Lydia Millet On The Challenges Of Writing In The Here And Now

Read Lydia Millet’s fabrication from her first novel, Omnivores (1996) to her caller short communicative collection, Atavists, and you’ll trace an evolutionary arc of American civilization from nan Home Shopping Network to AI and LARP. There are consistencies done nan years—climate change, bodybuilding, birds, dinosaurs, disjointed relationships, for instance—but her activity ne'er feels repetitive. Instead it feels inventive, arsenic she keeps pushing further into her universe. 

In stories, for illustration “Artist,” Millet drills heavy into nan generational paradox. “Shelley was smart arsenic a tack. But she was each astir nan spin…Somewhere, raising her girls, Helen had taken a incorrect turn. Left retired nan portion astir morality.” When Helen suggests she return a progressive schedule pinch her talent agency clients, Shelley pushes back. “Mom. Noam Chomsky’s a dinosaur. And not moreover a ferocious T.rex, either. More of a brontosaurus. A lumbering plant-eater.”

Millet touches upon tech bros successful her communicative of nan futurist, an world who considers morals “stodgy” and AI a “spiritual revelation.” His acquisition of glimpsing “a dense swoop of achromatic dots that were birds” connected a tally successful a larboard metropolis successful Europe becomes astir meaningful to him erstwhile it is reiterated successful a YouTube video: “Swallows. They formed and re-formed successful graceful morphing shapes successful nan blink of a quality eye. The video was captioned Celestial choreography. He’d understood it correct away. The birds were hardly alive. More for illustration fragments of accusation successful nan sky. And past he’d had nan feeling. Power. Euphoria. The smooth, difficult glint of steel. Flesh into digits, wings into pixels. Blood and oxygen into will, will into majesty.” 

Each caller book is simply a revelation, arsenic Millet spins her narratives done an original, satiric, often genre-bending lens. Her sound keeps getting sharper—simultaneously funnier and much painful.  Our email speech reached from my agency successful wildfire-prone Sonoma County to her location successful nan Sonoran godforsaken adjacent Tucson, wherever she useful astatine nan Center for Biological Diversity.

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Jane Ciabattari: When did you commencement moving connected this caller postulation of stories, your 3rd (after 2018 Fight No More, which won nan American Academy of Arts and Sciences short fabrication grant and Love successful Infant Monkeys, a 2010 Pulitzer Prize finalist that features weird animal stories astir Madonna, Sharon Stone, and different celebrities)?

Lydia Millet: About 3 years ago.

JC: How did you travel up pinch nan title? And what is its meaning to you? Did you constitute nan linked stories astir nan conception of nan title?

LM: Actually nan original title wasn’t a connection but a connection fragment—“The -ists”—and that proved difficult for nan hardworking group who person to talk astir nan book successful bid to thief waste it. So I chose an alternate that is simply a word. Albeit a somewhat obscure one. Atavists was nan only -ist I could deliberation of that connected to each nan -ist characters successful nan collection. I for illustration nan connection for its charged quality, its inherent conflicts and judgments, its dual exertion successful biology and psychology/criminology. “Atavistic” refers some to a return to a primordial form, for illustration erstwhile a vestigial gill shows up connected a newborn, and historically to a expected brutishness and unit of character. What a strange, acheronian abyss of a word.

JC: The stories are group post-pandemic, immoderate arsenic precocious as 2025, it seems. What are nan complications of penning stories truthful adjacent to nan now?

LM: Many! Everything changes truthful fast, everything caller becomes aged astatine a breakneck pace. These tales were written earlier nan caller election, and so, successful a sense, are already quaint. 

JC: Why group nan stories successful Los Angeles? What does that correspond to you?

LM: I’ve group a batch of my books successful LA—I lived location for a fewer years astatine a formative infinitesimal successful my 20s and astir of my family lives location now. It’s still a spot I walk time, afloat of friends and loved ones, which remains some acquainted and strange. It utilized to look to me, arsenic Leonard Cohen sang astir America, for illustration nan cradle of nan champion and of nan worst. Or 1 of nan cradles. Now I’m not judge precisely wherever nan champion is, successful America. Maybe nan forests and deserts and meadows. Maybe successful nan past of nan chaotic places.

JC: Your characters screen a wide scope of generations, professions, interests; you constitute 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 prime these categories, these areas of interest?

LM: Hmm. I wove toward them for illustration a drunkard? There are truthful galore ways we usage nan suffix -ist, and I wanted to play pinch that…it fundamentally intends personification who advocates for thing aliases believes successful it, but tin besides conscionable bespeak nan shape of someone’s labour aliases their psychological inclination (say, narcissist). There’s a fluidity successful -ist that’s interesting.

JC: How did you investigation these characters, who beryllium is specified circumstantial universes?

LM: Not overmuch investigation here, astatine slightest not conscious. Impressions and exaggerations of group I’ve met, group I’ve not met, group whose shadows and stereotypes flicker on successful nan unreserved and ugly-beautiful damages and triumphs of culture.  

JC: You interweave nan characters successful fascinating ways. For instance, a characteristic successful 1 communicative is nan niece of a characteristic successful different story. She runs into her uncle successful a barroom pinch a group of men including a musculus man who ghosted her pinch a achy text: “Sorry, but you’re conscionable excessively fat for me.” This thread, and her hunt for revenge, runs done yet different story, pinch a startling  conclusion. How did this echoes of stories evolve?

LM: (Not an absorbing answer!) Writing, I conscionable travel nan threads of nan sentences and nan made-up personalities and spot wherever nan doors and windows appear. It’s for illustration a locomotion done a house, a locomotion done a city, aliases a locomotion done a maze astatine nan separator of nan woods.

JC: How did you spell astir choosing nan bid of nan stories?

LM: They sewage rearranged a bit, mostly for travel and truthful that nan touchstones worked together.

JC: When past we had a conversation it was astir your caller Dinosaurs. How do you equilibrium penning novels and communicative collections?

LM: I constitute stories to relax, usually while I’m betwixt novels aliases betwixt caller drafts. 

JC: Which different writers (or artists, musicians, filmmakers, others) are you paying attraction to now?

LM: I’m preoccupied by nan crises successful our politics, correct now, and erstwhile I’m not reference astir those, and successful a authorities of repulsion and anger, I’ve been tending to publication nonfiction. I loved wildlife journalist Brandon Keim’s caller book Meet nan Neighbors, for example. Oh and I *am* reference 1 breathtaking caller correct now: The Harmattan Winds, by Sylvain Trudel. A translator from nan French (Canadian). Highly recommend.

JC: What are you moving connected now/next? (How galore projects?!)

LM: Three novels successful various stages of disarray.

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Atavists: Stories by Lydia Millet is disposable from W.W. Norton & Company.