{"id":36078,"date":"2010-05-14T12:46:00","date_gmt":"2010-05-14T19:46:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/test-inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/?p=36078"},"modified":"2025-02-18T09:57:57","modified_gmt":"2025-02-18T17:57:57","slug":"issue-67-a-conversation-with-lydia-millet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/test-inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/issue-67-a-conversation-with-lydia-millet\/","title":{"rendered":"Issue 67: A Conversation with Lydia Millet"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n
\n
\n\n
\"Willow<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Interview in Willow Springs 67<\/em><\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Works in Willow Springs 60<\/em><\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n

\n\n

May 14, 2010<\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Laura Ender, Samuel Ligon, and Melina Rutter<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

A CONVERSATION WITH LYDIA MILLET<\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/h2>\n\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n
\n\n
\"Photo<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Photo Credit: J. Beall<\/em><\/em><\/em><\/em><\/em><\/em><\/em><\/em><\/em><\/em><\/p>\n\n<\/div><\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n

Lydia Millet discovered that she loved the desert <\/strong>when she attended the University of Arizona\u2019s MFA program. And though she didn\u2019t stay in the program, she returned to live in the desert a decade later\u2014a wild, expansive setting fitting for both her fiction and her environmental advocacy. Millet is the author of six novels and, most recently, a collection of short stories, Love in Infant Monkeys, which was a finalist for the 2010 Pulitzer Prize. Her third novel, My Happy Life, won the 2003 PEN-USA award for fiction, and embodies her interest in what she calls an \u201cagenda of empathy\u201d through the perspective of a grudgeless woman who has experienced a life full of misfortune and abuse.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Born in Boston and raised in Toronto, Millet lived in both Los Angeles and New York City before settling outside of Tucson. Her fiction deals with subjects as diverse as extinction, the creation of the atomic bomb, and celebrity worship, and shares a commitment to cultural investigation that is by turns serious and satirical.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In an interview with Eclectica Magazine, Millet described the condition with which her characters grapple as follows: \u201cIt seems to me that adult lives are not chiefly lives of discovery but of calcification and sedimentation: we become more rigid and we become more passive, buried in the sand that blows over us\u2026 And rarely, punctuating these long plateaus of sameness and non-learning, there are moments of rapture. In such moments we feel how near we are to touching truth, but how far away truth is, and how always and forever it will hover there beyond our reach\u2026 Many of my characters are caught up in moments of rapture and recognition, indeed such moments pop up like jack-in- the-boxes, because what else is worth the price of admission, finally? Myself, I live for those moments.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We met with Lydia Millet on a shady porch in Spokane last spring, where we discussed imagination, the unsaid, and \u201cthe tragedy and glory of our individual selves.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Samuel Ligon<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Do you see yourself as a cultural critic?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lydia Millet<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I think any writer of substance is a cultural critic by nature. Almost any. I think books should have an agenda, but I don\u2019t think you should be able to deliver a one-liner about what that agenda is. It should be an agenda felt by the reader, sensed by the reader, but not fully known. In my work, often there\u2019s a sort of agenda of empathy. Very simple. Empathy is something I\u2019m interested in. But other people have other agendas, a nostalgic agenda, or an agenda that circles the idea of longing. It could be anything. I just want to feel that it\u2019s there, pulsing behind the bones.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Melina Rutter<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Is the empathy agenda the same thing you refer to as the macrosocial? You\u2019ve described that as writing that deals with the self in relation to the larger mysteries of the world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Millet<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Not exactly the same. One of the things I react against in contemporary literary fiction is the preoccupation with the personal. Obviously, it\u2019s hard to define \u201cpersonal\u201d against \u201cindividual\u201d or \u201cthe self.\u201d But so much literary fiction seems to dwell singularly in the domain of the personal, the doings of the person, the social life of the person, the personal life of the person. And I find it very limiting. I\u2019m not interested, finally, in just the personal. I\u2019m interested in the relationship of the individual self to society and the social self, and morality, in fact, to use an old-fashioned word. Those connections are what I\u2019m interested in exploring. But macrosocial can also be in the same vein as macroeconomics versus microeconomics, meaning larger systems or structures of the social. Government, for instance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ligon<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Should fiction be interested in those kinds of systems?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Millet<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Absolutely. It can be very covert, that interest, but I think it needs to be there. We\u2019re a culture that\u2019s dooming itself to navel-gazing, and has for a long time, and I don\u2019t think that\u2019s done us any favors. That\u2019s not to say that navel-gazing doesn\u2019t exist elsewhere, but I do think that we, as Americans, are in this crevasse of our own making in terms of the way we\u2019ve allowed the apotheosis of self to dominate our thinking about the world, and I think it\u2019s always a job of art to make us look at ourselves critically. Whether we do so overtly or covertly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019m not interested in polemics. Polemics are horrible to read. Even if a piece is satirical, if it\u2019s sheer polemic, it doesn\u2019t work as art. It doesn\u2019t allow any space for the reader. I wrote some polemics when I was young. I wrote this terrible book called Parts and Services, which was a feminist screed, basically, against men. Every chapter was a part of a woman\u2019s body. It was dreadful. Luckily, there are no extant copies of this monstrosity. But I started writing from that youthful angst-ridden passion about the injustice of the world, and then I moved away from that when I learned how to create something I was actually interested in. I have to be interested in what I\u2019m doing, and any kind of polemic just shuts me out, someone else\u2019s polemic or my own. The polemic kills imagination, essentially. Because it\u2019s foregone. It\u2019s already decided. There\u2019s nothing in there that we\u2019re helping to decide; there\u2019s nothing we\u2019re making in a polemic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ligon<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

What prose interests you?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Millet<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I was asked recently whether I considered my taste to be minimalist in prose, and I never thought of myself that way, but I do like a lot of space on the page. That is to say, not actual physical white space, but I like there to be space, as with, say, some Nabokov, where there\u2019s a lot of metaphysical space that\u2019s somehow created by the language. I don\u2019t like to be overwhelmed with words. I don\u2019t want someone to try to do some \u201cWham, bam, thank you, ma\u2019am\u201d with their verbiage. I want there to be room for the silence of the mind in the reading.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ligon<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

How does that manifest itself?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Millet<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I don\u2019t know the answer to that. It\u2019s a sort of magic. It\u2019s not that I want sentences to be small. It might have to do with the way time passes, narrative time and reading time, and how they work together. Pacing has something to do with it, a certain economy of language, which would be aspired to by Carver-ites. I don\u2019t want any flashy tricks. I want there to be contemplation in the world of the story. But as to how that\u2019s achieved technically, I think there are myriad ways, untold numbers of ways. So it\u2019s not that I\u2019m looking for a certain technique or formula or anything in the work, or even a series of tropes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Thomas Bernhard, an Austrian, is one of my favorite writers, and my favorite book of his is Woodcutters. All of his books are about some version of himself, and he\u2019s very bitter, he hates the world, but also hates himself, and he has these long internal monologues of\u2014because he wrote in German\u2014these run-on sentences. It\u2019s very interior, and very judgmental of culture. He hated Austrian culture with a vengeance, which was his own culture, the culture of Vienna. But it\u2019s not without humor. Part of the space I\u2019m talking about prose generating has to do with humor. There should be a lightness. A book that does this well is
J.M. Coetzee\u2019s Disgrace. It\u2019s perfectly spaced for the reader. It perfectly generates a world of thought and moment. I like books where the unutterable and the ineffable are lurking behind everything, where you approach the unsaid consistently in some way throughout the book. I like the unspeakable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ligon<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

You mentioned time. Is fiction always about time?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Millet<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Always. But stories also help us to situate ourselves outside it, or to feel that we have. Obviously, there is no situating ourselves outside of time, but the illusion of being outside of time is exhilarating. It always seems like you could live your life in a movie, or in a book you love, a charismatic book. What if you had a score for everything you did? What if there was always music playing? What if there was always momentum, and always the shifting of landscapes, and you were that hero. It\u2019s romantic, and I think all of us love the romantic, whether or not we admit it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ligon<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

But poetry isn\u2019t always concerned with time as fiction seems to be.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Millet<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

There is a stop-time thing with poetry. But still, within a poem there has to be an expression of time. I think it\u2019s a different relationship to time, but I\u2019m not sure there\u2019s not a concern with time in poetry. Because I think there always has to be time where careful language is concerned. There\u2019s always time that we\u2019re responding to and time we\u2019re invoking in our sentences. I don\u2019t think it\u2019s a non-time with poems.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Rutter<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Is music a non-time?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Millet<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

No. Music is all about time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Rutter<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

You can take a piece of music out of context, like what you said about having a score to your life, or to a movie. You can take music out of context and impose it somewhere else.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Millet<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Of all the arts, music is the best at allowing us access to the present, I think. And whether that has to do with neurology, neurolinguistics, whether it has to do with the way that blood cycles through our bodies, I don\u2019t know, but the rhythm and the power of music is, I think, in allowing us to live in the present in this particular, unique way that is remarkable. If I could, I would be a great musician.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Rutter<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I was reading your essay about the Mekons.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Millet<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I love those damn Mekons.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Rutter<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In an interview you talked about rapture. Is the moment you describe in the essay\u2014at the Mekons show\u2014how you would define rapture?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Millet<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

You know when you\u2019re at a music event, and you\u2019re dancing around, or maybe you\u2019re not, maybe you\u2019re just still, and you\u2019re loving with this deep love that you can feel for music? I think at those times I\u2019m more aware of myself in space and the rest of the world than at many other times. It\u2019s extraordinary. Music has that great power to make you want to be nowhere but there, at that moment. I don\u2019t think fiction works that way. You can love a book and be deeply immersed in a book, and want to remain with the book, and you should, if it\u2019s a good book. But it\u2019s not the same. It\u2019s in this sort of past time of the book. You\u2019re in the world of the book, this already completed world, into which you\u2019re injecting yourself, of course, in a changeable, mutable way. But it\u2019s not the same as listening to a piece of music.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Rutter<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

And it\u2019s not collective. It seems like that might have something to do with the feeling of rapture.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Millet<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Definitely. It\u2019s an idea of communion. It\u2019s like a religious sort of ecstasy, I think. Folks who are involved in those sorts of ecstatic religions, they\u2019re involved also in going to a Mekons concert, or whatever the brew of choice is.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Rutter<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In your book, My Happy Life, when the narrator experiences what I thought of as rapture, it seemed to come out of feeling connected to someone else, for better or worse.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Millet<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I do think that\u2019s where empathy lies, in this recognition of the self and its relation to the not-self, to the community, to the species, another species, to beingness. It\u2019s the pain of being individual selves, of being isolate. And yet, of course, our greatest gifts live in that selfhood also. Our greatest capacity. The privacy of our minds is such a glorious thing. Yet we\u2019re social beings always straining for communion. And for me, much of the tension of my fiction, or the project of it, lies around that subtragedy of our individual selves, which is also our glory.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Laura Ender<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

How does the \u201cpain of being individual selves\u201d play a role in your work? The narrator of My Happy Life, for example, seems to experience rapture when she\u2019s in physical pain, usually at the hands of others.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Millet<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Her gift in this book, the gift that I wanted to give her, was the gift of being fully expressed and in commerce with other souls, which is clearly a fictional conceit. When I sat down to write that book, I think I was just turning thirty, and I was moving away from judgment as a main practice that defined my artistic life and world. When I lived in New York in my twenties, it seemed that my friends and I were always going to parties, and this also applied to our reading, and our choosing of what art we liked. Our practice was to go to these parties and separate ourselves and look at all the things we didn\u2019t like, and all the people we didn\u2019t like, criticize people for what they weren\u2019t, or what they were. This was the way we defined our taste. As I grew older, I became more interested in\u2014well, I\u2019m still highly judgmental, but I became more interested in defining myself by what I loved. And by love in general, by love of the world and its denizens rather than by criticism of it. So I wrote this book as a gesture for myself. Could I write a character who was unlike myself in this extreme fashion, in this fashion of living an un-judging life? And, also, what would the tragedy of that look like? What would the sadness of that look like? Because I believe we should, in many cases, be more judgmental, actually, as a culture. So it wasn\u2019t that I was simply creating a utopian character. It was that I wanted to look at the practical reality of a self who fails to criticize the society in which he or she lives.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ender<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Is violence important to that point?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Millet<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yeah, and that\u2019s why the events in that book had to be extreme, any of the various torture episodes. I didn\u2019t wish to linger on them, and I don\u2019t think I did linger. It\u2019s not a graphic mayhem that\u2019s occurring, because I had no interest in that. It\u2019s a form of voyeurism, but I wanted to establish the parameters of her servitude in ways that were fairly extreme as a backdrop. You couldn\u2019t play such a character off anything that was less than extreme. Or I couldn\u2019t.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ender<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

You use violence in George Bush, Dark Prince of Love and in Omnivores. Do you think violence is important to fiction?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Millet<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I think of myself as tending away from reading violence, as being less interested. We get so much of it in other places that I never think of fiction as the locus of that. So I guess I\u2019m more interested in references to violence than descriptions of violence. Most of my violent scenes, when you read them line to line, are not graphically violent. They just state that a violent event has occurred. For example, there\u2019s a scene in George Bush, Dark Prince of Love where she\u2019s sort of raped, you know, but you don\u2019t actually see the details of that. You don\u2019t see any physicality of it. We\u2019re already deluged by so many images of violence that they\u2019re sort of throwaways now, and they\u2019re everywhere, in every procedural that comes on TV. They\u2019re so everywhere that they\u2019re formulaic, and so I think a reference is really all that\u2019s required to invoke the feeling of that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But I also don\u2019t see much of a need for landscape descriptions in fiction. There\u2019s a lot I don\u2019t see a need for or am not interested in prosecuting in fiction. Most physical description I\u2019m not interested in. I like it when other people do it well, as long as they don\u2019t linger, but I\u2019ve never been very\u2026 you\u2019d be hard pressed to say where any one of my characters is situated on a given page. I mean, where are they in the world? It\u2019s not clear. What does their world look like? That\u2019s all for the reader to make. I\u2019m just not interested in lengthy textual exploration of physicality in general, I guess.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Rutter<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Do you think that human\/animal relationships in literature have been romanticized?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Millet<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

That\u2019s a broad question. What are your thoughts on it?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Rutter<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

There seems to be an archetype of the human\/animal relationship in literature: the man going out in the wilderness to conquer the beast and show his dominion over nature.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ender<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Like The Old Man and the Sea.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Millet<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Or Moby-Dick. There certainly is that sort of predator\/prey dynamic in a lot of earlier American literature.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Rutter<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

And there\u2019s something different going on in your work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Millet<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

You should read Joy Williams\u2019s essay collection, Ill Nature. The hunting piece, \u201cThe Killing Game,\u201d is a polemic, but she\u2019s someone who can do that in an essay better than anyone I know. It has this moral weight to it that\u2019s just brilliant.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I guess what I find more in contemporary American fiction is a rejection of the world of the non-domesticated animal. Pets don\u2019t really count. There are plenty of dog-obsessed people. I\u2019m a dog-obsessed person. But there\u2019s a rejection of the whole nonurban world, and even the urban nature world. At the same time, there is sometimes this fetishization of the animal, you know, obscure bits of natural history that people cling to, or just the symbolic weight of animal morphology, like the beauty of animals, that does make an appearance in much contemporary fiction, but is not to be dwelt upon. More in an almost nostalgic way, as though the animal is already gone. As though these things are not somehow relevant. The wild animal as pet, I think, appears in contemporary fiction, but it\u2019s difficult to cite my references here.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I also think that animals are extraordinarily difficult to write about. And can be boring to read about. Because they are other. They don\u2019t have dialogue. There\u2019s contemporary fiction that does deal with animal subjectivity, for example Barbara Gowdy\u2019s book, The White Bone, which is written from the point of view of the elephants. Or there\u2019s that quasi- commercial pop fiction, the guy with the tiger on the raft. Life of Pi. So there are attempts. Gowdy\u2019s a Canadian writer who\u2019s not probably known enough in the U.S. Her book is strange\u2014very ambitious and sort of a misfire, cringe-inducing at times. Because it\u2019s really hard to write well from the point of view of an elephant, a difficult project. Few are more difficult, I think. So there are some things like that in contemporary fiction. But I think that the project of entering animal subjectivity is just immense and undoable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What\u2019s more interesting is the attempt to explore how animals aren\u2019t us, and how different we are, you know, just the fact of embracing the unknowableness of the animal, and wanting that always to persist in culture, to be there. Even the most urban among us would feel impoverished in a world without animals and without trees. We may not be prone to hiking or whatever, but we live in the knowledge that somewhere in our land there is the wild. We don\u2019t want to live in a world where that doesn\u2019t exist. Yet we don\u2019t talk about this very much. And it\u2019s ceasing to exist more every day. There\u2019s very little outcry about this. It\u2019s problematic, for me. The intersection of environmental advocacy culture and literary culture has always been very\u2014there almost is none, for one thing. And when it does happen, it\u2019s odd, because I don\u2019t typically love so-called nature writing. I don\u2019t do a lot of reading in that area. I do like Barry Lopez, his nonfiction. But I\u2019m bored by a lot of writing that is more pastoralist.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And the whole style and aesthetic of the environmental movement, in which I\u2019m immersed to some degree\u2014because I work in it and my husband is an environmentalist, and my graduate degree was in the field\u2014but it\u2019s not a culture where I feel at home at all, because I don\u2019t like the aesthetics of it, and I don\u2019t like the single-mindedness of it. There are two sides of it now in America. There\u2019s the kind of granola-ey, more grassroots-y culture of it, and then there\u2019s the national-environmental- group-super-corporate culture of it, which is full of lawyers. And I\u2019ve worked in both. When I lived in New York, I worked at the Natural Resources Defense Council for three years, and wrote grants for them, so I\u2019ve seen both of these arenas, and I don\u2019t like either. The people in them don\u2019t\u2014and there are exceptions to this\u2014but they don\u2019t read literature at all. In many cases, the art that is gravitated toward by enviros is just not of the first order to me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

My husband is a rare exception to this, a voracious reader of poetry, with an almost-PhD in phenomenology, so he\u2019s philosophical and he\u2019s a theory head, more erudite than I am by far; and he also loves art. But he\u2019s so rare. I mean, people in that world just aren\u2019t interested in the books that I love and revere. On the other side, my literary friends have very limited interest in environmentalism, which is an awkward and uncharismatic word anyway, not one that sufficiently illuminates the nature of these matters\u2014we\u2019re talking about a range of things having to do with human life support, quality of life, and the ontological reality of the world, so I don\u2019t like the term environment or environmentalism. But that said, most of my literary friends see a certain tediousness in the strivings of that subculture. I understand in a way, because the aesthetics of environmentalism are so limited and unfortunately pass\u00e9, but the refusal of the U.S. intelligentsia to engage in these sorts of social issues, beyond just a passing acquaintance with them, is tragic. And it\u2019s greatly exacerbated here, compared to say Latin America, where there\u2019s a more well-rounded relationship to social problems and art, where these things are more interlinked.
I think we have a culture that refuses to confront itself in honest and powerful terms. It\u2019s partly the ironic gesture, the supremacy of the ironic, which in the wake of 9\/11 was dismissed by various idiotic critics. Irony certainly has not disappeared, nor should it, but I do think there\u2019s a distance between the literary subculture and the subculture of advocacy that wants to say, quite rationally and urgently\u2014because given what the science says about climate change, we don\u2019t have much time at all\u2014\u201cLook. We have serious problems, and we need to pay attention to them if we want our grandchildren to live in a bearable world.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ligon<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I wonder if there\u2019s a rejection of the human in the environmental community\u2014a focus on the fact that humans destroy\u2014and what\u2019s valued is the pristine, where humans aren\u2019t. There seems to be a rejection of the human, which, as a fiction writer, is one of your primary concerns.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Millet<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

There is a reaction to anthropocentrism in that community that rejects the human and the human-preoccupied. But I don\u2019t think it\u2019s calculated. I think it\u2019s more a sort of thoughtless rejection of maybe an urban sort of elite, a certain kind of materialism. I do believe there\u2019s a better way to do that, that it\u2019s possible and in fact necessary to reject the centrally human without rejecting the human. I\u2019m interested in our foibles and our beauties as a species. This doesn\u2019t make me any less interested in the rest of the world; indeed it makes me more interested in the rest of the world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We\u2019ve got all these false dichotomies in the culture, like the dichotomy between creationism and evolutionary biology\u2014Darwinism and creationism. This whole idea that you can\u2019t have God if you have evolution is so obviously specious. It\u2019s just unreasoned and specious, and yet has become this leviathan in culture, that these things are at war with each other. It seems like category errors are made all over the place. I\u2019d like to see a world where the literary folks were more interested in extra-literary concerns, and where activists\u2014and not just environmental activists\u2014were more interested in the arts. And also, if more scientists were interested in the arts\u2026 I read lots of stuff about popular science, but I don\u2019t know a lot of scientists who read literature. There are some, don\u2019t get me wrong, but it just seems like we so tragically undervalue art and literary art.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ligon<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Are we too specialized? Is that the problem?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Millet<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I do think there\u2019s extreme specialization, but there\u2019s no intrinsic reason that the specialty has to close out the rest of the world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ligon<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Was this less true fifty years ago, a hundred years ago?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Millet<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Certainly a hundred years ago. What happened is just capitalism, I think. Extreme postindustrial capitalism. Competition is everything. Everything is a competition, and if you have to excel in a particular skill\u2014like if you\u2019re a shot-put thrower, you\u2019re taught not to pay attention to the whole rest of the track and field world. We actually make a feast of this. It\u2019s all that we do, this notion of excellence, wanting our children to excel, wanting ourselves to excel, which means focus on one thing to the detriment of the rest of existence or experience. A return to the Renaissance man would be great, and the Renaissance woman.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ligon<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Does your work ask us to reconsider the human relationship to animals or nature?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Millet<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I hope it does. I almost always set my people in urban environments, in particular L.A. Generally, I\u2019m not environment-specific, but L.A. looms large in my writing, because I think it\u2019s sort of the ultra-America, an exaggeration of America. Or a perfection of American exaggeration. But also, I would find it boring to have my people constantly gamboling in nature. There\u2019s no doubt that we\u2019re urbanized and urbanizing more all the time. I think we should all go more to the woods, or the beach, more to the ocean, to the river, to the desert, but I\u2019m not interested in situating my fiction there. Individual animals have always been more compelling to me; their charisma is more interesting as a subject of fiction. I think it\u2019s difficult to write compellingly about trees. John Fowles did it, but I can\u2019t.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ligon<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Did you have an experience that caused you to reevaluate your relationship to animals?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Millet<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

It wasn\u2019t any particular moment, really. It was when I left Manhattan and moved to the desert outside Tucson. This was in January of 1999. I lived in an apartment in the West Village with my then boyfriend, but I had loved the desert since I first went there a decade earlier and briefly attended the University of Arizona\u2014my brief foray into an MFA program. So I went back to live there part-time, like four months a year, and then a week after I got there, I bought the house I now live in. My boyfriend wasn\u2019t too happy about that, because he didn\u2019t want to live in the desert. But coming to that desert, I realized that the sky was so huge, and it was the only place I\u2019d ever felt all right about dying in. I realized, here is where I can be comfortable with death, with the idea of my own mortality. Because here the world is so beautiful, that to be a part of it, even if I\u2019m just dead, is all right with me. I\u2019d always hated the idea of growing old in New York and hobbling along those cold sidewalks in my old age, even though I\u2019d only lived in Manhattan for three years and still love going there. But I realized, this is actually the world. The world is not the places we have built on it. The world is this. And it\u2019s the world that I want to live in, where I can see a million stars at night over my house and animals wander through the yard. So it wasn\u2019t any sort of epiphany, but just going there and realizing I should be there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ligon<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Recognizing something larger than yourself, or that you were part of?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Millet<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

No, I\u2019ve always had awe. I had awe at great cities, too. I\u2019ve always lived with awe, but it was actually that I wasn\u2019t a part of it, that I didn\u2019t have to be a part of it, that this world would exist after I did. It would go on and on and on without me, and that\u2019s in My Happy Life. So it wasn\u2019t that I was a part of it; it was that I was not a part of it and didn\u2019t have to be.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ligon<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

It seems like Europeans, but especially the British, have attitudes about human relationships to animals that are different than Americans\u2019. For example, we see an animal rights movement in Britain more than in the United States.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Millet<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I think that\u2019s true. Of course, Europe has destroyed its own nature long since, for the most part, but I do think they have a more sophisticated relationship to animals in general. I think that has a lot to do with the philosophical underpinnings of our various societies. American pragmatism, materialism, the Methodist sort of John Wesley get rich and richer and richer, all that philosophy that was so crucial to the birth of our country\u2014Puritanism\u2014prepared us for a more objectified relationship to the natural world. Whereas in European philosophy, you know, your Derrida, your sort of continental philosophy, there\u2019s a greater appreciation for and understanding of the nonhuman.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ender<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Are you addressing that in \u201cSexing the Pheasant\u201d when the character is considering what\u2019s American and what\u2019s English?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Millet<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019ve done that a lot lately, you\u2019re making me recognize, because in the book that is the sequel to How the Dead Dream, called Ghost Lights, and then the third one, called Magnificence\u2014they\u2019re not published yet, but they\u2019re in existence\u2014the protagonist of Ghost Lights is the father of Casey in How the Dead Dream, and he\u2019s an IRS guy. He goes looking for T down in Costa Rica. After he discovers that his wife is cheating on him, he wants to get away, so he invents this expedition to find T, who has disappeared, as in the end of the first book. He meets these Germans there, and he objectifies these Germans, and at the same time adores them. It\u2019s comic, but it\u2019s like the Aryan ideal, and I\u2019m thinking now that I do that a fair amount, just playing off the European.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ender<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Madonna is the main character in \u201cSexing the Pheasant,\u201d and every story in Love in Infant Monkeys features some sort of celebrity or historical figure, alive or dead. Where does the celebrity end and the character begin?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Millet<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Of course I have no idea what Madonna is like personally. I just had my version of an invented Madonna, although I suspect there are certain accurate parallels. I let myself write whatever I wanted to about these living and dead people. You can\u2019t be constrained by fact.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ligon<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The way you used fact in that book reminded me of Don DeLillo with Libra, how you would take characters, and I\u2019m thinking of Harlow, who you reveal as somewhat despicable, and then humanize them. How did fact play into the fiction, or how did you get away from fact?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Millet<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I take what I like amongst the facts and play with it. I love despicable characters. I\u2019m fascinated with them. When I read my book Everyone\u2019s Pretty\u2014when I\u2019m forced to read a portion of it\u2014I realize just how harsh that main character is, but I loved him at the time, his wickedness. I love the wicked and the dismissive, and the narcissistic in particular, probably because I find these things in myself, and in other people\u2014but all those terrible parts of our selves exaggerated are just so much fun to play with. I\u2019m very opportunistic, I think, when I write about historical personages or contemporary living individuals. I pick what I want out of the shimmering vision of them that\u2019s ambient in culture, and play my own game with it, and please myself in rendering it in whatever form I see fit for the purpose of the story. I feel little obligation to verisimilitude. So that\u2019s liberating, but I think that\u2019s why I\u2019m a poor candidate for nonfiction. Because it\u2019s very difficult for me to\u2014and I\u2019ve written a few essays, probably enough for a collection now, but only a couple of them are good, I think, and that\u2019s because I\u2019m not very able to situate myself comfortably in a narrative eye that has to reflect my actual self in some genuine form. I have a couple of times, I think, succeeded in that, but it\u2019s hard to reduce yourself. I envy good nonfiction writers that capacity. I think it\u2019s exceptional. Very few do it to my satisfaction, actually. It\u2019s hard to construct a narrative persona in nonfiction that is not repugnant in some way. Because how self-praising do you allow yourself to be, or how self-deprecating, and just what parts of yourself do you choose to represent in nonfiction? It\u2019s such a difficult negotiation, and one I don\u2019t
care to undertake very often.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Rutter<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Part of what\u2019s effective about Oh Pure and Radiant Heart is the juxtaposition between straight historical fact and the narrative that the reader is already involved in. How did that structure evolve?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Millet<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I did something a little bit like that in George Bush, Dark Prince of Love, too, where I had quotes at the beginning of each chapter, often from George Bush himself. I did a lot of primary research for Oh Pure and Radiant Heart. I went to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I went to the Nevada test sites, and Los Alamos, and the Trinity Site. I really wanted to ground it, and there was so much that was fascinating about the facts, as they pertained to this piece of history, that I didn\u2019t want to lose them entirely, so I played my obviously fanciful narrative off of that. I think, perhaps, because I did so much research, I simply wanted to inject it into there. I read shelves of books about these men, all the biographical writing about them, and far more than I needed to know about nukes in general, and I think that it was a thing where, for me, the stakes were so high, in terms of what actually happened. And what actually happened had such terrible beauty of its own that I didn\u2019t want to give it short shrift.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Well, the creation might not be beautiful, but the explosions of the bomb are beautiful, ridiculously so. The mushroom cloud is sublime, and I didn\u2019t want my book to exist as a fancy completely divorced from this very heavyweight reality. Also, the nonfiction narrative parts served to anchor portions of the book for me. I don\u2019t know if it completely worked, honestly, because those pieces take you out of the narrative, and are by nature didactic. I feel that of all my books, that is the least technically successful, although some people only like that book. But for me, artistically, it was a harder thing to pull off. Probably because it\u2019s a long book, and I\u2019m not really a long book person. It\u2019s difficult for me to maintain tone over the course of such a long narrative, and those didactic segments also allowed me to release myself from the job of maintaining that tone. But between the hardback and the paperback, I cut 15,000 words. That was how dissatisfied I was.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Rutter<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I thought the structure gave variance to the reading experience. I guess it was giving variance to the writing experience, too. The juxtaposition was where I found that metaphysical space you were talking about earlier.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Millet<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I hope it does that; I\u2019m not always confident in it. But a curious thing with the reception of that book was that several of the readings I gave attracted physicists from the Manhattan Project who were still alive. Several of them came up to me and told me that they felt my portrayals of the other physicists were not far off. Which was astonishing and perhaps not true, because I don\u2019t think they were the intimates of those physicists, so it may have just been their social projections onto these figures that they had worked with. I don\u2019t know. I don\u2019t entirely believe it, but it was odd for me that they attributed any verisimilitude whatsoever. It remains for me the most realist of my books, and I think that\u2019s why its fans are a discreet segment among my readers, who don\u2019t tend to go as easily into the things that are less earnest.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ender<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Your book covers feature the color pink and babies and pink and more pink. But it seems like you\u2019ve escaped the chick-lit ghetto more than most female writers. What are your thoughts on marketing of contemporary fiction by women?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Millet<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

For a long time I was angered by what I perceived to be real sexism in the publishing industry, and it absolutely still exists. Now I\u2019m more likely to laugh at it, though the laugh is definitely not your light-hearted, dizzy- with-joy type laugh. It\u2019s more like the laugh of a cackling inmate. But it is purely laughable, the way merely solid writing by men gets anointed as genius with a kind of methodical, institutional urgency. Literary writing by women isn\u2019t pushed or touted as \u201cgenius\u201d the way writing by men is. Men, and especially men who write long books, are touted as geniuses at the drop of a hat, frankly. But many women who write with equal or greater brilliance are lucky to get called by lesser names, are never viewed as powerhouses, and are often relegated to the margins. As to chick lit per se, there are so many categories: your urban power-outfit chick lit apparently for grownups, your teen-fiction specimens that groom young girls to be vapid, your middlebrow women\u2019s fiction concerned chiefly with relationships and the home front\u2026 and then of course there are numerous serious writers with two X chromosomes who simply get overlooked or dismissed as minor.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ligon<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Alice Munro can write about \u201cwomen\u2019s\u201d issues, and she doesn\u2019t get pigeon-holed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Millet<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

That\u2019s true, but she has much greater austerity and more metaphysical space in her prose than so many writers of both sexes, even though I actually went on record sort of lambasting all of the Alice Munro fans in the world on the front page of The Globe and Mail\u2019s book section. You can\u2019t fault Munro for the work she does, in the sense that she\u2019s technically brilliant and very intelligent and a great writer in some ways\u2014she\u2019s a serious writer, someone I respect\u2014but I do think that domestic microscopy is problematic in literary culture. It\u2019s just that she does it so well, it\u2019s really hard to object to Alice Munro. But I wish there weren\u2019t as many Alice Munro imitators. It\u2019s sort of like Carver. I like Carver. But I wish there weren\u2019t so many Carver-ites….<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I once wrote a vicious review of The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, which would fall into a middle-aged, Herm\u00e8s-scarf-wearing female-bonding category\u2026 I detest that kind of thing. I find it materialistic and status-quo promoting and \u201clet\u2019s all play bridge at the country club.\u201d Or the uber-commercial chick-lit products like the Sex in the City franchise: Let\u2019s all bond by wearing designer clothes. Sex in the City is the equivalent of setting up a huge line dance by lung cancer patients singing a glittering show tune about the fabulousness of their premium-brand cigarettes. Which would at least be funnier. What amazes me is that so many women, some of them actually smart, delude themselves that the Sex in the City line dance, with skinny chicks belting out the praises of their high-heeled shoes, is empowering. That kind of presentation of female bonding is vile to me. Although there\u2019s nothing wrong with female bonding. I practice it in my own life, and I love women, but there\u2019s not much to like in chick-lit culture. It\u2019s a pathetic trivialization of femaleness.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ender<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

There\u2019s a lot of biology, zoology, and anthropology in your books.
Would you say writing is a kind of anthropology?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Millet<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Anthropology has a way of objectifying the \u201cother,\u201d and fiction also objectifies. You can\u2019t not. Humorous fiction especially is all about objectification; that\u2019s how we\u2019re funny. There\u2019s a kind of distance required for humor, I think, and to achieve that distance, you need to objectify. It\u2019s not always that you\u2019re objectifying a character. You might be objectifying a trend, or an entire people. There are numerous forms of objectification. But it\u2019s almost always in some form of it, I think, that the funniest funny occurs. I think that\u2019s why I seem never able to write a book where there aren\u2019t marginal characters who are severely objectified. In even my gentler books, there are throwaway objectified characters, lampooned caricatures. They\u2019re types, archetypes or stereotypes. And anthropology has this, you know, \u201cwhite man\u2019s burden\u201d kind of aspect to it, even when it tries to be postmodern, or post-structuralist, when it attempts to say that it\u2019s not doing what it\u2019s doing. It\u2019s still always about this microscopy of the other. I always want, in what I do, to have both objectification and sympathetic identification; I want them to coexist. I think that the tension between those two is interesting in fiction and that some of the best fiction is highly aware of the play between the object and the subject. I think we automatically objectify everywhere we go, all our perceptions; we\u2019re not just meaning-making machines, but specifically objectification-creating machines. We can\u2019t help objectifying others, and to a degree, ourselves, by reducing, categorizing, labeling, naming. All the things that make us who we are, in a great way, also make us compulsive objectifiers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ligon<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

And when we objectify, it means we don\u2019t see the person?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Millet<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

It means we can\u2019t see without naming. There\u2019s no complete vision of the self or of others, but the way we make sense of the world is to create objects. This book I just blurbed is a 30th anniversary reissue of a famous John Fowles essay called \u201cThe Tree.\u201d It\u2019s a beautiful essay about the way we relate to nature, and don\u2019t, and the difference between those among us who are cultivators, and those who just like to look at trees, and what that difference is. At least briefly, he talks about this sort of \u201cthingification\u201d of nature. He doesn\u2019t call it that. I guess reification, though he doesn\u2019t call it that either. But it has to do with a way we can look at something like that ponderosa pine, and as soon as we turn away from it, or even in the looking at it, we have already made of it a thing. There\u2019s a way in which it\u2019s really hard for us to not make totality into things that we then see ourselves seeing as things, if that makes any sense. Let\u2019s say you\u2019re on a hike\u2014and this could be in an urban environment equally, where the trees are the buildings\u2014but you\u2019re walking and you see something, a tree or a house. You\u2019re there with it, but almost as soon as you turn away, it\u2019s already not itself. It\u2019s already something you are bracketing in your own experience as something you have experienced. It\u2019s hard to parse, but I\u2019m interested in that. It\u2019s a form, obviously, of objectifying the world around us, that we seem unable not to perform. We can\u2019t escape it.
But there\u2019s nobility in the struggle to try, I think. Because otherwise, once every being is classified as a thing, we\u2019ve experienced a great loss in understanding, even our attempt to understand ourselves as a part of the world. It\u2019s the difference between art and nature he talks about. Art is something that already is what it is. It\u2019s complete. It\u2019s done. You read a book. It\u2019s what it already was. But nature\u2019s constantly changing, and we find it difficult to interact with, because we can\u2019t rely on it the way we can the things that we\u2019ve created, even if they\u2019re beautiful. We can\u2019t rely on it to remain the same. We can\u2019t \u201cthingify\u201d it entirely. And by nature, I mean the entire world that we live in, that we inhabit, and I\u2019m certainly not the first person to see this, but this sort of alienation that we feel from totalities, I think, has had a pernicious effect on us as a species. We\u2019re dying as we speak. We\u2019re changing, our cells are changing; we\u2019re not art; we\u2019re not made, but being. We\u2019re nature, so we\u2019re also things that can\u2019t be relied upon to remain the same.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ligon<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Are we afraid of that? Is that part of our problem?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Millet<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Of course, of course. Because we can never dwell successfully in the present, and that\u2019s part of our tragedy. We\u2019re always creatures of the future or the past. Both of them we feel we control to a greater degree than we do the present. We can\u2019t get a grasp on this. What is this \u201cus\u201d sitting here? We don\u2019t even know what we are because we\u2019re changing as I say this. I already feel different from the way I felt five seconds ago.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I think there\u2019s a great narrative beauty in anthropology, a great charisma in objectification in general. It\u2019s beyond charming to make people into characters and events into stories. It\u2019s compelling. It\u2019s lovely. It\u2019s our way of bringing color into our lives, to create these linear paths for ourselves. We don\u2019t know any other way to exist than by making stories, and that applies to everyone, not just writers. All we can know is a story, and that has to do directly with the fact that we\u2019re not creatures who can fathom the present. The making of things we don\u2019t understand into stories, there always has to be reduction in that. It\u2019s always an act of reduction. And that reduction is so fucking fun. It\u2019s an adventure.<\/p>\n\n

<\/svg><\/div><\/div><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Lydia Millet discovered that she loved the desert when she attended the University of Arizona\u2019s MFA program. And though she didn\u2019t stay in the program, she returned to live in the desert a decade later\u2014a wild, expansive setting fitting for both her fiction and her environmental advocacy. Millet is the author of six novels and, most … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9086,"featured_media":2294,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"wpo365_audiences":[],"wpo365_private":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-36078","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/test-inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36078"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/test-inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/test-inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test-inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9086"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test-inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=36078"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/test-inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36078\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":36750,"href":"https:\/\/test-inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36078\/revisions\/36750"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test-inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2294"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/test-inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=36078"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test-inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=36078"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test-inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=36078"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}