Lydia Millet (born 5 December 1968) is an American novelist. Her third novel, My Happy Life, won the 2003 PEN-USA Award for Fiction. Her fifth novel, Oh Pure and Radiant Heart was short-listed for the 2007 Arthur C. Clarke Award. Her most recent work, a collection of short stories entitled "Love in Infant Monkeys" was one of three finalists for the 2010 Pulitzer Prize.
Millet was born in Boston, Massachusetts and raised in Toronto, Canada. She holds a BA in Creative Writing with honors from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a master's degree from Duke University.
Millet is best known for her dark sense of humor, stylistic versatility, and political bent. Her first book, Omnivores (1996), is a subversion of the coming-of-age novel, in which a young girl in Southern California is tormented by her megalomaniac father and invalid mother and finally sold in marriage to a real estate agent. Her second, George Bush, Dark Prince of Love (2000), is a political comedy about a trailer-park woman obsessed with the 41st American President.
Brief but weighty, her third book, My Happy Life (2002), is a poetic, language-oriented work about a lonely misfit trapped in an abandoned hospital, who writes the poignant story of her life on the walls.. It is narrated by, as the Village Voice glowing deems her, “an orphan cruelly mistreated by life who nevertheless regards her meager subsistence as a radiant gift.” Despite the horrors that amount to her life, she still calls herself happy. Jennifer Reese of The New York Times Book Review commented on Millet’s new approach to the treatment of the literary victim, saying “Millet has created a truly wretched victim, but where is the outrage? She has coolly avoided injecting so much as a hint of it into this thin, sharp and frequently funny novel; one of the narrator's salient characteristics is an inability to feel even the mildest indignation. The world she inhabits is a savage place, but everything about it interests her, and paying no attention to herself, she is able to see beauty and wonder everywhere.”
Millet's fourth novel, Everyone's Pretty (2005), is a picaresque tragicomedy about an alcoholic pornographer with messianic delusions, based partly on Millet's stint as a copy editor at Larry Flynt Publications. . Sarah Weinman of the Washington Post Book World called it “both prism and truth” “With a sharp eye for small details, a keen sense of the absurd and strong empathy for its creations,” Millet creates a kaleidoscope of quirky characters. The New York Times Book Review called her fifth novel, Oh Pure and Radiant Heart (2005), an “extremely smartresonant fantasy.” Short listed for the Arthur C. Clark Award, it brings three of the physicists responsible for creating the atomic bomb to life in modern-day New Mexico, where they acquire a cult following and embark on a crusade for redemption.
How the Dead Dream (2008) “a frightening and gorgeous view of human decline,” according to Utne Reader. It features a young Los Angeles real estate developer consumed by power and political ambitions who, after his mother's suicide attempt and two other deaths, begins to nurture a curious obsession withvanishing species. Then a series of calamities forces him from a tropical island, the site onone of his developments, onto the mainland where he takes a Conrad-esque journey up a river into the remote jungle. Eye Weekly summarized this black comedy, noting “American culture loves its stories of hubris, downfall and ruin as of late, but it takes a writer of Millet's sensitivity to enjoy the way down this much.”
Millet's most recent work, Love in Infant Monkeys (2009), was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize -- a short story collection featuring vignettes about famous historical and pop culture icons and their encounters with other species.
