They were all, “No, man, God made the world in seven days and also made us, too. LM: Yes, I’ve heard that rumor too…then someone reassured me. In your opinion, what animal are humans most like?

Except for the one about Noam Chomsky in the dump - my husband actually ran into him there, and he was actually trying to get rid of a gerbil cage.įP: Many evolution theorists believe humans descended from apes. These were just the ones that filtered down to me and caught my attention.

I’m always listening for animal stories, so in this case I was listening, and browsing, for celebrity-and-animal stories or relationships. I wanted to do some more fictional riffs on true pairings. I wrote about him, and then decided I wanted to write about other known figures and their encounters with animals. Lydia Millet: It started with an autobiography I read by Joy Adamson’s husband George - you know, of Born Free, the late-’60s lion movie. You meet David Hasselhoff’s dog, the elephant that Thomas Edison electrocuted, and a ferocious Komodo dragon that an Indonesian billionaire bought for Sharon Stone.Īfter the jump, Millet discusses why she saw Noam Chomsky at the dump, which animal humans resemble the most, and what she’d like to do to a baby spider.įlavorpill: How did you choose the humans to write about in this collection of short stories? In Love in Infant Monkeys, the animal and human (er, superhuman, in the case of Madonna in the opening story, “Sexing the Pheasant”) hierarchy is leveled, with each influencing the other’s life, decisions, and emotions. To say that Lydia Millet’s first book of short stories (after six novels) is merely a tome about human and animal relationships would be a blatant understatement - too Cesar’s Way.

Love in infant monkeys by lydia millet