In spring 1999, Lydia Millet impulsively purchased a dilapidated house in the desert outside of Tucson, Ariz., on the edge of Saguaro National Park West, and relocated there from New York City to start a new life—one set against a landscape of sage and cacti, teeming with wildlife, from bobcats and coyotes to rattlesnakes and tarantulas. Built in the 1950s, the place—which Millet shares with her partner, Aaron; one of her two kids; and two dogs—is a bit of a lovable mess. Recently, the electricity went out in parts of the house, which forced Millet to move to an Airbnb while workers attempted to fix the problem.
“The house was absurdly built by people who didn’t know how to build a house,” Millet says over Zoom. “It’s a hodgepodge beehive of a house, but I’m really attached to it. I can look through my kitchen window and see deer or owls. I’m a bourgeois wildlife enthusiast. I need my morning coffee and my laptop. I’m absolutely not a mountain woman, but I do admire the more feral among us.”
The feral among us—of the animal and human variety—have occupied Millet throughout her writing career. “I love beastliness,” she says. “I like hateful characters who are extreme, un-self-aware, and have huge blind spots.” Millet’s books, which often focus on people’s contentious relationships with each other and with animals and the planet, include the story collection Love in Infant Monkeys (2009), a Pulitzer Prize finalist; the novel A Children’s Bible (2020), a National Book Award finalist; and We Loved It All (2024), her first nonfiction work. Millet’s books have sold approximately 250,000 copies, according to her publisher, Norton, and have been translated into 11 languages.
Atavists, Millet’s 21st book, out in April, is a collection of loosely linked stories about life in postpandemic America. The stories concern characters, some related, living in Los Angeles, who are trying to find their place in a tech-saturated, alienating world of deepfakes, social media, virtual friendships, and apps for food and sex. They include a woman obsessed with checking a former friend’s Instagram account, a process she likens to picking at a knee scab; a bodybuilder and misogynist who uses online dating to demean women; and a young man who prefers role-play to reality. Among other characters are a girl who functions as the word police of her family, correcting them when they use potentially insensitive language; a scholar trying to “cancel” his coworker online; and a gay couple who, after they begin to receive anonymous homophobic letters, hope that the sender isn’t a person of color, as this could complicate whether they’re viewed as hate crime victims. Throughout the stories, Millet calls out our collective neuroses and anxieties around cultural sensitivity, and examines how tech has changed us as a species and has left some yearning for a less complicated, more primitive existence.
“Stories are joyful toys to me, and what I do to delight myself when I’m working on something longer,” says Millet, who has already completed two yet-to-be-published novels. Atavists may have been fun to write, but it tackles in earnest pressing cultural issues—around virtue signaling, identity politics, and the weaponization of language. “There’s a sort of McCarthyism right now on the cultural and political left—a false idea that language should be inoffensive,” Millet explains. “There’s been this abandonment of free speech ideas, a real muzzling, from the left and the right, and if you say that from the left then you’re a traitor, and so to be able to write about that stuff in fiction is liberating.”
Millet was born in 1968 in Boston and raised in Toronto, where her father, an Egyptologist, was a professor. In her childhood home, politeness was valued over argument, making her a standout. “I was skinny, dirty, and given to elaborate weeping and loud laughter,” she says. “I was cheerful, but bossy and dictatorial to my younger brother and sister.”
She earned a BA in interdisciplinary studies in 1990 from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She then moved to L.A., where she lived from 1991 to 1994 and worked as a copy editor at Hustler, among other media outlets, and wrote Omnivores, her first novel. She was at Hustler, napping under her desk, when she got the call that Omnivores had been accepted for publication. Millet recalls in We Loved It All that the men she worked with at Hustler had a “workmanlike commitment to misogynist aggression,” and misogyny has become a theme in her books. “Periodically I worry about vilifying men, but I don’t think the world is suffering from my portrayals. Am I shooting fish in a barrel? It’s delightful to do so, I must say.”
Author Jonathan Lethem admires Millet’s perceptivity. The two met at a book party 20 years ago, and “I insisted we become friends,” Lethem recalls. “Lydia is a confidant that I rely upon. Her acuity and impatience with bullshit and her awareness are enormous. She’s funny as can be, and she cracks me up on the page, too. There’s a velocity in her storytelling that makes her books hard to put down.”
In 1996, the same year Omnivores was published, Millet received her MA from Duke University’s Nicholas School of the Environment and moved to Manhattan to work as an environmental grant writer. In 1999, she relocated to Arizona, got a job at the Center for Biological Diversity, and bought her house. She fell for her boss at the center, married him in 2003, had two kids, and got divorced in 2011. As the center’s deputy creative director, her job, she says, is “to take the wonky language of experts and try to make it more charismatic.” Her love of nonhumans keeps her motivated. “I’ve always been drawn to creatures with different forms from our own. I can’t think of anything more worth fighting for then the persistence of those forms on Earth.”
Tom Mayer, Millet’s editor, has worked with the author on 10 previous books and highlights her ability to tap into life through fiction. “Lydia is aware of humanity’s place in the vast web of connection,” Mayer says. “She’s a spectacular novelist of the everyday and someone who’s able to capture what it’s like to live now.”
Whether she’s discussing how our phones have turned us into weird little cyborgs or contemplating the behaviors of javelinas or scorpions, Millet is endlessly tuned into the world—and, notes her agent, Maria Massie, great at exposing humanity’s foibles. Most days, she writes in a ramshackle guesthouse near her main residence. “There are pack rats in the roof and no heating or cooling,” Millet says. “There are lots of rattlesnakes around the area, so I have to wear big chunky boots. One snake lives in a hole under the front door. But it’s solitude, and a huge luxury. And the snakes? They’re just part of it.”
Elaine Szewczyk’s writing has appeared in McSweeney’s and other publications. She’s the author of the novel I’m with Stupid.
