WEBVTT

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Thank you, Shannon.

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It was great.

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Hi.

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Hi, everyone.

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Lydia Millet is the
award winning author

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of eight novels, two
books for young adults,

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and one short story collection.

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Millet's third
novel, My Happy Life,

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won the 2003 PEN USA Award.

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Her fifth, Oh Pure
and Radiant Heart

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was shortlisted for the
2007 Arthur C. Clarke Award.

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And her collection
Love in Infant Monkeys

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was a finalist for the
2009 Pulitzer Prize.

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2011's Ghost Lights, the
second in a three novel cycle,

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made best of the year lists in
the New York Times and the San

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Francisco Chronicle.

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Her most recent book,
2012's Magnificence,

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was just named one of Publishers
Weekly's best books of 2012.

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Also, in 2012, Millet won a John
Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship

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for her work.

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She lives in Tucson
where she works

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as a writer and
editor for the Center

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for Biological Diversity.

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I like Lydia Millet's
fiction because it reminds me

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that I am just an animal.

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And as one of her narrator
says, it's hard to be an animal.

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It's hard work.

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It's dirt, and danger, and bile.

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Millet reminds us
that we are just

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made up of flesh, stray hairs,
and dry skin, especially skin,

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which is the thing
that holds us together

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and the thing that
keeps us apart.

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Her work is concerned with the
porous membranes between people

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and other people, people
and monkeys, hearts

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and brains, husbands and wives.

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In Magnificence, Susan remembers
the smell of her husband's skin

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after she's lost him.

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She says, "It was
skin that bound

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you the most, the
contact of two skins."

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Millet's bond with her
subjects, whether she's

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writing about a woman who's
forced to eat toothpaste

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or Jimmy Carter's
rabbit, allows her work

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to skirt the boundary
between the absurd

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and the sincere, the
timely and the timeless.

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It is a cultural microcosm,
a social and environmental

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experiment.

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In a story called
"Sexing the Pheasant,"

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Madonna, the pop star,
not a religious figure,

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sums up hunting this way.

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"A gun is basically-- sorry.

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A gun was basically a
huge iron dildo designed

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by someone French and classy."

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Humor like this is
always accompanied

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by a real sense of compassion,
both for and on the part

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of the diverse narrators.

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This story ends this way,
"Pity warmed her, generous

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and blossoming.

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It was hard to be so small."

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In Lydia Millet's worlds,
all kinds of animals

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act generously.

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After a young lioness sits
companionably all day with

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and then kills a giraffe
foal, Millet writes,

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"It was almost as though the
possibilities of the world had

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streamed through Girl and
the Giraffe, and that he,

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the human narrator-- a hunched
over primate in the bushes--

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had been the dumb one.

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Things like giraffe blood and a
houseful of taxidermied animals

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can simultaneously be
affirming and unsettling.

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Husbands can be deer.

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Pigeons can be true loves.

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Humans are animals."

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Lydia Millet's animals
are not abstractions.

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They are not stand-ins
for other things.

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They are just
acting like animals.

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They circle one another.

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They butt up
against one another.

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Sometimes, they go
in for the kill.

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Other times, they fly
away up and out in order

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to see the ground differently.

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Ladies and gentlemen,
Lydia Millet.

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[APPLAUSE]

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