My Happy Life

Fiction writer Lydia Millet will read from her work at 8 p.m. Thursday, Sept. 17, for Washington University’s Writing Program in Arts & Sciences.

The talk — part of The Writing Program’s fall Reading Series — is free and open to the public and takes place in Hurst Lounge, Room 201, Duncker Hall, on the university’s Danforth Campus. A reception and book signing will immediately follow.

Lydia Millet

Duncker Hall is located at the northwest corner of Brookings Quadrangle, near the intersection of Brookings and Hoyt drives. For more information, call (314) 935-7130 or email David Schuman at dschuman@wustl.edu.

Millet is the author of six novels, beginning with the subversive coming-of-age tale Omnivores (1996), which centers on a young woman whose megalomaniac father turns their home into an armed camp after seceding from the United States. Her second novel, the political satire George Bush, Dark Prince of Love (2000), tells the story of a trailer park denizen who becomes obsessed with the 41st president.

Millet’s third novel, My Happy Life (2002) — which won the 2003 PEN-USA Award for Fiction — follows a nameless woman who, abandoned in a derelict hospital for the mentally ill, spends her days writing memories on the walls.

“Occasionally a book comes along that is truly written (as writers are instructed books should be) as if it were the writer’s last,” noted Publisher’s Weekly. “Millet’s sad and infinitely touching third novel (after the absurdist George Bush, Dark Prince of Love) is such an extraordinary work.”

Other novels include the tragicomic Everyone’s Pretty (2005), about an alcoholic pornographer seeking immortality; Oh Pure and Radiant Heart (2005), which images Robert Oppenheimer, Enrico Fermi and Leo Szilard transported to contemporary America to survey the legacy of the Manhattan Project; and How the Dead Dream (2008), a black comedy about an ambitious L.A. real estate developer.

Her latest book is the forthcoming story collection Love in Infant Monkeys.