{"id":58458,"date":"2024-12-06T10:00:13","date_gmt":"2024-12-06T16:00:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.publicbooks.org\/?p=58458"},"modified":"2026-01-16T20:10:30","modified_gmt":"2026-01-17T02:10:30","slug":"and-soon-lydia-millet-and-emily-hyde","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.publicbooks.org\/and-soon-lydia-millet-and-emily-hyde\/","title":{"rendered":"And Soon: Lydia Millet and Emily Hyde"},"content":{"rendered":"

Our partner podcast <\/em>Novel Dialogue<\/a> invites a novelist and a literary critic to talk about novels from every angle: how we read them, write them, publish them, and remember them. This season\u2019s signature question is: I<\/em>f you could live anywhere in the world, where would it be, and why?<\/i><\/p>\n

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During a desert thunderstorm outside Tucson, Lydia Millet joined the Novel Dialogue<\/em>\u00a0conversation with hosts John Plotz and Emily Hyde, with Emily playing the role of critic. Lydia\u2014author more than a dozen novels and story collections and recently the nonfictional\u00a0We Loved it All<\/em>\u2014also works at the Center for Biological Diversity. Wild creatures gambol, flap, swim, and crawl their way through her writing and her conversation: We begin in the Garden of Eden but quickly learn that for Lydia human exceptionalism is the original sin, one that continues to bedevil us in \u201cthe nuclear era\u201d (or did she say error<\/em>?). As thunder cracks overhead, she muses on salvation in an exhausted world and the busy lives of Gambel\u2019s Quail. In her recent novels, Lydia has worked to balance the intensely personal with our more communal aspirations: Without gossip, she wonders, how do you avoid polemic and the maudlin? Emily praises Lydia\u2019s humor and asks us to consider how a joke\u2014the earnest set-up followed by a sudden deflation\u2014can reconcile our fears and hopes for the future, the daily here-and-now with the magnificent unknowability of the world. Is it humor, comedy, satire, wit? Lydia is \u201cjust trying make myself laugh.\u201d She worries, in her life as well as in her writing, about the BS impulse to pretend everything\u2019s ok inside \u201cthis emergency, this critical life support dilemma.\u201d We also learn that Lydia will never write historical fiction, despite having a tantalizing family connection to Mark Twain.<\/p>\n

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