By Annie Guthrie

Lydia Millet is the author of six novels, most recently How the Dead Dream (2008), and a short story collection, Love in Infant Monkeys (2009). Her fifth novel, Oh Pure and Radiant Heart, was shortlisted for Britain’s Arthur C. Clarke Prize; her fourth, My Happy Life, won the 2003 PEN-USA Award for Fiction. Millet is also an essayist and critic and lives in the desert outside Tucson with her husband and children. She writes and edits for a nonprofit endangered species group called the Center for Biological Diversity.

Annie Guthrie is a writer, jeweler, and artist. Her book THE GOOD DARK was published by Tupelo Press in 2015.

Annie Guthrie: Because animals are, in a way, often central characters in your stories, one could make assumptions that your work in the field of species conservation has influenced your writing. What does the desert do, if anything, to you or to your prose?

Lydia Millet: My love of animals came before my love of language, like everyone’s. We’re raised among the beasts; their images are everywhere. So both writing and conservation come from the same place—not sequential but parallel—loving the world. Having a desperate sadness for it. 

Annie: In some of your work the plot seems to seismically shift about halfway through, the sediments of character become displaced, or the tone fatally erupts. In your opinion, is plot subservient to character in contemporary literature ? (Do you think the traditional notion of progression is still integral to the novel or short story, and if not, has it been replaced and by what?)

Lydia: Oh, we need narrative. We can’t help it; it’s like a drug. But sure, plot is dependent on character and tone because it’s plastic, it’s mutable. Event can be anything. You can pick it out of the sky. You want to write about the Tall Grays living on Mars? Good, good. Kitty cats? Good. Vicious homicide or the sudden appearance of God? Go right ahead. But voice, tone, and the characters they create are only partly consciously chosen by the writer. In the way that we don’t choose the language we’re born into, we don’t exactly choose the idiom in which we write. Or better said, we choose from among limited options, and those options are defined by our individual mind’s structure and its relationship to felt reality.

Annie: Would you call your novels “social novels?” Aside from your deep interest in activism, do you also feel a responsibility to include social concerns in your fiction? If so, does that responsibility ever function to shackle you rather than free you?

Lydia: I’m interested in society and morality, but writing about them is less a duty than an instinct. I write what I want to read, at a certain given moment, and I find there’s far less passionate commentary on contemporary society than there should be in contemporary fiction. All novels are social; all people are social. So it’s a question of how they're social. Do they evade meaning, all po-mo and sly? Do they chatter glibly around the edges of real life? A lot of U.S. novels are trivially social, like someone sidling up to you at a party and talking about how they like your shoes. That’s kind of boring. It’s a lot less boring if that person gets really drunk, stands up on a table and strips his clothes off, declaiming, weeping and tearing his hair. But even that gets old after a while. Then you have to move in the direction of actual thought—thought that contains music, contains ecstasy, contains the universe. A path that goes somewhere worth going.