Lydia Millet
Lydia Millet is an award-winning author who has produced an impressive collection of works over her career. She has written short stories, novels, essays, and non-fiction books, all of which combine her interests in politics, nature, and culture. Millet is known for crafting fully realized characters who bring to life the various themes in her stories and explore universal questions in unique and thought-provoking ways.
Lydia Millet was born in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1968 and moved with her family to the San Francisco Bay Area at a young age. She became interested in creative writing from a young age and published her first short story at the age of 18. She attended the University of California at Santa Cruz, where she studied literature and creative writing. Following college, she briefly worked as an editor before becoming a full-time writer in 1997.
Millet's early short stories explored gender roles, social issues, and fantasy stories, and her work later expanded to encompass satire and dystopian fiction. Many of her stories have been published in major publications such as The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, and The Atlantic Monthly. Her debut novel,George Bush, Dark Prince of Love, was released in 2001 to great critical acclaim and has since become a cult classic.
In addition to her fiction, Millet has also published a number of non-fiction books, including A Children's Bibleand The Gulf: The Making of an American Sea. In A Children's Bible, Millet combines her interests in ecology, environmentalism, and politics to tell an unfinished Biblical story of the end of the world. In The Gulf, she delves into the history of the Gulf of Mexico and its impact on American culture, examining both the devastation caused by human activity and the relationship of humans to the environment.
In 2012, Millet published her most celebrated novel, My Happy Life. It was the recipient of multiple awards, including the PEN USA Fiction Award, the St. Francis College Literary Prize, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. The novel follows the story of a woman living in a nursing home trying to make sense of her life and survival.
Lydia Millet continues to write and publish today. Her most recent novel, A Children's Dictionary of Words, was released in 2020. In it, she tells the story of a young girl who creates her own language to escape her difficult childhood and find beauty and solace in the world.
Millet is an incredibly insightful and talented writer who has earned numerous awards and accolades for her work. Her stories captivate readers, many of which explore universal questions and the importance of nature and the environment in our lives. Her works provide readers with an opportunity to reflect on their lives and the world as a whole.