Lydia Millet’s Writerly Evolution Is All About Being More Shameless

If you haven’t already read at least one of Lydia Millet’s books, the prospect might be daunting. By my count, there are 22 to choose from. Where to start? Do you go back to the madcap beginnings of her career and read the satirical George Bush, Dark Prince of Love? Or do you look to Dinosaurs, a quiet meditation on ecology, community, and loneliness—a book that, for all the disaster it engages with, actually made me happier at the end than I was at the beginning?

In true EL fashion, I have to say both, and. Millet has an astounding ability to write good book after good book after good book. Her concerns with human destruction, fallibility, consciousness, and the limits or limitlessness of our communication become ever more refined, ever more trenchant, ever more beautiful. One woman’s ceaseless interior dialogue, locked alone in a room in My Happy Life...