Thank you, Shannon.
It was great.
Hi.
Hi, everyone.
Lydia Millet is the award winning author
of eight novels, two books for young adults,
and one short story collection.
Millet's third novel, My Happy Life,
won the 2003 PEN USA Award.
Her fifth, Oh Pure and Radiant Heart
was shortlisted for the 2007 Arthur C. Clarke Award.
And her collection Love in Infant Monkeys
was a finalist for the 2009 Pulitzer Prize.
2011's Ghost Lights, the second in a three novel cycle,
made best of the year lists in the New York Times and the San
Francisco Chronicle.
Her most recent book, 2012's Magnificence,
was just named one of Publishers Weekly's best books of 2012.
Also, in 2012, Millet won a John Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship
for her work.
She lives in Tucson where she works
as a writer and editor for the Center
for Biological Diversity.
I like Lydia Millet's fiction because it reminds me
that I am just an animal.
And as one of her narrator says, it's hard to be an animal.
It's hard work.
It's dirt, and danger, and bile.
Millet reminds us that we are just
made up of flesh, stray hairs, and dry skin, especially skin,
which is the thing that holds us together
and the thing that keeps us apart.
Her work is concerned with the porous membranes between people
and other people, people and monkeys, hearts
and brains, husbands and wives.
In Magnificence, Susan remembers the smell of her husband's skin
after she's lost him.
She says, "It was skin that bound
you the most, the contact of two skins."
Millet's bond with her subjects, whether she's
writing about a woman who's forced to eat toothpaste
or Jimmy Carter's rabbit, allows her work
to skirt the boundary between the absurd
and the sincere, the timely and the timeless.
It is a cultural microcosm, a social and environmental
experiment.
In a story called "Sexing the Pheasant,"
Madonna, the pop star, not a religious figure,
sums up hunting this way.
"A gun is basically-- sorry.
A gun was basically a huge iron dildo designed
by someone French and classy."
Humor like this is always accompanied
by a real sense of compassion, both for and on the part
of the diverse narrators.
This story ends this way, "Pity warmed her, generous
and blossoming.
It was hard to be so small."
In Lydia Millet's worlds, all kinds of animals
act generously.
After a young lioness sits companionably all day with
and then kills a giraffe foal, Millet writes,
"It was almost as though the possibilities of the world had
streamed through Girl and the Giraffe, and that he,
the human narrator-- a hunched over primate in the bushes--
had been the dumb one.
Things like giraffe blood and a houseful of taxidermied animals
can simultaneously be affirming and unsettling.
Husbands can be deer.
Pigeons can be true loves.
Humans are animals."
Lydia Millet's animals are not abstractions.
They are not stand-ins for other things.
They are just acting like animals.
They circle one another.
They butt up against one another.
Sometimes, they go in for the kill.
Other times, they fly away up and out in order
to see the ground differently.
Ladies and gentlemen, Lydia Millet.
[APPLAUSE]