Everyone's Pretty

Lydia Millet is publishing this novel February 9, 2005 from Soft Skull Press:

Everyone's Pretty is a savagely funny novel about the search for God, sex, and significance. When he's not drinking himself into a stupor, stealing credit cards to pay for sex, or plotting his fame with a horny midget, Los Angeles pornographer Dean Decetes entertains messianic delusions and freeloads wantonly from his spinster sister. Distancing herself from her deadbeat sibling, Bucella obsesses over the quasi-religious love notes she writes to her boss and reassures a coterie of codependent coworkers, including a hygiene-phobic Christian Scientist and a depressive blonde bombshell named Alice. Next door, a teenage math genius has endured humiliation at the hands of her mother and is running away from home. She hightails it to a local dive and hooks up with Dean's editor from the porno magazine. Told from five hilariously bizarre points of view, this novel serves up a fabulously florid cast of characters, many inspired by author Lydia Millet's two-year stint working at Larry Flynt Publications.

A friend writes Luke: "Just read the excerpt from her new book about the pornographer with messianic delusions. The character Decetes sounds like you. His father is a missionary. He talks about religion constantly. He provokes people constantly. He admits it. He has a weak constitution. He has one beer and he's pulled over nad he's technically drunk. The cop puts him in the back of the car and Decetes starts babbling about religion and insulting the cop at the same time. So the cop drops him off in the middle of South Central, which is what Mike Albo [former editor of Hustler Erotic Video Guide] did to you [8/9/99]."

Lydia Millet Interview

Lydia has two novels coming out next year, including one about the porn industry -- Everyone's Pretty.

* How would you describe your tenure at LFP?

I was the Hustler copy editor mostly, though I also worked on other porn magazines -- Busty Beauties, Barely Legal. Busty Beauties was my favorite; it had a heartfelt evangelical feel. It was trying to bring the cult of the giant breast to the masses.

You know, we were overeducated, underpaid, and underworked. I tried to act jaded and cynical, and when that got old I went to sleep under my desk. This was before the days of the Internet in the workplace so there were limited options for time-wasting. Now and then some male staffer would make a lame attempt at some form of sexual harassment, and that would spice things up for a few seconds.

* What caused you to combine the themes of religion and porn in your novel?

Everyone's Pretty is about obsessive searches for meaning. Religion is an obvious place to look; porn isn't as obvious, but I encountered a number of people in the industry I thought were true believers. Funny thing about people: you don't have to be the Pope to take your work seriously.

* What inspired you to write this novel?

I wanted to make myself laugh.