“Dinosaurs” solidifies a new phase of Millet’s career. It’s written, like her last novel, the furious and gorgeous climate-crisis allegory “A Children’s Bible,” in sparer, less busy prose. The spaciousness of the style makes the sense of loss richer and the questions posed — what constitutes moral action, how best can we help one another — at once simpler and more profound. If you’ve been feeling crazy reading about ice caps and oceans and habitat loss, or unsure how to metabolize the ecological crisis that is both looming and long since arrived, that’s because, in Millet’s words, you are witnessing “the greatest tragedy ever to unspool in human history.” But rather than turning to the distraction of self to numb or evade, “Dinosaurs” puts its characters into a wider frame. Millet’s great insight — why her writing matters so much right now — is that looking outside the human is what gives human life its meaning. “It’s really important to live in a world where not everything is known,” she said. “It’s not enough to have sameness. It’s not enough to have just each other.”
The Fascinating World of Birds
Millet was raised in Toronto, the eldest of three children. Her parents were American. Her father, Nicholas, was an Egyptologist who went on digs to the Sahara; her mother, Saralaine, taught English in Turkey after graduating from Wellesley, then ran the home and volunteered as an editor for La Leche League. Millet and her siblings spent many summers in Georgia, where Saralaine’s family operated a peach farm. Family life was intellectual — both parents loved to read — and somewhat freewheeling. When Nicholas and Saralaine wanted more light in the kitchen, they knocked out part of the ceiling, which was directly under the second-floor playroom, and replaced it with a spider web of ropes for the children to climb across.
The Millets weren’t an especially outdoorsy bunch. They didn’t camp or hike, but according to family lore, the first complete sentence Millet ever spoke was a warning issued to a bird in danger from a predator: “[Expletive] off, little bird!” As a grade-schooler, she cherished her “dead-pet collection,” a plexiglass case of dearly departed cicadas, beetles and butterflies. (One is tempted to see this act of curation as a working-through of the toad’s death — a memorial of sorts.) At the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, she studied Romance languages and sang opera. (She’s a mezzo soprano.) She considered pursuing a career but hated performing and didn’t like the culture of opera. “It was a world of a lot of rules and mimicry,” she said.
After dropping out of an M.F.A. program at the University of Arizona (Joy Williams was her teacher), Millet moved to Los Angeles, where she got a job at Larry Flynt Publications, working as a very-low-paid copy editor for Hustler; SWAT: For the Prepared American; and Fighting Knives: America’s Most Incisive Cutlery Publication, among other titles. When she was ready for more permanent employment, she decided she would look for a job in conservation because “it was the thing I was most passionate about outside the act of writing.” All she had on her résumé was “porn and guns,” so she went to Duke University for a master’s degree in environmental management. “It was boring,” she says. “I made this error of doing economics and policy, instead of what I was really interested in, which was the animals. I could have done conservation biology, but I was too intimidated by the ‘ology.’”
Her first novel was published in 1996, when she was living in New York, working by day at the Natural Resources Defense Council and, at night, standing around with Offill at parties, smoking and projecting, as her friend Jonathan Lethem describes it, her “Algonquin Table-style brittle arch-an-eyebrow exterior.” In 1999, she returned to Arizona to do an internship at the Center for Biological Diversity. A few years later she married the center’s founder, Kierán Suckling; the two split up in 2010 but continue to work together. They have two children: Nola, who started college this fall, and Silas, who started high school.
When Millet first bought her house in Tucson, she was not intending to move there permanently; it just seemed like a good place to spend winters and write. But the spiky, strange landscape pulled on her. It had, as Gil puts it in “Dinosaurs,” “an alien beauty that seemed as different as you could get, within the lower forty-eight.” It felt like home and not home at the same time. Many people might admire beauty, but few of us uproot our lives for it. Suckling described Millet as keeping the staff of the center focused on that sense of awe and wonder. “The lawyers are talking about the legal requirements of protecting endangered species and the scientists are talking about how many kilograms they weigh,” he said. “She’s so often the one who’s like, ‘Yeah, but we’re here because we love them, and they matter because they’re beautiful.’”
Millet’s literary writing isn’t polemical or guilt-ridden in the way of so much contemporary ecofiction. This may be because she is, as Offill says, “the least neurotic person I’ve ever met,” or it may be that her job frees her up to approach fiction in a spirit of joy and invention. She doesn’t have to justify it. She likes to write twice a day: for an hour in the morning before her work at the center begins, and then again for an hour and a half in the evening. She often writes outdoors. (In Maine, she used to sit right on the ground hunched over her laptop, but lately she has been working in a lawn chair that her boyfriend, Aaron Young, bought for her.) She has, by many reports, an unusually unanguished relationship to putting words on the page, so long as she gets the time to do it. (“It’s good for everyone around her if she writes,” Young remarked dryly.) The words come fast, and she doesn’t plan things ahead of time. “I love not knowing and then doing,” she said. “It’s like constantly jumping off the diving board.”
