A Conversation with Lydia Millet

Helena Feder | February 2024

Helena Feder

Lydia Millet is the author of over a dozen novels and collections of stories, including Dinosaurs (2022) and A Children’s Bible (2020), a New York Times “Best 10 Books of 2020” selection, shortlisted for the National Book Award. The Wall Street Journal wrote that to call the novel “a generational allegory seems like an understatement,” and it was described by the Washington Post as “a blistering little classic: Lord of the Flies for a generation of young people left to fend for themselves on their parents’ rapidly warming planet.”

In 2019, Millet’s collection of short fiction, Fight No More, received an Award of Merit from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and her brilliant 2009 collection, Love in Infant Monkeys, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2010. In all her work, Millet depicts or considers aspects of the error at the heart of contemporary ecological crises: species solipsism. As T., the main character of How the Dead Dream, expresses it, it’s a problem that comes from “only knowing people, not knowing anything beyond them. That was another kind of solitude, the kind where there was nothing all around but reflections.”

Millet is an editor and staff writer at the Center for Biological Diversity and writes essays, opinion pieces, book reviews, and other ephemera in addition to fiction. She lives in the desert, outside Tucson, Arizona, with her family. We spoke in September 2022, before the release of Dinosaurs. She has two books forthcoming spring 2024: We Loved It All, environmental nonfiction, and The Ists, a collection of short fiction.

Helena Feder: Dinosaurs (2022) is tonally quite different from your last book, A Children’s Bible (2020). It’s in many ways a quiet novel, and compelling for the space it makes for silence. Did you begin the novel as a meditation on loneliness, individual loneliness, or human loneliness in the midst of mass extinction?

Lydia Millet: There’s very little that I don’t approach through that filter. This novel is a quiet book, and that’s exactly how I think of it—a quiet book that has a certain warmth to it despite what can be the coldness of being alone. And of living with the crises we face. It’s a novel about kind company, and about finding this when you don’t expect to.

Feder: As you said, all or most of your work is filtered through the lens of extinction. It’s considered at length in your trilogy, beginning with How the Dead Dream (2008) and ending with Magnificence (2013). Animals seem forms of knowledge in these books, paths to self-knowledge, sites of species knowledge, aspects of global identity. Their loss is, necessarily, the loss of ourselves.

Millet: I think that’s dead on, when you say we lose ourselves when we lose the others. We lose our own history on earth and everything and everyone we coevolved with. We’re at risk of losing our souls when we lose other animals and the green things. That’s part of what I write about.

Feder: I was startled again by the emotional weight of roadkill in Dinosaurs, which also plays an important role in your trilogy. The sorrow and guilt we feel seeing these animal bodies seems in contrast with an almost Hitchcockian promise of insects, when Tom tells Gil there are “at least ten quintillion insects on earth” and he thinks, “Good news. Maybe the insects will handle it. Since the dinosaurs didn’t have it in them. The insects might be naturals at revolution, with their hive minds. Their brainless, decentralized intelligence.” Is the novel conceiving this as an antidote to what’s problematic about mammalian individuality?

Millet: In that moment, when Gil wants the insects to save us and themselves, we see a fantasy of deliverance—an answer to our despair over our inability to deliver the others, and ourselves, from what’s looming. This idea that something would descend from on high and take care of it all, as a god might, and that these beings would be animals, is such a dream. The terrible and pitiable positions are reversed, and the animals are able to liberate us from our destruction of them through their own agency. It’s such a dream.

Feder: The dream of deliverance from down low or on high is an idea that’s also considered in A Children’s Bible. A godlike figure, the “owner,” descends to a rescue. Can you talk about that Deus ex machina, and the way the novel unravels it?

Millet: In A Children’s Bible, the owner descends, and the parents ascend—one authority manifests and the other disappears. There’s a verticality, always, in our fantasies of salvation—the ethereal plane, the opposite of the mundane and the earthly—when, in fact, the earth is where all life is, as far as we know, and the sky is devoid of it. But we treasure impossibility in our stories. Impossibility is the doorway to the sublime.

Getting back to that exchange between Tom and Gil, I do think the primordial revulsion or fear that many of us feel toward insects is often not as present in children. Children—in this book, Tom—often have a more open-ended relationship to the world of the beasts, one that’s less compartmentalized and objectifying. You could argue that children just objectify everything, but you could also say that they embrace the subjectivity or subjecthood of others more easily. Adults have had this socialized out of them. We’re told the love of animals is childish and should be relegated to the past as we strive and compete against other people. Aspects of Tom are based on my son, who’s not as captivated by critters as Tom is but still has his moments of fascination. I see gestures of despair, love, and panic from young people as animals disappear, these martyrs to human activity, and Tom is part of that. The enormity of it all can be alienating; I see that a lot with climate—kids obliterated by the sensory overload of information about climate change. But children’s minds are also capacious, particularly when it comes to animals, and that seems a way forward. We adults are obsessed, and rightly so, with what’s happening to the climate, but I worry that we remain anthropocentric, and solipsistic, even with regard to climate change—and mass extinction is shoved aside. The love of animals and plants—fungi, everything living—may be a way out of that quandary, whether it’s in fiction or in life.

Feder: In this sense, is Dinosaurs an allegory for the future, as A Children’s Bible seems an allegory of the future? Are the books speaking to each other?

Millet: It’s a generational reversal in point of view, and in that sense there’s some give and take between the two of them. I don’t think that’s too esoteric a point, about of and for—they’re important parts of speech. Dinosaurs isn’t allegorical in the same way that A Children’s Bible is, but there is in some sense a prescriptiveness to it, not instructional but affective. It conveys an emotion of ideas around our position in a world whose trajectory often seems overwhelmingly negative. 

Feder: Dinosaurs continues another concern articulated in your trilogy, with the abstraction and the power of money in neoliberal, global culture versus the real cost of things, social and ecological. Gil explains this when he articulates the trouble with his individual situation: “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 . . .” This condition of the one percent sounds a little like humanity in the west, living at the apex through exploitation. It put me in mind of what’s becoming less sustainable about the human inhabitation of certain landscapes, including the one in which I live. This is your only book set in Arizona, near where you live, and I wondered if that’s something you were thinking through. 

Millet: As you know, the monumental edifice of our particular set of extractive economies is fully unsustainable. I think we have certain ideas here in the United States about what the ultimate sustainable garden consists of that are problematic. In the desert valley where I’ve lived for twenty-three years, people have lived here longer, and more continuously, than any other place in the US. It’s been the site of human settlement for many thousands and thousands of years. The desert is not fundamentally hostile to human inhabitation—for example, it burns less easily than the grasslands of, say, California. We have groundwater, though there’s a huge drought, and I’m not arguing that I live in some kind of ideal place for climate change because there is no such place. And, if there were, it wouldn’t be here. But I love the desert, and so deeply that I’ve generally shied away from writing about it. (And I still didn’t write about Tucson in this book; instead, I chose a more Americanski kind of place. Aspects of Scottsdale and Phoenix are very privileged, and Tucson just isn’t like that. For one thing, it’s majority Latino and blue. It’s not typical of the state’s economic profile.) In this book, I stayed in white urban America, its vicissitudes and absurdities and consumerism. I’ve set a lot of things in LA, where I lived for several years, and some things on the East Coast, where I’ve lived too. 

To be honest, sustainability is a word I hate, though I use. It’s like the word environment. I prefer the German word umwelt. It seems more onomatopoeic in its relationship to the actual thing. A round world. Environment, and sustainability, are so dry. There’s a whole lexicon that’s way too wonky and detached, and that wonkiness and detachment seem a part of market capitalism. Really, sustainability has to do with a landscape’s maximum carrying capacity and maximum human use and yields, all those things measured by classical microeconomics. But I know what you mean by sustainability, what we generally mean in casual usage: something that can be sustained. That can last. This is all by way of circling back to yes, finally, I did have to write something about aspects of the desert I love. Because we must write about what we love. If you’re lucky to have enough time, you come to write about each of the things you love. And though I’ve only spent a little time in Scottsdale, there are plenty of animals and plants in common with Tucson; it’s not an alien environment.

Feder: And how do you feel about “Anthropocene”? It’s more troubling than sustainability and, also, now everywhere.

Millet: The group I work for, the Center for Biological Diversity, was active in the debate around that word when it was coined. People were very opposed to the term, the idea of claiming the late Holocene in the name of those who are destroying it. I do think there is a certain arrogance to it, but also perhaps a certain empirical validity. I don’t know whether the hubris wins out or not, but I don’t generally use the term, though it is all over the material that I edit and is so unavoidable. I stumble on it, in a mild way, when it crosses my eye. I do like some of the neologisms associated with ecological crisis, and I like the Bureau of Linguistical Reality website with portmanteaus like “ennuipocalypse.”

Feder: It’s important that language grapples with the present, even when it inevitably fails. While Dinosaurs is a novel deeply concerned with others, one that looks outward, it is also, as you’ve said, a quiet, interior novel. Does the emptiness Gil experiences inside himself mirror culture’s failure to live with the world? Or is the novel merely Janus-headed, as we all are?

Millet: The latter, I think. I’ve always thought a lot about the privacy of the mind, and what a privilege it is to have the refuge of a singular consciousness (not that I’ve experienced anything else). There’s something distressing and isolating about the solitude of the mind and yet it’s the last refuge we possess, the ability to be alone with our thoughts, unseen. It’s a tension: our nature is to want company and, at least in some senses, never to have it.

With Dinosaurs, I wanted to look at the way we live now, with windows and screens everywhere, and infinite voyeurism and infinite self-reflection. Not self-reflection in a good way, but the literal mirroring of ourselves back to ourselves in all our media, in all of the boxes that we surround ourselves with. Here there’s a house of glass, or rather, one side is made of glass, like a screen on a laptop or a phone. It was my analog way of depicting that, of thinking about seeing and being seen in the moment we’re in, the way in which we project ourselves everywhere. It’s a voyeurism that isn’t even a voyeurism anymore, because it is so entrenched in our culture. Everything is voyeurism so nothing is voyeurism. Now it’s just looking.

Feder: Yes, and collectively it is a kind of species’ solipsism. All we see is the human, ourselves or the work of our hands and minds, everywhere we look. Without giving the plot away, near the end of the novel, we’re told “being alone is also a closed loop. A loop with a slipknot . . .” Untie the knot, open the loop, and we see that, quote, “separateness had always been an illusion.” Is this a necessary illusion, for the human, or the novel, or is it an illusion that’s killing us?

Millet: All fiction tries to be about selfhood, and the self isn’t an illusion. However, otherness, and the unknowability of otherness is essential to a rich imaginary life. The ineffable qualities of the universe are what keep us engaged and living. And when we dismiss or discount the value of otherness, we are turning away from life itself. To live in a world robbed of its otherness would be a dreadful fate. We would never again have that neural romance with the unknown and unknowable. It is how we know ourselves; it is part of the human soul—if I can use that word. Unknowability is the breath of life to us. Our blithe confidence that we are not dependent on the unknown is extremely dangerous. Even for people who never go into the woods, the idea of the existence of the woods is crucial to being alive.

Feder: Yes, I agree, and your work conveys this idea. It connects you to a line of writing that goes back to Thoreau. In the “Spring” chapter of Walden, he calls it the “tonic of wilderness”: “At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be infinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable.” In most of your novels, someone professes a version of this thought. 

Interestingly, I don’t think I’ve seen it appear in your work in relation to reading or writing. However, your book of short fiction, Love in the Infant Monkeys, tells stories that seem to also be about reading or writing—that is, explicitly about textuality and creation, about interpretation or misinterpretation.

Millet: I like the way you’ve phrased that, and no one has said it to me before, that I recall. And I did write those stories based on fragments of narrative from other places. They were all taken from rumor or from texts that I came upon. I was playing with allegedly nonfictional accounts and making them fictional. People never asked me about this when the book came out; they just asked about celebrity culture. They were fun for me to write. Like a holiday. 

Feder: The collection is a kind of bestiary, or part bestiary, part library—for example, the story of Edison, Golakov, the elephant Topsy, and the 1903 film of her electrocution. Are all stories always already animal stories? Were you thinking of it at all as a bestiary when you wrote it?

Millet: That’s very interesting; the nonfiction book I am working on right now is a bestiary. I had to cut so many animals out of it to make it palatable that I felt like I was hurting their feelings . . . anyway, to the questions about Love in Infant Monkeys, I do think all language is made of other animals—and others have written about this in a more erudite way—or the echoes of vanished animals, the echoes of the pictographs that were the animals. Early art was always of animals, and we really can’t have stories without animals. So, yes—yes, to your question! We can’t think without animals. But it’s not enough, in a mass extinction, to maintain animals as a background. We need to write about them as subject instead of objects, as principals instead of walk-ons.

Feder: When I read Deborah Bloom’s nonfiction book on Harry Harlow’s experiments with infant monkeys, Love in Goon Park (2002), it just about broke my heart. Your story broke it again, but also humanized Harlow, which felt remarkable. A goal of that story seems to be compassion, in stark contrast to Harlow’s work and the logic of the means and ends.

Millet: It is an infamous experiment, but I’m still surprised to run into very well-educated people who have never heard of it. It does seem like the opposite of Harlow’s modus operandi to write about him with any compassion. So that was important to me. Also, it was a story about just how mundane torture can be, and how daily the use of other creatures can be. How automatically trivial we can make the lives of other animals through language. Once that’s happened, it’s kind of a done deal. Once we consign an animal to object status, anything goes, as in the industrial animal farming of “cattle” or “poultry.” We grotesquely degrade animals in our language all the time, and Harlow’s work was an example of this.

Feder: It’s profoundly perverse, that he set out to demonstrate the value of empathy through torture.

Millet: It would be a perfect piece of performance art, if it hadn’t actually happened.

Feder: Yes, it would. 

Other figures in Love in Infant Monkeys are quite different from Harlow and Edison, as different as Madonna and Noam Chomsky. They seem like two poles of something, an icon of twentieth-century capitalism and, perhaps, her opposite? All, or almost all, of the key characters in the book are public figures. What is the line with fiction about real people? Chomsky is a hero of mine, and certainly not the suing kind, but Madonna?

Millet: This book kind of flew way under the radar and I’m glad you read it. I have to admit, I didn’t think of this at the time. It did well critically, but I’ll bet Madonna didn’t read it (and of course Chomsky would have nothing to sue over).

From what I understand from the publishing industry, you only tend to get sued by musicians when you quote their lyrics beyond fair use. Fiction affords a certain kind of liberty; I am used to the disclaimers that fiction uses. I’ve never been asked to modify my language about a celebrity, though more commercial writers may have to worry about this. 

Feder: That’s good to hear. More generally, can you speak to the age-old conundrum, personal and political, of what to leave in and what to take out?

Millet: I haven’t really been faced with this before now—that is, until I began writing the nonfiction book I mentioned. My fiction has never reflected my personal life in any specific way. I’m just not sufficiently interested in depicting my own activities. But now that I’m writing a book that has so much of my own doings and thoughts in it, and I’m forced to claim them as my own, there are things that I have decided to leave out because they might harm someone. And other things that you leave in even though they might harm someone.

Feder: Narrative voice both varies a great deal and feels of a piece in your work. Do you see your oeuvre as one world, your narratives as different animals that share an ecosystem?

Millet: That they all live in the same town? I like to think of myself as not writing the same book twice, since I’m so impatient. But inevitably, one way or another, you write the same book many times over in different forms anyway. There’s always a certain vector, a movement toward grief and joy that I aim for in the endings.

I recently said to someone: if anyone gave me the chance to go back and redact my books, I would do so. There’s so much that, in hindsight, could be done better and more succinctly. I love hearing you talk about some of my older books because I never go back and read them—for the same reason that it’s difficult to read letters that you wrote in high school. There’s an intermingling of shame and something else . . . I think I’m too judgmental. It’s hard for me not to see my older work through an editor’s eyes. 

Feder: I understand that impulse, but surely you also have other moments of coming upon something—or someone like me reads a passage from a book you wrote eight or ten years ago—and you think, boy, that’s not a bad sentence.

Millet: I do sometimes think that, but then there’s something that irritates me three sentences later. But, yes, I will sometimes think, I like that. And maybe I’d like it even more if I hadn’t written it myself.

Feder: As you’ve mentioned the feeling you want to reach at the end of a book—an intermingling of grief and joy—can I ask you about the “apocalyptic sublime”? You used the phrase in an interview after the publication of A Children’s Bible. Is this a description of the arc of your books or the feeling you want readers to have at the end of them?

Millet: Well, I think probably both, though I’m not calculating or particularly deliberate about readers and audience. It is a feeling I want to have—I know the feeling, and I want to exist in it in a way that’s new for myself at the end of every book. I want to relive or live anew in something I’ve made that evokes a sense of an ending that’s larger than a book ending, and a grief that is attendant to endings of that kind outside of books. And also, the joy of recognition of the beauty that exists eternally through it all, and even after the ending. I wish to inhabit that longing and distress and mourning all at once. 

Feder: It sounds a little like the terrible ecstasy of being in love, which from the moment of its realization is always somewhere in the process of ending— from its own energy or trajectory, or the fragility of bodies. 

Millet: It could be being in love, or it could be loving God. It could be praying, an act of devotion of that kind. Ideally, it might cross a number of such boundaries, approaching a sense of the divinity of things. 

Feder: And then, in the background, there’s what we sometimes experience as the mundane part of life. Most writers have bills to pay, and day jobs to pay them. As a novelist and an environmental writer, you have what might be the best “day job” ever, at the Center of Biological Diversity. I imagine this work feeds into research for your creative writing, but it is still a different kind of writing. How do you manage these two kinds of work, and how do you maintain space for creativity? 

Millet: I work thirty hours a week and I have kids, and so I only get time to write with the help of family. I go to a little house my mother owns next to mine, and I write for an hour in the morning and an hour and a half in the evening. I am grateful to them for that time. 

One thing I do to avoid being taken over by my work outside of my writing is I keep my tasks modest. I have not sought advancement; I keep my work basic. I do have a job as a gatekeeper of sorts and am responsible for ensuring that the material that goes out is in the voice of the Center, but I haven’t sought managerial responsibility. I love and admire many of my colleagues who have those stressful jobs that take sixty or seventy hours of their week. But I couldn’t write if I did that. So I have made myself a footservant or handmaiden. A civil servant. [Laughs] 

Feder: Well, civil servants are glorious. Without them we would not have sanitation or vaccination, bridges or schools. I am still amazed that you write as much and as wonderfully as you do, however modest your other work. Can you tell me something more about your new projects? 

Millet: I am working on a book of short stories called The Ists. All of the stories end with -ist. It is set in post-pandemic Los Angeles, and all the stories are connected. It was a lark to write. 

Feder: That does sound like fun. Is it a French apartment novel? How are the stories connected? 

Millet: Just by the people. The characters’ lives all touch each other. 

And then, there is the nonfiction book we’ve discussed, the bestiary. For the moment, it is called We Loved It All. 

Feder: That’s a great title. 

Millet: It’s about having children in the age of extinction, about the love of children and the love of the rest of the world and how those things are interwoven. And then I’ve got an even newer book I’m working on, a novel called The Furthermore that’s sort of strange and perverted. 

Feder: Who doesn’t like strange and perverted? I think that’s exactly how the lead cover blurb should read: “Millet knocks it out of the park with a strange and perverted novel of our times.” Or maybe “for our times.” As you’ve said, they’re important parts of speech. Thank you, so much, for your work and for a wonderful hour. 

Millet: Thank you.

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Helena Feder has published essays, poems, interviews, and articles in ISLE, J/ASAP, Guernica, North American Review, Orion, the Writer’s Chronicle, After the Art, Radical Philosophy, Another Chicago Magazine, Critical Read, Green Letters, Twentieth-Century Literature, The Georgia Review, Women’s Studies, Capitalism Nature Socialism, Western American Literature, and other venues. She is the author of one book and editor of two more, including You Are the River, a book of ekphrasis in response to works in the permanent collection of the North Carolina Museum of Art. Helena is Professor of Literature and Environment at ECU, where she is currently working on a book of environmental nonfiction.