Lydia Millet's Mermaids in Paradise

In the Weeds

Mermaids are the fly in the ointment in Lydia Millet’s very funny satirical novel Mermaids in Paradise, “an absurdist entry into the mundane,” as she puts it. And, yet, her mermaids, who have bad teeth and the particular features of individuals, also draw us into the wonders of the ocean itself. Mermaid lore, Millet reminds us, recalls manatees and the order of the Sirenia, and it speaks to “the way we imprint our imaginations onto the wild.”

One of the most interesting writers working at the intersection of fiction and environmentalism, Lydia Millet has written over a dozen novels and story collections, many about ties between humans and animals and the crisis of extinction. Her story collection Fight No More received an Award of Merit from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2019 and her collection Love in Infant Monkeys was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2010.

In this episode, we discuss her 2015 novel Mermaids in Paradise and the ways in which she uses these hybrid, mythical creatures to address our environmental crises. We also talk at length about story telling, the kinds of stories we tell and how they both help and hinder our relationship with the natural world.