Lydia Millet

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Lydia Millet (born 5 December 1968) is an American novelist. Her third novel, My Happy Life, won the 2003 PEN-USA Award for Fiction.

Millet is best known for her dark sense of humor, stylistic versatility, and political bent. Her first book, Omnivores (1996), is a subversion of the coming-of-age novel, in which a young girl in Southern California is tormented by her megalomaniac father and invalid mother and finally sold in marriage to a real estate agent. Her second, George Bush, Dark Prince of Love (2000), is a political comedy about a trailer-park woman obsessed with the 41st American President; her third, My Happy Life (2002), is a poetic, language-oriented work about a lonely misfit trapped in an abandoned hospital, who writes the poignant story of her life on the walls.

Millet's fourth novel, Everyone's Pretty (2005), is a picaresque tragicomedy about an alcoholic pornographer with messianic delusions, based partly on Millet's stint as a copy editor at Larry Flynt Publications. Her fifth novel, Oh Pure and Radiant Heart (2005), brings three of the physicists responsible for creating the atomic bomb to life in modern-day New Mexico, where they acquire a cult following and embark on a crusade for redemption.

Millet was born in Boston, Massachusetts and raised in Toronto, Canada. She holds a BA from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a master's degree from Duke University.