Lydia Millet

Lydia Millet
Millet at the 2016 Texas Book Festival
Born	(1968-12-05) December 5, 1968 (age 48) Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.
Occupation	Writer
Alma mater	University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Duke University

Lydia Millet (born December 5, 1968) is an American novelist. Her third novel, My Happy Life, won the 2003 PEN Center USA Award for Fiction, and she has been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Salon wrote of Millet's work, "The writing is always flawlessly beautiful, reaching for an experience that precedes language itself."

Millet was born in Boston, Massachusetts and raised in Toronto, Canada, where she attended the University of Toronto Schools. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in interdisciplinary studies, with highest honors in creative writing, from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a master's degree from Duke University. Formerly married to Kieran Suckling, Millet lives in Tucson, Arizona with her two children. She holds a master's in environmental policy from Duke University's Nicholas School of the Environment and worked for Natural Resources Defense Council for two years before joining the Center for Biological Diversity in 1999 as a staff writer.

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.