Issue 67: A Conversation with Lydia Millet

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Lydia Millet discovered that she loved the desert when she attended the University of Arizona’s MFA program. And though she didn’t stay in the program, she returned to live in the desert a decade later—a 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 “agenda of empathy” through the perspective of a grudgeless woman who has experienced a life full of misfortune and abuse.

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.

In an interview with Eclectica Magazine, Millet described the condition with which her characters grapple as follows: “It 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… 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… 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.”

We met with Lydia Millet on a shady porch in Spokane last spring, where we discussed imagination, the unsaid, and “the tragedy and glory of our individual selves.”

Samuel Ligon

Do you see yourself as a cultural critic?

Lydia Millet

I think any writer of substance is a cultural critic by nature. Almost any. I think books should have an agenda, but I don’t 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’s a sort of agenda of empathy. Very simple. Empathy is something I’m 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’s there, pulsing behind the bones.

Melina Rutter

Is the empathy agenda the same thing you refer to as the macrosocial? You’ve described that as writing that deals with the self in relation to the larger mysteries of the world.

Millet

Not exactly the same. One of the things I react against in contemporary literary fiction is the preoccupation with the personal. Obviously, it’s hard to define “personal” against “individual” or “the self.” 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’m not interested, finally, in just the personal. I’m 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’m 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.

Ligon

Should fiction be interested in those kinds of systems?

Millet

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

I’m not interested in polemics. Polemics are horrible to read. Even if a piece is satirical, if it’s sheer polemic, it doesn’t work as art. It doesn’t 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’s 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’m doing, and any kind of polemic just shuts me out, someone else’s polemic or my own. The polemic kills imagination, essentially. Because it’s foregone. It’s already decided. There’s nothing in there that we’re helping to decide; there’s nothing we’re making in a polemic.

Ligon

What prose interests you?

Millet

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’s a lot of metaphysical space that’s somehow created by the language. I don’t like to be overwhelmed with words. I don’t want someone to try to do some “Wham, bam, thank you, ma’am” with their verbiage. I want there to be room for the silence of the mind in the reading.

Ligon

How does that manifest itself?

Millet

I don’t know the answer to that. It’s a sort of magic. It’s 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’t want any flashy tricks. I want there to be contemplation in the world of the story. But as to how that’s achieved technically, I think there are myriad ways, untold numbers of ways. So it’s not that I’m looking for a certain technique or formula or anything in the work, or even a series of tropes.

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’s very bitter, he hates the world, but also hates himself, and he has these long internal monologues of—because he wrote in German—these run-on sentences. It’s 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’s not without humor. Part of the space I’m talking about prose generating has to do with humor. There should be a lightness. A book that does this well is
J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace. It’s 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.

Ligon

You mentioned time. Is fiction always about time?

Millet

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’s romantic, and I think all of us love the romantic, whether or not we admit it.

Ligon

But poetry isn’t always concerned with time as fiction seems to be.

Millet

There is a stop-time thing with poetry. But still, within a poem there has to be an expression of time. I think it’s a different relationship to time, but I’m not sure there’s not a concern with time in poetry. Because I think there always has to be time where careful language is concerned. There’s always time that we’re responding to and time we’re invoking in our sentences. I don’t think it’s a non-time with poems.

Rutter

Is music a non-time?

Millet

No. Music is all about time.

Rutter

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.

Millet

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’t 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.

Rutter

I was reading your essay about the Mekons.

Millet

I love those damn Mekons.

Rutter

In an interview you talked about rapture. Is the moment you describe in the essay—at the Mekons show—how you would define rapture?

Millet

You know when you’re at a music event, and you’re dancing around, or maybe you’re not, maybe you’re just still, and you’re loving with this deep love that you can feel for music? I think at those times I’m more aware of myself in space and the rest of the world than at many other times. It’s extraordinary. Music has that great power to make you want to be nowhere but there, at that moment. I don’t 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’s a good book. But it’s not the same. It’s in this sort of past time of the book. You’re in the world of the book, this already completed world, into which you’re injecting yourself, of course, in a changeable, mutable way. But it’s not the same as listening to a piece of music.

Rutter

And it’s not collective. It seems like that might have something to do with the feeling of rapture.

Millet

Definitely. It’s an idea of communion. It’s like a religious sort of ecstasy, I think. Folks who are involved in those sorts of ecstatic religions, they’re involved also in going to a Mekons concert, or whatever the brew of choice is.

Rutter

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.

Millet

I do think that’s 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’s 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’re 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.

Laura Ender

How does the “pain of being individual selves” play a role in your work? The narrator of My Happy Life, for example, seems to experience rapture when she’s in physical pain, usually at the hands of others.

Millet

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’t like, and all the people we didn’t like, criticize people for what they weren’t, or what they were. This was the way we defined our taste. As I grew older, I became more interested in—well, I’m 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’t 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.

Ender

Is violence important to that point?

Millet

Yeah, and that’s why the events in that book had to be extreme, any of the various torture episodes. I didn’t wish to linger on them, and I don’t think I did linger. It’s not a graphic mayhem that’s occurring, because I had no interest in that. It’s 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’t play such a character off anything that was less than extreme. Or I couldn’t.

Ender

You use violence in George Bush, Dark Prince of Love and in Omnivores. Do you think violence is important to fiction?

Millet

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’m 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’s a scene in George Bush, Dark Prince of Love where she’s sort of raped, you know, but you don’t actually see the details of that. You don’t see any physicality of it. We’re already deluged by so many images of violence that they’re sort of throwaways now, and they’re everywhere, in every procedural that comes on TV. They’re so everywhere that they’re formulaic, and so I think a reference is really all that’s required to invoke the feeling of that.

But I also don’t see much of a need for landscape descriptions in fiction. There’s a lot I don’t see a need for or am not interested in prosecuting in fiction. Most physical description I’m not interested in. I like it when other people do it well, as long as they don’t linger, but I’ve never been very… you’d 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’s not clear. What does their world look like? That’s all for the reader to make. I’m just not interested in lengthy textual exploration of physicality in general, I guess.

Rutter

Do you think that human/animal relationships in literature have been romanticized?

Millet

That’s a broad question. What are your thoughts on it?

Rutter

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.

Ender

Like The Old Man and the Sea.

Millet

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

Rutter

And there’s something different going on in your work.

Millet

You should read Joy Williams’s essay collection, Ill Nature. The hunting piece, “The Killing Game,” is a polemic, but she’s someone who can do that in an essay better than anyone I know. It has this moral weight to it that’s just brilliant.

I guess what I find more in contemporary American fiction is a rejection of the world of the non-domesticated animal. Pets don’t really count. There are plenty of dog-obsessed people. I’m a dog-obsessed person. But there’s 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’s difficult to cite my references here.

I also think that animals are extraordinarily difficult to write about. And can be boring to read about. Because they are other. They don’t have dialogue. There’s contemporary fiction that does deal with animal subjectivity, for example Barbara Gowdy’s book, The White Bone, which is written from the point of view of the elephants. Or there’s that quasi- commercial pop fiction, the guy with the tiger on the raft. Life of Pi. So there are attempts. Gowdy’s a Canadian writer who’s not probably known enough in the U.S. Her book is strange—very ambitious and sort of a misfire, cringe-inducing at times. Because it’s 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.

What’s more interesting is the attempt to explore how animals aren’t 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’t want to live in a world where that doesn’t exist. Yet we don’t talk about this very much. And it’s ceasing to exist more every day. There’s very little outcry about this. It’s problematic, for me. The intersection of environmental advocacy culture and literary culture has always been very—there almost is none, for one thing. And when it does happen, it’s odd, because I don’t typically love so-called nature writing. I don’t do a lot of reading in that area. I do like Barry Lopez, his nonfiction. But I’m bored by a lot of writing that is more pastoralist.

And the whole style and aesthetic of the environmental movement, in which I’m immersed to some degree—because I work in it and my husband is an environmentalist, and my graduate degree was in the field—but it’s not a culture where I feel at home at all, because I don’t like the aesthetics of it, and I don’t like the single-mindedness of it. There are two sides of it now in America. There’s the kind of granola-ey, more grassroots-y culture of it, and then there’s the national-environmental- group-super-corporate culture of it, which is full of lawyers. And I’ve 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’ve seen both of these arenas, and I don’t like either. The people in them don’t—and there are exceptions to this—but they don’t read literature at all. In many cases, the art that is gravitated toward by enviros is just not of the first order to me.

My husband is a rare exception to this, a voracious reader of poetry, with an almost-PhD in phenomenology, so he’s philosophical and he’s a theory head, more erudite than I am by far; and he also loves art. But he’s so rare. I mean, people in that world just aren’t 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—we’re 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’t 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 passé, 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’s greatly exacerbated here, compared to say Latin America, where there’s 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’s 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’s a distance between the literary subculture and the subculture of advocacy that wants to say, quite rationally and urgently—because given what the science says about climate change, we don’t have much time at all—“Look. We have serious problems, and we need to pay attention to them if we want our grandchildren to live in a bearable world.”

Ligon

I wonder if there’s a rejection of the human in the environmental community—a focus on the fact that humans destroy—and what’s valued is the pristine, where humans aren’t. There seems to be a rejection of the human, which, as a fiction writer, is one of your primary concerns.

Millet

There is a reaction to anthropocentrism in that community that rejects the human and the human-preoccupied. But I don’t think it’s calculated. I think it’s more a sort of thoughtless rejection of maybe an urban sort of elite, a certain kind of materialism. I do believe there’s a better way to do that, that it’s possible and in fact necessary to reject the centrally human without rejecting the human. I’m interested in our foibles and our beauties as a species. This doesn’t make me any less interested in the rest of the world; indeed it makes me more interested in the rest of the world.

We’ve got all these false dichotomies in the culture, like the dichotomy between creationism and evolutionary biology—Darwinism and creationism. This whole idea that you can’t have God if you have evolution is so obviously specious. It’s 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’d like to see a world where the literary folks were more interested in extra-literary concerns, and where activists—and not just environmental activists—were more interested in the arts. And also, if more scientists were interested in the arts… I read lots of stuff about popular science, but I don’t know a lot of scientists who read literature. There are some, don’t get me wrong, but it just seems like we so tragically undervalue art and literary art.

Ligon

Are we too specialized? Is that the problem?

Millet

I do think there’s extreme specialization, but there’s no intrinsic reason that the specialty has to close out the rest of the world.

Ligon

Was this less true fifty years ago, a hundred years ago?

Millet

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—like if you’re a shot-put thrower, you’re taught not to pay attention to the whole rest of the track and field world. We actually make a feast of this. It’s 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.

Ligon

Does your work ask us to reconsider the human relationship to animals or nature?

Millet

I hope it does. I almost always set my people in urban environments, in particular L.A. Generally, I’m not environment-specific, but L.A. looms large in my writing, because I think it’s 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’s no doubt that we’re 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’m 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’s difficult to write compellingly about trees. John Fowles did it, but I can’t.

Ligon

Did you have an experience that caused you to reevaluate your relationship to animals?

Millet

It wasn’t 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—my 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’t too happy about that, because he didn’t 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’d 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’m just dead, is all right with me. I’d always hated the idea of growing old in New York and hobbling along those cold sidewalks in my old age, even though I’d 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’s 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’t any sort of epiphany, but just going there and realizing I should be there.

Ligon

Recognizing something larger than yourself, or that you were part of?

Millet

No, I’ve always had awe. I had awe at great cities, too. I’ve always lived with awe, but it was actually that I wasn’t a part of it, that I didn’t 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’s in My Happy Life. So it wasn’t that I was a part of it; it was that I was not a part of it and didn’t have to be.

Ligon

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

Millet

I think that’s 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—Puritanism—prepared us for a more objectified relationship to the natural world. Whereas in European philosophy, you know, your Derrida, your sort of continental philosophy, there’s a greater appreciation for and understanding of the nonhuman.

Ender

Are you addressing that in “Sexing the Pheasant” when the character is considering what’s American and what’s English?

Millet

I’ve done that a lot lately, you’re 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—they’re not published yet, but they’re in existence—the protagonist of Ghost Lights is the father of Casey in How the Dead Dream, and he’s 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’s comic, but it’s like the Aryan ideal, and I’m thinking now that I do that a fair amount, just playing off the European.

Ender

Madonna is the main character in “Sexing the Pheasant,” 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?

Millet

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’t be constrained by fact.

Ligon

The way you used fact in that book reminded me of Don DeLillo with Libra, how you would take characters, and I’m 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?

Millet

I take what I like amongst the facts and play with it. I love despicable characters. I’m fascinated with them. When I read my book Everyone’s Pretty—when I’m forced to read a portion of it—I 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—but all those terrible parts of our selves exaggerated are just so much fun to play with. I’m 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’s 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’s liberating, but I think that’s why I’m a poor candidate for nonfiction. Because it’s very difficult for me to—and I’ve written a few essays, probably enough for a collection now, but only a couple of them are good, I think, and that’s because I’m 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’s hard to reduce yourself. I envy good nonfiction writers that capacity. I think it’s exceptional. Very few do it to my satisfaction, actually. It’s 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’s such a difficult negotiation, and one I don’t
care to undertake very often.

Rutter

Part of what’s 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?

Millet

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’t 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’t want to give it short shrift.

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’t 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’t 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’s a long book, and I’m not really a long book person. It’s 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.

Rutter

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.

Millet

I hope it does that; I’m 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’t 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’t know. I don’t 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’s why its fans are a discreet segment among my readers, who don’t tend to go as easily into the things that are less earnest.

Ender

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

Millet

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’m more likely to laugh at it, though the laugh is definitely not your light-hearted, dizzy- with-joy type laugh. It’s 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’t pushed or touted as “genius” 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’s fiction concerned chiefly with relationships and the home front… and then of course there are numerous serious writers with two X chromosomes who simply get overlooked or dismissed as minor.

Ligon

Alice Munro can write about “women’s” issues, and she doesn’t get pigeon-holed.

Millet

That’s 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’s book section. You can’t fault Munro for the work she does, in the sense that she’s technically brilliant and very intelligent and a great writer in some ways—she’s a serious writer, someone I respect—but I do think that domestic microscopy is problematic in literary culture. It’s just that she does it so well, it’s really hard to object to Alice Munro. But I wish there weren’t as many Alice Munro imitators. It’s sort of like Carver. I like Carver. But I wish there weren’t so many Carver-ites….

I once wrote a vicious review of The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, which would fall into a middle-aged, Hermès-scarf-wearing female-bonding category… I detest that kind of thing. I find it materialistic and status-quo promoting and “let’s all play bridge at the country club.” Or the uber-commercial chick-lit products like the Sex in the City franchise: Let’s 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’s nothing wrong with female bonding. I practice it in my own life, and I love women, but there’s not much to like in chick-lit culture. It’s a pathetic trivialization of femaleness.

Ender

There’s a lot of biology, zoology, and anthropology in your books.
Would you say writing is a kind of anthropology?

Millet

Anthropology has a way of objectifying the “other,” and fiction also objectifies. You can’t not. Humorous fiction especially is all about objectification; that’s how we’re funny. There’s a kind of distance required for humor, I think, and to achieve that distance, you need to objectify. It’s not always that you’re objectifying a character. You might be objectifying a trend, or an entire people. There are numerous forms of objectification. But it’s almost always in some form of it, I think, that the funniest funny occurs. I think that’s why I seem never able to write a book where there aren’t marginal characters who are severely objectified. In even my gentler books, there are throwaway objectified characters, lampooned caricatures. They’re types, archetypes or stereotypes. And anthropology has this, you know, “white man’s burden” kind of aspect to it, even when it tries to be postmodern, or post-structuralist, when it attempts to say that it’s not doing what it’s doing. It’s 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’re not just meaning-making machines, but specifically objectification-creating machines. We can’t 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.

Ligon

And when we objectify, it means we don’t see the person?

Millet

It means we can’t see without naming. There’s 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 “The Tree.” It’s a beautiful essay about the way we relate to nature, and don’t, 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 “thingification” of nature. He doesn’t call it that. I guess reification, though he doesn’t 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’s a way in which it’s really hard for us to not make totality into things that we then see ourselves seeing as things, if that makes any sense. Let’s say you’re on a hike—and this could be in an urban environment equally, where the trees are the buildings—but you’re walking and you see something, a tree or a house. You’re there with it, but almost as soon as you turn away, it’s already not itself. It’s already something you are bracketing in your own experience as something you have experienced. It’s hard to parse, but I’m interested in that. It’s a form, obviously, of objectifying the world around us, that we seem unable not to perform. We can’t escape it.
But there’s nobility in the struggle to try, I think. Because otherwise, once every being is classified as a thing, we’ve experienced a great loss in understanding, even our attempt to understand ourselves as a part of the world. It’s the difference between art and nature he talks about. Art is something that already is what it is. It’s complete. It’s done. You read a book. It’s what it already was. But nature’s constantly changing, and we find it difficult to interact with, because we can’t rely on it the way we can the things that we’ve created, even if they’re beautiful. We can’t rely on it to remain the same. We can’t “thingify” it entirely. And by nature, I mean the entire world that we live in, that we inhabit, and I’m 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’re dying as we speak. We’re changing, our cells are changing; we’re not art; we’re not made, but being. We’re nature, so we’re also things that can’t be relied upon to remain the same.

Ligon

Are we afraid of that? Is that part of our problem?

Millet

Of course, of course. Because we can never dwell successfully in the present, and that’s part of our tragedy. We’re 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’t get a grasp on this. What is this “us” sitting here? We don’t even know what we are because we’re changing as I say this. I already feel different from the way I felt five seconds ago.

I think there’s a great narrative beauty in anthropology, a great charisma in objectification in general. It’s beyond charming to make people into characters and events into stories. It’s compelling. It’s lovely. It’s our way of bringing color into our lives, to create these linear paths for ourselves. We don’t 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’re not creatures who can fathom the present. The making of things we don’t understand into stories, there always has to be reduction in that. It’s always an act of reduction. And that reduction is so fucking fun. It’s an adventure.