, people whose shadows and stereotypes flicker along in the rush and ugly-beautiful damages and triumphs of culture.
I just follow the threads of the sentences and the made-up personalities and see where the doors and windows appear.
JC: You interweave the characters in fascinating ways. For instance, a character in one story is the niece of a character in another story. She runs into her uncle in a bar with a group of men including a muscle man who ghosted her with a painful text: “Sorry, but you’re just too fat for me.” This thread, and her search for revenge, runs through yet another story, with a startling conclusion. How did this echoes of stories evolve?
LM: (Not an interesting answer!) Writing, I just follow the threads of the sentences and the made-up personalities and see where the doors and windows appear. It’s like a walk through a house, a walk through a city, or a walk through a maze at the edge of the woods.
JC: How did you go about choosing the order of the stories?
LM: They got rearranged a bit, mostly for flow and so that the touchstones worked together.
JC: When last we had a conversation it was about your novel Dinosaurs. How do you balance writing novels and story collections?
LM: I write stories to relax, usually while I’m between novels or between novel drafts.
JC: Which other writers (or artists, musicians, filmmakers, others) are you paying attention to now?
LM: I’m preoccupied by the crises in our politics, right now, and when I’m not reading about those, and in a state of repulsion and anger, I’ve been tending to read nonfiction. I loved wildlife journalist Brandon Keim’s new book Meet the Neighbors, for example. Oh and I *am* reading one exciting novel right now: The Harmattan Winds, by Sylvain Trudel. A translation from the French (Canadian). Highly recommend.
JC: What are you working on now/next? (How many projects?!)
LM: Three novels in various stages of disarray.
Millet, Lydia FIGHT NO MORE Norton (Adult Fiction) $24.95 6, 12 ISBN: 978-0-393-63548-5
Real estate--and the anxiety and disruption that often come with moving house--drives this linked collection of Los Angeles-set tales.
Millet has used broken relationships as a launchpad for austere, absurdist fiction (Magnificence, 2012; Sweet Lamb of Heaven, 2016) and laugh-out-loud farce (Mermaids in Paradise, 2014). Here, her attack is more compassionate and realistic, but she can still bring the weird: In one story, a woman believes her home is being overrun by "handyman midgets" who arrive unsolicited to make repairs; how much of this is real and how much is the panicked vision of a woman who's just been abandoned by her husband is intentionally vague. The central (and more grounded) figure in these stories is Nina, a real estate agent who must bear witness to the vicissitudes and cruelties of her clients: the famous musician who tries to drown himself in the pool of one home; the rebellious teen determined to force potential buyers to witness unmistakable evidence of his masturbatory habits; the wealthy, arrogant man who's led his mistress to believe she's his fiancee. Nina herself can't find a professional distance from these shenanigans, falling for a member of the musician's entourage in a relationship that ends tragically. Changing homes brings out our generosity and monstrousness in equal measure, Millet seems to suggest, an idea she explores most potently in a trio of stories featuring Lexie, a teenage sex worker whose safe job as an au pair is threatened by her sexually abusive stepfather. Those stories are especially strong because Millet so readily shifts point of view--by turns she can be a snotty rich kid, a pedophile, and a lower-class cam girl striving to rise above her station. And though Millet has never been much for easy uplift, the collection ends with the sense that our lives can find some kind of order if we acknowledge the forces that disrupt them.
A linked-story collection done right, with sensitive and complex characters each looking for a place to call home.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
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"Millet, Lydia: FIGHT NO MORE." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Apr. 2018. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A532700538/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=a6b33d17. Accessed 23 Sept. 2025.
Fight No More.
By Lydia Millet.
June 2018. 224p. Norton, $24.95 (9780393635485).
When Nina was eight years old, her catastrophically depressed and neglectful mother asked her, " Can youfeel the pain that resides in all beings?' Given the high empathy quotient in her previous work, including her last novel, Sweet Lamb of Heaven (2016), one would expect Millet herself to answer in the affirmative, even though she has a gift for discerning humor in dire predicaments. This first story collection since Love in Infant Monkeys (2009) is a book of adeptly interlocked tales revolving around skilled and stoic Los Angeles real-estate agent Nina, whose clients range from a pragmatic vampire to a successful businesswoman convinced that seven dwarfs have taken over her house. Each property Nina shows becomes a stage for dramas wrenching, ludicrous, hilarious, or all three at once. She falls in love after a potential buyer nearly drowns in a client's swimming pool. Another listing inadvertently sets in motion unlikely and alarming events as a family copes with divorce and a second marriage, bringing together angry teenager Jeremy; resilient and resourceful Lexie, an underage internet porn actor grateful to escape her sexually abusive stepfather; and Jeremy's smart, acerbic grandmother, a Holocaust survivor and university professor reluctantly leaving her beloved home.
As Millet makes exceptionally potent use of the linked-stories form, her writing is razor-edged, her comedy at once caustic and compassionate, and her insights agile as she contrasts rich and poor, house and home, delusion and love. Place Millet's latest beside connected-story collections by Elizabeth Strout 0Olive Kitteridge, 2008; Anything Is Possible, 2017), Ann Beattie (The State We're In, 2015), and Michelle Latiolais (She, 2016). The simultaneous reissue of Millet's first novel, Omnivores (1996), confirms the evolution of this stellar author's vital, caring, and audacious creativity and literary splendor.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 American Library Association
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Seaman, Donna. "House for Sale: A real-estate agent's house showings expose secrets and lies and lead to revelations and love." Booklist, vol. 114, no. 18, 15 May 2018, p. 20. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A541400779/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=61bc689f. Accessed 23 Sept. 2025.
The novelist Lydia Millet, whose new story collection is ''Fight No More,'' was impressed as a teenager by the Marquis de Sade. ''Now he's more boring, but we all fall prey to nostalgia.''
What's the most interesting thing you learned from a book recently?
Someone made me try to read my car's manual after five years of ownership. I won't name names except to say: It was my boyfriend, Aaron. I shy away from the mechanical and don't read any manuals. Or contracts. Or fine print. When I'm going to read at length I want it to be for work or pleasure, not for practicality. But he thought I should know the basics. He sees it as an ethical flaw that I don't change tires. Probably others agree. I learned I'm intractable and have the attention span of a 6-year-old faced with a differential equation. I was reminded that in a disaster scenario, an every-person-for-herself kind of challenge or even one involving minor electronic failure, I would be lost. That much like pediatric periodontists and professional closet organizers, writers like me, however uneconomic we may seem, can exist with a degree of tranquillity or efficiency only in economies like this one, of extreme specialization. Hothouse flowers.
What moves you most in a work of literature?
Grief and longing. From an austere place, not one that 's squishy with emotion. I like a backdrop of coldness, or at least neutrality. And I like fiction that doesn't affirm, reinforce a reader's fixed ideas or comfort him but casts the familiar in a strange light. Humor should always be present or ambient, even if sly or slight. I want to sense the presence of an author who can laugh at herself, who's aware of her own design and also her fallibility. One who doesn't think he's above self-mockery. Also I love ecstatic moments, but they have to be delicate, with the right balance of restraint and indulgence. Hard to earn as a writer and to find as a reader.
Which genres do you especially enjoy reading? And which do you avoid?
I read literary fiction most, but also some charismatic and political nonfiction and cultural history. I loved ''Cadillac Desert,'' by Marc Reisner, for instance, and Barthes's ''A Lover's Discourse.'' I've loved the rare great memoir: say, ''Darkness Visible,'' by William Styron, or ''Autobiography of a Face,'' by Lucy Grealy. Children's literature and poetry. Science fiction and fantasy, if the idiom isn't lame. Ideally the fantasy shouldn't feature fake Gaelic-sounding names, breastplates or women with long flowing hair, but even there my resolve has been known to fail. Maybe I can blame my late father, who raised me on a diet of the stuff. Out of a similar aversion to long flowing hair, the romance-fiction door is firmly closed to me. I did read Harlequin novels as a preteen, though, and formed the perfect mental image of a repressed, withholding, cruel yet devilishly handsome man. I do not seek out such men. Or the books that celebrate them. I also don't tend to read books about middle-aged self-realization involving people who travel to exotic and impoverished countries to seek spiritual enlightenment after divorce, later to fall in love with a better guy and drink sauvignon blanc back at their renovated country farmhouses outside Darien, Conn. Or ones where Tom Hanks uncovers ancient religious conspiracies via outrageously infantile forms of symbol interpretation.
How do you like to read? Paper or electronic? One book at a time or simultaneously? Morning or night?
Paper at home but electronic if traveling, because I am too lazy to carry heavy things. Night, because the rest of the day is for work and the children. Of course then there's the hazard of falling asleep, which happens too often. Recently I've started a lot of books I don't keep reading. Not proud of it. Some of those books are very good. There are piles. Unfinished business that stretches for years.
How do you organize your books?
Opportunistically. I only keep them if I love them. And there are few enough of those that I can generally find them again pretty easily. I love libraries, so I borrow a lot.
What book might people be surprised to find on your shelves?
''120 Days of Sodom''? Maybe they wouldn't be surprised. It features in my new collection. As a teenager I was very impressed by the Marquis de Sade. Horrified but compelled. Now he's more boring, but we all fall prey to nostalgia.
What's the best book you've ever received as a gift?
''The Giant All-Color Book of Fairy Tales,'' retold by Jane Carruth, Golden Press, 1971, from my parents. Stories with pictures by different artists. It was my staple as a child. I still have it, spine torn and taped up, pages soft and filthy with childish finger smears. Fifty retellings of Grimm and Andersen and Perrault, piercingly sad tales like ''The Little Mermaid'' and ''The Little Match Girl,'' as well as lighter tales about the foolishness of those darn peasants, like ''The Golden Goose.'' But I remember even the odd and mediocre tales, like ''Ricky of the Tuft,'' where a prince suffers from having bad hair until he finds a beautiful stupid princess he has the power to make smart. Luckily she has the power to fix his hair in return. Young royals should have to settle for nothing less than the total package.
Who is your favorite fictional hero or heroine? Your favorite antihero or villain?
Those that are hero and villain at once. Different ones dominated different times. Before I was 10 it was the Lorax and Aslan, then briefly Scarlett O'Hara, until I switched my loyalty to saintly Melanie. I too will suffer nobly in silence, I decided for a while. But then it turned out silence did not come easily to me. Ignatius J. Reilly and Beckett's fictional proxies in my 20s, and Nabokov's Charles Kinbote and the terrible guy in Elias Canetti's ''Auto-da-Fe.'' Deeply flawed men with vast blind spots. Eventually I stopped remembering or noticing characters' names and cared only about voices. In my 30s maybe the narrator of J. M. Coetzee's ''Disgrace,'' the voices in Virginia Woolf's books and Joy Williams's and Lydia Davis's, in funny books by Mary Ruefle and Julie Hecht. In my 40s, not sure. The heroes are in hiding.
What kind of reader were you as a child? Which childhood books and authors stick with you most?
Avid, obsessive and a binge reader, where the binges were constant. Prone to dramatic weeping and hysterical laughter. Extreme identification with characters both tragic and comic. We didn't have a television until I was 12 or 13, so books were all. Stories with talking animals were my favorites, typically. I loved the genius Dr. Seuss. ''The Chronicles of Narnia'' and Edward Eager and Beverley Nichols, who wrote ''The Tree That Sat Down'' and ''The Stream That Stood Still.'' They're tragically neglected. The ''Swallows and Amazons'' series, by Arthur Ransome; P. G. Wodehouse; Diana Wynne Jones, though I came to her late; and Nancy Farmer. I love Philip Pullman and Garth Nix, but they weren't around when I was young. I read their books now instead.
Whom would you want to write your life story?
I want to say, anyone! But that would in fact be a lie. I would have to pick my friend Jenny Offill, author of ''Last Things'' and ''Dept. of Speculation.'' She's strictly a fiction writer, which is actually a selling point. And she has a way of spinning the everyday into subtle gold. She could take the tawdry parts and make them seem almost tasteful, or at least forgivable, using nothing but her magic wand of words. Also, she actually knows the tawdry parts, and you can't have a juicy biography without those. Plus she brings the funny. On the down side, she's a busy woman and would never have time.
How do you decide what to read next? Is it reviews, word of mouth, books by friends, books for research? Does it depend on mood or do you plot in advance?
A bit of everything. I admit I use the ''Look Inside'' feature on Amazon as a smell test. I don't often browse at real bookstores, though I buy from them, because I don't enjoy the standing-and-perusing model. I never did, even before the internet. I like to write socially at times, surrounded by people in public spaces, but not to read that way. As Amazon knows very well, ''Look Inside'' has a voyeuristic quality all its own. It's like speed-dating, where the date is a book.
If you could require the president to read one book, what would it be?
This president? Yes. One book.
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An expanded version of this interview is available at nytimes.com/books.
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"Lydia Millet." The New York Times Book Review, 10 June 2018, p. 7(L). Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A541966142/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=3156e55a. Accessed 23 Sept. 2025.
FIGHT NO MORE By Lydia Millet 209 pp. W.W. Norton & Company. $24.95.
''Home'' is a word that can conjure feelings of safety and belonging. The very sound suggests a comfortable embrace; the exhale is almost a sigh of relief. But the canny and daring writer Lydia Millet is no sentimentalist, and in ''Fight No More,'' her new collection of linked stories, she explores the fragility and treachery of a place that can offer both solace and deception.
Millet's boldly playful and intellectually charged body of work combines lightning bolts of emotional acuity, moments of precise poetry and subversively dark comedy along with investigations of existential ideas and real-world concerns. The ambitions of her latest are no less far-reaching. The stories' activating character is Nina, a young real estate agent in Los Angeles. Nina meets all kinds -- a woman who fancies herself a vampire and keeps blood in her refrigerator, a suicidal rock star, a woman who hallucinates that tiny men are renovating her house out from under her. Jeremy, a teenager, stung by his father's desertion and angry that he and his mother must move out of their home, times his masturbation sessions so that when Nina and her clients open the door to his bedroom, they are treated to a surprise. Aleska, Jeremy's grandmother, a retired academic, must sell her beloved home and move in with Jeremy's father, his sweetly naive young wife and their new baby. The couple want an au pair to care for the infant, and Jeremy suggests Lexie, a teenage girl whose online sex site he patronizes. Lexie has fled her home and a stepfather whose sexual obsession with her is the subject of one of the collection's most unnervingly raw pieces.
[Read Lydia Millet:By the Book]
Formally, a linked collection suggests that meaning lies not in any individual story but in the philosophical joins that connect them, and Millet provides her characters with the desire to understand the fractures in their lives in a larger context. Aleska, whose family perished in the Holocaust, has spent a lifetime studying the aesthetics and appeal of fascist art. Desire and degradation are also issues Lexie confronts. While showing a house, Nina, raised but mostly abandoned by a mentally ill mother, helps to save the depressed musician from drowning. In the aftermath, Nina feels ''the euphoria drain away. What stayed was almost like grief. It was true someone had been saved, but who was saved and who was left?''
This question of relative gain is subtly threaded through the stories. ''A person might want to be free to do something to you, often,'' Nina considers. ''One man's freedom was another man's aggravated assault.'' It is a sentiment that not only has sickening resonance when we meet Lexie's predatory stepfather, but one that also troubles the hearts of stories that explore a complex set of ideas including the relationship between sexual and political pornography, the pain of others and the ways in which we mistake the ersatz for the real. Aleska mourns the loss of her beloved home that she has fashioned as a bulwark against the trauma of her past, but she also understands that it offered her son no protection from her inadvertently wounding behavior. ''What we do to our children,'' she muses. ''She herself, what had she done? Benign neglect. Lost in the daydreams. Sometimes nightmares. The sedimentation of everyday life.''
Life cannot be fully reckoned with, Millet suggests in this shimmering and brilliantly engaged collection, unless we embrace the fact that there is always a snake in even the most serene of gardens.
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PHOTO: Lydia Millet (PHOTOGRAPH BY IVORY ORCHID PHOTOGRAPHY)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 The New York Times Company
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Silver, Marisa. "Where the Heartache Is." The New York Times Book Review, 12 Aug. 2018, p. 9(L). Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A549820300/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=72a573c1. Accessed 23 Sept. 2025.
A Children's Bible
Lydia Millet. Norton, $25.95 (224p) ISBN 978-1-324-00503-2
Millet follows up Sweet Lamb of Heaven with a lean, ironic allegory of climate change and biblical comeuppance. A group of friends, successful "artsy and educated types," plan an "offensively long reunion" at a summer house "built by robber barons in the 19th century," somewhere on the East Coast. They bring along their children, ranging in age from prepubescent to 17, who devise inventive ways to ignore them. With the young teenage narrator, Evie, Millet perfectly captures the blend of indifference and scorn with which the teenagers view their boozy parents, emblematic of humanity's dithering in the face of environmental catastrophe: "They didn't do well with long-term warnings. Even medium-term." After a massive storm interrupts the summer idyll and brings looting and riots to New York and Boston, the parents lose themselves to booze and cocaine and the children flee with a menagerie of rescued animals, seeking refuge at a farmhouse. This lurid section, in which they are besieged by armed raiders searching for food, is shaky, and allusions to biblical tales such as Noah's Ark and the Ten Commandments feel facile, but the novel regains its footing once parents and children reunite, with the children calling the shots. Millet's look at intergenerational strife falls short of her best work. (May)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2020 PWxyz, LLC
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"A Children's Bible." Publishers Weekly, vol. 267, no. 3, 20 Jan. 2020, p. 38. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A613203752/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=c8088e9b. Accessed 23 Sept. 2025.
Millet, Lydia A CHILDREN'S BIBLE Norton (Fiction Fiction) $25.95 5, 12 ISBN: 978-1-324-00503-2
A group of children are forced to fend for themselves in the face of rising sea levels, worsening storms, and willfully ignorant parents.
This somber novel by Millet (Fight No More, 2018, etc.) is a Lord of the Flies–style tale with a climate-fiction twist. Evie, the narrator, is one of a group of kids and teenagers spending a summer with their parents at a lakeside rental mansion that’s pitched as a vacation retreat but increasingly feels like a bulwark against increasingly intense weather on the coasts. The parents’ chief activity involves stockpiling alcohol, leaving their children to explore the area. When a massive storm hits, the parents double down on self-medicating (“during the night the older generation had dosed itself with Ecstasy”) while the kids explore further, ultimately arriving at a farm that’s well stocked, at least for a while. The novel takes some time to find its footing, introducing a host of characters who are initially difficult to differentiate, but it ultimately settles on Evie and her rising fury at the grown-ups’ incapacity to rise to a challenge and her younger brother, Jack, who’s become increasingly obsessed with a Bible he’s received and whether it can serve as a climate change survival handbook. (At one point he attempts to gather up animals, Noah-like.) Millet’s allegorical messages are simple: The next generation will have to clean up (or endure) the climate mess prior ones created, and any notion that we can simply spend our way to higher ground is a delusion. Millet presses that last point in the novel’s latter pages as the brief peace of the farm is disrupted in often horrific fashion. In the process, Jack’s Bible plays an allegorical role too: Can we maintain civilization as we know it when the world descends into Old Testament–style chaos?
A bleak and righteously angry tale determined to challenge our rationalizations about climate change.
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"Millet, Lydia: A CHILDREN'S BIBLE." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Mar. 2020. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A616094275/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=0fe2d8f8. Accessed 23 Sept. 2025.
Lydia Millet; A CHILDREN'S BIBLE; W. W. Norton & Company (Fiction: Literary) 25.95 ISBN: 9781324005032
Byline: Michelle Anne Schingler
Imagination is a lifeboat, and complacency an albatross, in Lydia Millet's visionary novel A Children's Bible.
A gaggle of families converge at an ocean-adjacent mansion for a summer of revelry and reconnections, bringing with them the tensions of their outside lives and a host of their dubious children. The younger generation resolves to ignore their parents, connecting to one another in relative anonymity. They explore the nearby beaches and streams, experiment with intimacy, and take care of the youngest among them. Their parents self-medicate their way through nights and days.
Among the children is Evie, who wishes that the adults would acknowledge the challenges to come. Glaciers are melting and species dying off; the rich are building inland bunkers and planning for the apocalypse. But instead of preparing, her parents insist on functioning "passably in a limited domain. Specifically adapted to life in their own small niches," even if it leaves their children flailing.
When the storm finally hits, Evie and her cohort take charge, wrangling the children and relocating them to a nearby farm. Their parents stay behind, among the murk of the hurricane's detritus and languishing under a virus not familiar in their climate. The children bring with them an illustrated children's Bible that Evie's brother translates for them: God is science. And science can either kill or restore.
In the sometimes surrealistic A Children's Bible, the young and savvy inherit the Earth; the meek fade away. Eerie biblical illusions -- to crucifixions; old lives left behind; angels, saviors, and tormentors; and plagues and resurrections -- couple with stark, realistic examples of how human beings behave when they're pushed past the familiar. That its young cast remains so centered, even as waters rise and systems collapse around them, is part of what makes this atypical cli-fi novel so riveting.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2020 Foreword Magazine, Inc.
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Schingler, Michelle Anne. "A Children's Bible." ForeWord, 27 Apr. 2020. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A622088866/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=4699a77b. Accessed 23 Sept. 2025.
A CHILDREN'S BIBLEBy Lydia Millet
A burgeoning number of literary novelists are caught in a creative paradox: How do we write about the climate crisis? Flaubert's dictum about a global scourge of his own time -- ''Depict it: That's enough'' -- doesn't seem to apply, because the evidence is already in front of readers' eyes every day, and they refuse to engage with it. Many of the traditional effects of literature -- resolution, or individual heroism, or catharsis, or hope -- seem like phony comforts, misleading interior transformations that only feel like, rather than constitute, actual change. Most kneecapping of all, perhaps, is the knowledge that even the best novel is not a form of direct action. It alters nothing, its effects are isolate and random, the voice in which it preaches can't carry past the choir.
Lydia Millet has O.G. status among these writers. She holds a master's degree in environmental policy, and lives and writes far from the usual literary precincts, in the desert outside Tucson, where she works for the nonprofit Center for Biological Diversity. Though her literary productivity has remained impressive, one has the sense that it has moved into the background for her in some way, that, like all the best writers, she doesn't really write because she wants to but because she can't not.
Her 13th book of adult fiction is called ''A Children's Bible'' -- a clever self-undercutting that suggests an all-encompassing theory of everything while also promising simplicity, reduced scale, even a certain bowdlerizing. For a while the novel sustains a deceptively timeless, children's-treasury vibe, with its old-fashioned flipping of speech tags (''said a mother'' instead of ''a mother said'') and its concentration on common nouns without modifiers: ''Once we lived in a summer country,'' it begins. ''In the woods there were tree houses, and on the lake there were boats.'' But before long, signifiers of contemporary life seep in: cellphones, Fendi, Amazon Prime.
The setting -- a massive summer house, with multiple families vacationing in it -- calls to mind that of Susan Minot's novel ''Monkeys'' turned to account as metaphor: an abundance of children, a lazy hedonism, an air of uneasily inherited and vaguely threatened privilege. The house itself, we are told, was built by robber barons in the 19th century. There's never any mention of whom it actually belongs to: Though nominally a rental, it seems more like the parents' common heritage, and they do not interrogate it.
Our narrator is an adolescent named Evie, though she avails herself mostly of the first-person plural. The summer days she describes are made anarchic by a kind of parental economy of scale; there are simply so many kids that they cannot be kept track of, so they formulate their own plans while the adults lounge around and, mostly, drink. The children have a summer-long contest to conceal from one another which of the parents are actually theirs, because there is no way the answer will not be embarrassing. They seem estranged, self-generated, like children in a Joy Williams story. What they fear most is growing up, turning into adults, the helpless slide into valuing whatever the hell it is that these adults value.
Evie has a little brother, Jack, wholly unsupervised except by her. Jack is a reader, and one day Evie sees that he is carrying around an unfamiliar book, ''A Child's Bible: Stories From the Old and New Testaments.'' One of the mothers gave it to him, he says; he isn't quite sure which. Jack has no sort of religious consciousness or instruction, no context for making sense of this Bible as anything other than a book of stories. He becomes quite fond of it (though still ranking it behind his other favorite books, like the ''Frog and Toad Treasury'' and ''Laugh-Out-Loud Jokes''), and soon he starts noticing odd little concordances between the stories in this book and what is happening in the world around him.
After a brief interlude in which the kids camp out by the ocean and meet some handsome children of the 1 percent (who talk with WASPish modesty about their parents' expensively outfitted bunkers for surviving the end of the world), the children return to the house, which is then all but leveled by a storm. The grounds are flooded, the electricity goes out. The adults respond to the crisis by breaking out the Ecstasy and pairing off adulterously. Disgusted, the children (along with as many local animals as Jack can save) commandeer a car and set off for the home of one of them -- ''a 10-bedroom house in Rye'' -- but they don't make it, winding up instead on a farm somewhere in Pennsylvania (''west is Bethlehem'') run by a caretaker and owned by an absentee rich lady. It's on a hill, which means they can get a cell signal, and thus they learn that the storm was not just local: It has caused death and destruction as far away as New York and Boston.
Jack keeps noticing -- and duly pointing out, to the uninterested others -- parallels between current events and the stories in ''my book.'' There are more, even, than he catches: There's a birth in a barn, a plague, a Moses, a Cain and an Abel, even a crucifixion. But part of the novel's genius is that these allusions never really lead anywhere -- they don't coalesce into some superstructure of metaphor. The baby born in the manger is just a baby. The allusions aren't symbols or clues; they're just faint echoes, like puzzle pieces too few to fit together. They don't mean what we're used to them meaning.
It's Jack who teases out, using the spare parts of these old parables, a new system of understanding their devolving world. And it's pretty good: ''God,'' he decides, is a code word. When the people in the book say God, they mean nature. What's more, if God equals nature, then Jesus equals science. He makes a chart for comparison between Jesus and science: heals the sick -- check; makes blind people see -- check; ''turns hardly any food into lots'' ...
''And the proof is, there's lots the same with Jesus and science,'' Jack says. ''Like, for science to save us we have to believe in it. And same with Jesus. If you believe in Jesus he can save you.''
Science can still save us if we believe in it. That knowledge doesn't exactly hit the other characters with the force of a revelation. It doesn't change the outcome of events. But it's there, Jack insists; it's in his book. And now it's in Millet's book too, for those with ears to hear.
On the farm, the children find a shaky but peaceful equilibrium, for a while. Even in the Bible, of course, there are bad guys; and they come here in the form of looters, heavily armed and sadistic, whose base of operations is a nearby former McDonald's. The children have nothing with which to fight back. But, as in the Bible, every disaster story is also an origin story.
To Jack, the Bible is an old book found in a decaying summer house, an artifact to try to make sense of, a missive from some lost world. With brilliant restraint, Millet conceives her own low-key ''bible'' the same way. It's not a history, not a tract or a jeremiad; the truth it bears is not going to overwrite the future. It's a tale in which whoever or whatever comes after us might recognize, however imperfectly, a certain continuity: an exotic but still decodable shred of evidence from the lost world that is the world we are living in right now.
Jonathan Dee is the author of seven novels, most recently ''The Locals.'' A CHILDREN'S BIBLE By Lydia Millet 224 pp. W.W. Norton & Company. $25.95.
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PHOTO: (PHOTOGRAPH BY Ben Giles FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2020 The New York Times Company
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Dee, Jonathan. "Storm Warning." The New York Times Book Review, 10 May 2020, p. 9(L). Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A623294106/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=cf50edc8. Accessed 23 Sept. 2025.
Millet, Lydia DINOSAURS Norton (Fiction None) $26.95 10, 11 ISBN: 978-1-324-02146-9
Independently wealthy but bereaved in the wake of a painful breakup, a man moves from New York to Arizona in search of a fresh start.
Millet pulls back slightly here from the environmental catastrophe imagined in her National Book Award finalist, A Children's Bible (2020). To be sure, Gil sees plenty of evidence of human destructiveness around his new home in Phoenix, especially the corpses of birds shot and abandoned by an anonymous hunter. Human cruelty is also evident in the bullying of his next-door neighbors' son, Tom, by a schoolmate, who is himself maltreated by his brutal father. But Gil finds warm companionship with Tom's parents, Ardis and Ted, and his memories of New York include close friendships with two men, the hilariously unalike married couple Vic and Van Alsten. These relationships counterpoint the treatment he suffered from his abusive and manipulative former girlfriend, Lane; good-natured, almost pathologically unassuming Gil's eventual extrication from her emotional clutches forms an important element in the plot. How we can nurture ourselves, the people dear to us, and the world around us are key issues in this gentle, meditative novel, told from Gil's point of view to slowly build a marvelously full, if inadvertent, self-portrait. Gil rivals Dostoevsky's Prince Myshkin in sheer goodness, with a healthy dollop of Myshkin's cluelessness, but he grows and learns as he settles in in Arizona and gets several kinds of closure from developments in New York. His new Arizona friends are also depicted as kind people striving to do right by others. Are they doomed to extinction, like Millet's eponymous dinosaurs? Will they survive by evolving, as dinosaurs did into birds? These sorts of philosophical questions are raised with a very light touch by Millet, who enfolds thematic and psychological depths in elegant, deceptively simply prose. Her lovely, moving conclusion affirms that "separateness had always been the illusion the world was inside you."
Another life-affirming work from a writer who always carves her own literary path.
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"Millet, Lydia: DINOSAURS." Kirkus Reviews, 15 July 2022. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A709933291/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=44a28b5f. Accessed 23 Sept. 2025.
Dinosaurs
by Lydia Millet
Norton, [pounds sterling]14.99, pp. 230
Adapt or die. That brutal Darwinian dictum is too blunt to serve as the motto of Dinosaurs, Lydia Millet's slim, quietly powerful 12th novel, but the threat of extinction, implicit in the title, hovers in the air. Bird-obsessed--our feathered friends are 'the last of the dinosaurs'--the novel tracks two years in the life of a 'stricken' character who feels 'less than whole'. Gil was damaged in early childhood by the sudden death of both parents, and then by a second abandonment, by a long-term girlfriend who absconded, leaving a three-word note: 'I met someone.'
Gil is rich, having inherited his grandfather's fortune. He has few friends and no reason to be in one place rather than another. He tries to cure his heartache by walking from Manhattan to Phoenix, Arizona, where he has bought, sight unseen, a large house on the edge of the desert. The long walk does him some good, but even better are the people who move in next door: a husband, wife, teenage girl and younger boy. Theirs is a glass house, literally. 'At first they seemed like a group of mannequins to him, in a high-end department store window.' Gil is shy; they are not. Gradually they form a kind of symbiotic relationship.
He observes the neighbours and also the bird life: quail, mourning doves, hummingbirds, woodpeckers, vultures. He volunteers at a shelter for battered women but before long his role is discontinued. The director tells him that the shelter's board has 'decided, until the gender climate improves, to put the Friendly Man programme on hold'. (The novel is set during the first half of the Trump presidency.)
Other things happen. The boy next door is bullied. A woman courts Gil. Not far from his house he finds a large dead hawk, 'one wing so loaded with birdshot it had nearly detached from her body'. These events are ordinary, interesting enough, and the shellshocked Gil reacts to them--and yet it would be an exaggeration to say that Dinosaurs has a plot. It has a mood, a sensibility, and an elaborate series of loose avian allegories. Many of the chapters are named after birds, and bird behaviour reflects on the behaviour of the humans in our purview and vice versa.
Millet deploys a radically stripped-back prose style, as bare and plain as the dry, sandy river bed behind Gil's house. The sentences are short. Paragraphs, too. A paucity of verbs. Among the few lyrical flights is a meditation on ghosts. Gil doesn't believe in them, but wishes he did: 'The souls might gather in a host, flock together and wheel and spin. Funnel and disperse.'
What does Dinosaurs add up to? It could be mistaken for a character study. Gil is attractive, perceptive, passive but not apathetic. He wants to do good, to be good. 'You don't fight for yourself,' a friend tells him. 'Only for other people.' He fights for other people and other species, birds especially. Any threat to avian populations, descendants of the dinosaurs, ought to remind us of the threat to our own species. Will we evolve? Gil compels attention because he has the freedom to do as he likes--and chooses to observe and to care. Adapt and live.
Adam Begley
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2022 The Spectator Ltd. (UK)
http://www.spectator.co.uk
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Begley, Adam. "Among hawks and doves." Spectator, vol. 350, no. 10129, 15 Oct. 2022, p. 37. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A724101585/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=79134025. Accessed 23 Sept. 2025.
DINOSAURS, by Lydia Millet
When I read at the beginning of ''Dinosaurs,'' Lydia Millet's 13th novel, that a man traveled on foot all the way from New York to Arizona, I thought, That must have been some adventure. Surely he's got stories to tell. What did he see, whom did he meet, what went through his mind as he walked for nearly five months, across 2,500 miles, alone?
But ''Dinosaurs'' is not a road novel, and our traveler, Gil, a ''disgustingly rich'' 45-year-old bachelor, is no picaresque hero. By Page 2 the walk is already behind him, and we know that he's sold his Manhattan loft and bought a house in Phoenix, where most of the novel is set. (He's chosen Arizona for the ''alien beauty'' of its desert landscape.) Later, when asked about the trip, he says: ''It's not much of a story. ... It went like this: the same, the same, the same. Then, for a few miles, slightly different. The same, the same, the same, the same ... then slightly different. I met some truckers. And saw a lot more roadkill than I ever wanted to.''
This response is all the more surprising, given that Gil started walking not long before Election Day, 2016. ''Mostly away from the news cycle and the screens,'' he forgot about the date, and learned only the day after, from a motel TV, that the new president was not the ''reasonable'' woman he voted for (by mail), but ''quite the opposite.'' The shock affects him for weeks, we're told, but no significant anecdote arises from his trek across the United States during this upheaval in the political landscape.
Though it wasn't just roadkill that he observed along the way: ''The walk was when he first noticed birds.'' His appreciation of these descendants of dinosaurs only increases once he settles in bird-filled Phoenix, and Millet's many descriptions of various species afford much of the book's most delightful prose. Quail, for example, whose ''plumes hung over their faces, between their eyes, and trembled as they ran,'' look to Gil like ''foolish dandies.''
As to why he's undertaken the walk to begin with, Gil explains, ''When you have a lot of money, you never pay for anything. You never feel the cost, so you live like everything is free. There's never a trade-off. Never a choice or a sacrifice, unless you give up your time. I wanted the change to cost me. ... I wanted to earn it.''
But there was also something else driving him: the end of a long relationship with Lane, ''a singular force'' of a woman to whom ''he'd given ... all he had,'' but whose main interest in him, as he is ultimately forced to admit, was his inheritance. One day he came home to find her gone and a note: ''I met someone.'' Someone not only rich but also famous. After that, she ghosted him.
Gil is warmly welcomed to the neighborhood by the couple next door: a psychotherapist, Ardis, and her husband, Ted, whose job ''had to do with the funding of infrastructure projects.'' Gently prodded by Ardis, Gil soon finds himself bonding with her 10-year-old son, Tom, becoming his ''shadow -- half babysitter, half friend.'' Although Ardis ends up falling for Gil, she never acts on those feelings, and he only learns about them late, and inadvertently. By then he is fully committed to a relationship with Ardis's divorced friend, a surgeon named Sarah, who is as nice and right for Gil as Lane was mean and wrong.
Gil sees his wealth -- amassed by his grandfather's family of fossil fuel barons -- as ''a coat of shame he always had to wear'' and that he is morally obliged to lighten through charitable giving and volunteer work. In Phoenix he applies for a position at a shelter for abused women as a ''Friendly Man,'' or an ''unpaid bodyguard,'' ready to escort residents on errands. When I read that the shelter's director is at first concerned that Gil might be too attractive for the job (''it could be seen as threatening,'' she tells him), I foresaw some thorny predicament; but none occurs, and despite a warning that there could be ''a run-in with an abuser'' Gil never meets any such trouble. He does, however, lose his job when the shelter's all-female board of directors decides that, given ''the culture in the country. The president, et cetera. The toxic masculinity,'' it would be better not to have any men working there at all.
Another opportunity for a clash seems to arise when Gil decides to stake out who in the neighborhood is illegally night-hunting birds. But when Gil finally discovers the hunter's identity, the confrontation takes place almost in passing, and I doubt many readers won't already have guessed who the villain turns out to be.
Millet keeps thwarting the reader's expectations of drama, and offers instead a subdued portrait of a wounded middle-aged man's journey toward wholeness. Early on, Gil tells Ardis and Ted about ''his failing attempts to participate in society'' -- a failure we understand better upon learning of the trauma he suffered as a young child, when an accident caused by an impaired driver left him orphaned. Midway through the novel, the man who was responsible for Gil's loss, and who has served time in prison for manslaughter, reaches out to him. Old, sick, broke -- and never anything but ''a loser and a user,'' according to Gil's money manager -- the man astonishes Gil with an abject plea for help.
''I just want to be rid of him,'' Gil explains when he arranges for the man to receive a weekly stipend. But in fact this is another example -- perhaps the most extreme one -- of Gil's efforts to atone for the sin of his wealth. And although this magnanimous gesture does make him feel lighter, it also leaves him ashamed. ''A lazy solution, his form of self-defense,'' he thinks: ''Throw money.'' In any case, before too much money can be thrown, the man dies.
Millet may have thought that, in a time of widespread hatred, bigotry and violence, this is the kind of fiction we need: a comforting story about decency and simple human goodness. But she doesn't avoid the well-known problem of how to make goodness compelling. Of course, the mind itself can be a sphere of spectacular drama, but Gil is no thinker, and in place of depth he has the kind of cluelessness that virtuous fictional characters are often given. (It strains belief, for example, that he would not have grasped either Lane's or Ardis's actual feelings for him sooner in their relationships than he does.)
''He wasn't looking for easy,'' Millet writes about Gil's decision to walk to Arizona, but once he gets there, whatever happiness he finds comes easily enough. Perhaps Millet intended a lesson here: It doesn't take much to do the right thing, to leave the world a better place than you found it. (''He didn't want to win,'' she writes of Gil's uncompetitive nature. ''He only wanted to be worthy.'') But every human soul is a battlefield, and I wish I could have seen more wrestling between Gil's good and bad angels.
When Gil tells Sarah and Ardis he walked to Phoenix as a way of earning his fresh start, Sarah asks, ''So did it work?'' Gil replies, ''I'm not sure'' -- and at the end of ''Dinosaurs,'' I wasn't either. A truehearted woman, loyal friends, a beautiful place to call home -- no longer someone with ''nowhere to be and no one who needed him'' -- and still well wadded with assets: I don't begrudge this good person his rewards. But by my reckoning, none of it has cost him much.
Sigrid Nunez is the author, most recently, of the novel ''What Are You Going Through.''
DINOSAURS | By Lydia Millet | 230 pp. | W.W. Norton & Company | $26.95
Sigrid Nunez is the author, most recently, of the novel ''What Are You Going Through.''
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This article appeared in print on page BR14.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2022 The New York Times Company
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Nunez, Sigrid. "Atonement." The New York Times Book Review, 30 Oct. 2022, p. 14(L). Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A724465406/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=9b279ca6. Accessed 23 Sept. 2025.
Dinosaurs: A Novel
By Lydia Millet
(W. W. Norton)
"Birds were the descendants of the dinosaurs," Gil thinks during the walk that takes him from his expensive New York apartment to a new home in Arizona. It's more than a walk; it's a pilgrimage, a journey with a finite beginning and end, a closed loop of travel and migration. It takes him five months to make it to the home he's bought sight unseen. On his way through the desert, he begins to see birds and the natural world they inhabit with a hard-bought clarity. "Without the last of the dinosaurs," he thinks--without the creatures that survived an apocalypse--"the sky would be empty."
Gil is the protagonist in Lydia Millet's Dinosaurs, and as he settles into his new home, we learn about his own encounters with what feels like an apocalypse. The early loss of his parents, combined with the recent wreckage of a brutally unkind romantic relationship, leaves Gil feeling adrift in the world, unsure of how and where he belongs. Gil is also incredibly wealthy, the inheritor of family riches from his oil baron grandfather. "When you have a lot of money," he says, "you never pay for anything. You never feel the cost.... Never a choice or a sacrifice, unless you give up your time."
And that is precisely what Gil gives: his time as a volunteer, as a neighbor, and as a friend with a listening ear. He signs up as a "friendly man" escort at a local domestic violence shelter, where he takes single moms grocery shopping and keeps an eye out for their unhinged spouses. He opens his door to his neighbors, a family whose son, Tom, becomes a kind of son to Gil himself, confiding in him about schoolyard bullies and skateboarding adventures. He is without pretense, more comfortable eating in diners on his trek to Arizona than in the swanky hotels of New York. He helps others because he feels guilty about his wealth, but he also does it instinctively, like the mother hawk he watches from his window, caring for her young. Gil is the opposite of toxic masculinity--aware of his privilege, but also aware of how important it is for people to feel cared for, even if he struggles with being cared for himself.
Gil's eagle eye catches everything in his vision, from changes in ecological habitats to the emotional status of his friends. He seems to genuinely befriend people everywhere he goes, including Jason, a fellow volunteer (and aspiring birder) who teaches Gil about symbiosis, about how blackbirds and mistletoe berries rely on each other in their mutual loop of provision and seed scattering. Jason is stuck in his own loop of sibling abuse, and Gil helps him. When Gil gets set up with Sarah, a friend of Tom's mother, his own questions about how he can rely on another--and how his former partner was more parasite than mutual partner--become clearer and, surprisingly, easier to answer.
What makes those questions easier to answer is that Gil, in the desert, finds sanctuary. In the washes of the Southwest, under the "feathery shade of the mesquite trees," he can trace his own journey with a growing compassion for himself, one that he usually reserves for strangers, past personal offenders, and anyone but himself. When Sarah tells him that he's usually willing to fight for others but not himself, he accepts it plainly. He notes that his former partner's cruel competitiveness clashed with what she called "weakness" in him. But "he didn't want to win. He only wanted to be worthy."
As Gil's sense of worth grows, so too does his protective nature. He leaves a gutter untouched so that a mourning dove can build her nest; he tracks the movements of the mother hawk, the quail, and the rude HOA board members who yell at Tom for skateboarding in his own driveway. Gil's ability to watch out for predators becomes keener in their newly post-Trump world. At a house party, he watches a drunk male houseguest refuse to leave a woman alone, swinging his arms at the empty air. Dead quails begin piling up in the streambed, and as the death count increases, so do other worrisome signs: crude graffiti spray-painted on neighborhood signs, White supremacist crosses on bumper stickers around town. Tom's martial arts instructor sports a swastika tattoo, and when questioned, the receptionist shirks responsibility: "I don't like, do the hiring. Or whatever."
Gil becomes an even keener observer from his "castle" of a home. Tom's family lives next door in a house with glass walls, and as Gil watches for the fugitive bird killer, he sees Tom's parents making their own very human decisions about how to love each other, how to be faithful, and how to hold on. Gil observes his neighbors with the same protective gaze he gives the birds; he is unassuming and open, but fierce in his love for the friends (both animal and human) that have become his. Not because he wants to own something, or to win, but because he "gives a shit." Because he cares for them and, finally, for himself.
ALLISON BACKOUS TROY is a writer and educator living in Grand Junction, Colorado.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2023 The Christian Century Foundation
http://www.christiancentury.org
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Troy, Allison Backous. "Meet Gil, the protector: The protagonist of Lydia Millet's new novel is like a mother hen, both to his neighbors and to the birds." The Christian Century, vol. 140, no. 5, May 2023, pp. 96+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A749069554/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=a0bb6f74. Accessed 23 Sept. 2025.
Millet, Lydia WE LOVED IT ALL Norton (NonFiction None) $27.99 4, 2 ISBN: 9781324073659
The acclaimed novelist's first work of nonfiction examines the interconnected web of creatures on planet Earth.
In the modern era, despite increasing species endangerment and extinction, we continue to extract resources, hastening the destruction of the natural world. As Millet writes in one memorable passage, "Our way of life is not a triumph anymore but a mass suicide." In the past 50 years, wildlife populations have declined by an average of 69%; in the biodiverse regions of Central and South America, that number is near 94%. Using the terms species aloneness or species loneliness, the author examines "a dawning era in which the solitude we already know--as individuals of a deeply social species who are more and more shut off from our own physical communities--will be echoed by a greater silence gathering around." In the wake of such immense animal loss, how do we define ourselves in the sudden quiet? Millet suggests looking to children's respect and empathy for animals. By adulthood, we tend to define ourselves not as part of the animal kingdom, but by our "humanness," creating a divide where there could be a bridge. In lucid prose, the author illustrates the stories of several fascinating species, bringing us into their wondrous worlds. She also writes about the people in her life with similar insight and livelihood--her parents and children appear among other notable figures. While individual elements are compelling and well rendered, the occasionally jumbled structure restricts opportunity for narrative absorption. Readers may wish for deeper treatments of emergent themes of animal welfare and conservation. Still, the author offers a well-written, poignant lament for the greater animal kingdom to which we owe not just our survival as a species but our joy and companionship.
A philosophically tinted testament to the challenge of loving animals in an epoch defined by extinction.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 Kirkus Media LLC
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"Millet, Lydia: WE LOVED IT ALL." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Feb. 2024. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A782202674/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=b3ea1cc3. Accessed 23 Sept. 2025.
We Loved It All: A Memory of Life
Lydia Millet. Norton, $27.99 (272p) ISBN 978-1-324-07365-9
Novelist Millet (Dinosaurs), who's also a creative director at the Center for Biological Diversity, ruminates in this profoundly affecting meditation on what it means CO live through climate change. The narrative flows as if by instinct, moving from personal anecdotes to condemnations of corporate pollution to elegiac examinations of the havoc wrought by humans on the natural world, the organizing logic arising tacitly through suggestion and juxtaposition. In that vein, Millet's admission of how she used to believe systemic explanations constituted attempts to evade personal responsibility leads into a discussion of how the mid-1970s "Crying Indian" anti-litter campaign redirected culpability from the companies selling single-use plastic products to consumers. Contemplations of mortality recur throughout, as when Millet writes "I fear that my children one day... will be forced to endure the vanishing of much more than we ever did" and discusses how the last Tasmanian tiger died in 1936 after "she was locked out of the warm part of her enclosure overnight in a cold snap and froze." In scintillating prose, Millet makes a passionate case that humans must own up to their responsibilities to each other and the natural world ("Our coexistence has been, since forever, the backdrop of being. A dappled, shifting impression like the patterns of sun and shadows that fall across beds and ceilings and walls"). Mournful and piercingly beautiful, this will stick with readers long after they turn the last page. (Apr.)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 PWxyz, LLC
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"We Loved It All: A Memory of Life." Publishers Weekly, vol. 271, no. 8, 26 Feb. 2024, pp. 53+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A786321929/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=9e7b1e84. Accessed 23 Sept. 2025.
We Loved It All. By Lydia Millet. Apr. 2024. 272p. Norton, $27.99 (9781324073659). 813.
Millets (Dinosaurs, 2022) passion for the living world and concern over humanity's tragic role in destroying it is evident in her fiction. In her first work of nonfiction, she steps into the light, sharing personal stories I and her informed observations of the extinction crisis as a conservationist long-associated with the Center for Biological Diversity. Millet contrasts humanity's violence toward animals with the central roles animals play in place-based, preindustrial cultures and every child's imagination. She considers the impact of Christianity on the West's elevating of humanity above the rest of nature, how those in the know long concealed the truth about climate change, and why we're failing to address planetary crises. Bewitched by our screens and filtered versions of reality, we are largely unversed in science and deluded in our assumptions about solutions to environmental disasters. And our priorities are skewed. Millet reports that we spent $490 million in 2018 on our pets' Halloween costumes, five times the funds budgeted to protect endangered species. In a recalibrating mix of memoir, facts, critique, and passages of elegiac beauty, Millet reflects on our dangerous muddlement and pins hope on the growing impact of one digital advance, our ability to more fully perceive "the awesome variety" of life on Earth in all its "grandeur" and "precariousness."--Donna Seaman
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 American Library Association
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Seaman, Donna. "We Loved It All." Booklist, vol. 120, no. 14, 15 Mar. 2024, p. 36. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A788124883/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=0a0b4b70. Accessed 23 Sept. 2025.
The Long View We Loved It All: A Memory of Life Lydia Millet WW Norton & Company, 2024, 272 pages
It's easy to be selfish. Sure, the planet is warming, species are going extinct at unprecedented rates, and marginalized communities are disproportionately impacted by climate change. Yet, given the economic structure of modern life in countries of abundance, individual choices simply don't carry the significance we often hope they will. So, there can be a tendency to feel absolved of personal responsibility. Is my willingness to compost really going to change anything? Is a 10-minute shower really that much worse than a five-minute one?
Then one has a child, and suddenly it's hard not to consider the wider web to which these seemingly small actions are connected.
At least, that was the case for acclaimed novelist and National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize finalist Lydia Millet, who explores the onrush of existential concern sparked by our offspring with pathos and lucidity in her recent memoir We Loved It All.
"Nothing held me captive. If any friction slowed me down it was only the icy burn of atmosphere," Millet writes of that more-selfish time in her life before kids. With perhaps a touch of wistfulness she adds, "It was the freedom of having nothing to risk but myself."
Procreating, however, means having a greater stake in what is to come. Warns Millet: "When you turn into a mother you lose the power of coldness. Lose it for good, as it happens. You never get it back."
This may come across as dire, coldness elevated to power. Millet is not one to put a veneer on our circumstances, or the way her own personal trajectory has led to a reinterpretation of them. One of the startling aspects of her book is the way she shifts between objective assessment of our current predicament to unabashed appreciation for the creatures amongst us--the "beasts," as she calls them, out of reverence for their "exquisite strangeness"--to a subjective, emotional view of her own complicity in their undoing.
In an email, Millet described her book to me as "a memoir-y thing about animals and children and extinction." She meaningfully weaves these together. Through parenthood, Millet recognizes the full arc of her relationship with beasts, people, and planet. After all, as she notes in her book, "personhood is built out of narrative units." This same tendency towards individual narrative-construction has also placed humanity at the center of its own epic, thereby objectifying and subjugating anything outside the sapien realm. But kids don't see it that way, and perhaps, she suggests, that worldview should be embraced.
"The way many children respond to animals--not only with curiosity and delight, but also with a sense of companionship and instinctive solidarity that tends to disregard or minimize the boundaries between species--has an experiential authenticity that should inform the perspectives of biological inquiry instead of being dismissed," she writes.
This is not to say that Millet believes a childlike approach offers any sort of solution to the climate crisis. Her master's degree in environmental economics and her work as an editor and writer at the Center for Biological Diversity in Tucson since 1999 have given her a clear-eyed view of the present. Her memoir is chock-full of the kinds of astute analysis and fascinating minutiae one might expect from someone steeped in conservation work. For example, she notes, in 2018 Americans spent $490 million dollars on Halloween costumes for their pets, more than the federal budget for protecting endangered species. That year, the US Fish and Wildlife Service budget for "ecological services," which entails species protection, was $225 million.
What Millet does suggest, ultimately, is that if we are to define our world through narratives, and utilize our powers of introspection wisely, our connection to the next generation might be a thread that helps us tell new stories. "What if we said: our parenthood is not the lonely consecration of our own, of what has emerged from us, but also of the many they depend on?" she asks. "What if we turned, in a dawning instant, and saw ourselves for what we are--the parents of the world to come?"
This question has stayed with me, as a parent who, like so many others, often feels caught between the countless tasks of daily life--from diapers to meal prep to bath-time to bedtime--and the sinking weight of a biologically barren future. Millet is able to reckon with extinction not by decrying procreation but by embracing the vantage it offers. It is an ability I hope to emulate, for a future I hope to help write.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 Earth Island Institute
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Tzelnic, Alex. "The Long View." Earth Island Journal, vol. 39, no. 2, summer 2024, p. 55. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A797810577/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=8750e535. Accessed 23 Sept. 2025.
Millet, Lydia ATAVISTS Norton (Fiction None) $27.99 4, 22 ISBN: 9781324074410
A group of characters in Los Angeles face climate crisis and existential angst in 14 interconnected short stories.
Two families stand at the center of Millet's lovely, keening tales: Buzz, Amy, and their children Liza and Nick; and single mother Helen with daughters Mia and Shelley. They are well-educated, middle-class, liberal Americans, appalled by the state of their country and, in the case of the parents, bemused by their children. The younger generation "seemed to be void of ideology. Beyond naming and shaming each other for perceived identity bias," comments Trudy, another character who turns up in several stories. This isn't entirely true of Liza, who impulsively married a "DACA kid," Luis, while still in high school, or Nick, a Stanford grad enraged by Americans' complacency in the face of the "five-alarm emergency" of climate catastrophe and impending global extinction. "What we need," he tells his therapist, "is a worldwide revolution. Yesterday." Nonetheless, he's stocking shelves in a big-box store and bartending in a gay bar, and his attitude of "what can I do?" is shared by most of Millet's wonderfully human, believably flawed characters. A few creeps turn up--there's one in "Pastoralist," about a man who preys on vulnerable women, and another in "Cultist," where Shelley's smug boyfriend, Jake, spouts "pieces of pat received wisdom from business school" to her amused mother and the horrified Nick, who has become Mia's boyfriend over the course of the stories. But generally, the author is gentle with confused, well-meaning people immobilized by the scope of the apocalypse they see looming. As she did in such novels asDinosaurs (2022) andA Children's Bible (2020), Millet blends a blunt assessment of our refusal to deal with the ecological catastrophes we have created and a tender portrait of human beings with all their foibles.
Sharply observed, beautifully rendered, and heartbreaking.
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"Millet, Lydia: ATAVISTS." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Mar. 2025. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A828785229/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=e762ee23. Accessed 23 Sept. 2025.
Atavists. By Lydia Millet. Apr. 2025. 256p. Norton, $27.99 (9781324074410).
Who are the atavists? Millet's intriguing throwbacks are identified by the title of each tale in this Venn diagram-like collection, similar in structure and sharing the Los Angeles setting of her last volume of stories, Fight No More (2018). In "Tourist," a woman is flummoxed by the cyber world, where her 14-year-old son is utterly at home, but when he's in despair, she knows the body and the earth will provide the cure. In "Fetishist," a high-school senior abruptly marries a young, ambitious DACA recipient, her brilliant brother is derailed after studying at Stanford, and someone is viewing weird web porn. In "Artist," the older daughter is all about profit, while her younger sister finds her calling helping elders at a care facility use their smartphones. "Terrorist" brings neighbors together, including a gay couple and a family of Somali immigrants. With her sharply honed perspective on our digital bewitchment and destruction of nature, her shredding wit and depthless compassion, Millet deftly portrays individuals of different generations caught in tech-sparked predicaments absurd, heartbreaking, and enraging. These thought-provoking, surprising, charming, and deeply moving stories illuminate who we are at our core even as our lives are mediated by social media, dating apps, and surveillance cameras, even as the living world is being driven precipitously toward extinction. --Donna Seaman
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2025 American Library Association
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Seaman, Donna. "Atavists." Booklist, vol. 121, no. 15-16, Apr. 2025, p. 29. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A847030099/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=f14f395f. Accessed 23 Sept. 2025.
In a new collection, Lydia Millet casts a satirical eye on left-wing culture and its array of character types.
ATAVISTS: Stories, by Lydia Millet
Lydia Millet is a prolific writer who has won big accolades, and yet somehow I've never read her work. So there's no way for me to contextualize her latest collection of stories, ''Atavists,'' and say the things reviewers often do about a book being a departure or the apotheosis of a lifetime spent perseverating on a theme. I can, however, acknowledge why Millet has been so praised: She knows how to put a story together. How to pace drama and consummate tension, when to turn up the volume and when to leave us alone with what she's put in motion.
''Motion'' is a good word for how this collection of stories operates; it meanders through the lives of various characters who are related to or know one another, and the result is an ecosystem that satirizes left-wing culture in the aftermath of Covid.
Most of these stories do not stand on their own -- they aren't meant to -- which puts a lot of pressure on their cumulative power to stir in readers both the dread and joy of being alive (this being, IMO, the bar that fiction needs to clear to be great). ''Atavists'' succeeds on the dread, less so on the joy, which perhaps speaks to just how grim it feels to be a liberal in this country today. Not because we've lost power but because we've lost our way. In this collection, we liberals are mostly ridiculous, feckless, insipid and sometimes just sad.
The title of the book suggests Millet is exploring character traits that are primordial (as in essential) or anachronistic (as in ill-fitting). Both interpretations seem viable for the 14 people we meet here, each one an ''ist'' -- the tourist, artist, cosmetologist, etc. -- as they wrangle with first-world problems that belie a society in collapse and disarray.
Consider the story ''Futurist,'' in which an academic rightly accuses another of plagiarizing one line in a paper he wrote 12 years earlier. The accused retaliates by combing through the accuser's social media for transgressions: ''You had to play a trump card, in the culture wars. And in the current climate, that card was racism.'' He finds an old post on which he could ''stake out a racism claim for sure,'' though his effort results only in her posting a retroactive ''Content Warning.''
There is something so small and ugly about all this. Millet is really toeing the line between piercing satire and cynicism. But what's wrong with cynicism as a coping strategy for mass extinction and ascendant tyranny? That is the question Millet takes up in one of the more affecting stories in the collection, ''Therapist,'' in which a therapist is uncomfortably persuaded by a client -- a young, white, privileged male who finds that the world's ''compulsion to normalize'' the despoiling of the planet, of humanity, is ''the real pathology.'' The therapist wonders if he's right, and if by helping her clients cope with the ''new normal,'' she's ''delivering therapeutic euthanasia.'' But then she puts him on an S.S.R.I., he gets a nice girlfriend and his mood improves.
Ugh.
This young man, in a different piece, notes that even though he's only ever wanted to tell stories, today ''stories seemed more and more useless. The sound of fiddling while Rome burned.'' Which is a sentiment art has railed against since the dawn of art, because if not artists saving us from ourselves, then who? ''Atavists'' concedes ground to the disillusioned among us. I can see why -- there's so much to feel terrible about these days. And yet there's still goodness out there, right? Not just the sort of goodness a middle-aged man deploys to mitigate his own sense of obsolescence (as does the ''Optimist,'' who builds a tiny house on his property to take in Afghan refugees who never come), but the kind of goodness that vanquishes doom, or at least helps delay it. If nothing else, ''Atavists'' reminds me that we need to try a hell of a lot harder.
ATAVISTS: Stories | By Lydia Millet | Norton | 256 pp. | $27.99
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Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2025 The New York Times Company
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Maazel, Fiona. "Left Adrift." The New York Times Book Review, 25 May 2025, p. 8. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A841230052/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=50ee6eee. Accessed 23 Sept. 2025.