>>REVIEW
MY HAPPY LIFE
Lydia Millet
Soft Skull Press, 160 pp.
My Happy Life reads like a fairy tale. Strange, considering the subject matter of this book – a young woman’s heartbreaking life mired in abuse, exploitation and neglect. Yet, author Lydia Millet assigns her childlike narrator a voice that makes you feel as though you are floating from page to page, poetic and ethereal, amidst a sea of hardship and madness.
Abandoned on the street as a baby, the anonymous main character’s story begins decades later in a mental institution slated for demolition. Deserted and locked in a windowless, solitary room, she survives on toothpaste, water and the occasional snack of scraped wall plaster (although she wouldn’t recommend it to others). Her treasured possessions consist of a threadbare towel, a tooth, a pressed leaf "from a tree named gingko," and a drinking glass.
Relaying her story through an assortment of colourful yet cleverly vague flashbacks, we discover she is the product of the misshapen foster care system. A system that lost her, never properly educated her, allowed her to be beaten by her peers and abused by her caretakers, finally leading her to repeated sexual abuse at the hands of a psychotic millionaire.
You’ll feel angry as the nameless protagonist recounts the details of her life. Yet oddly, she is grateful for it. She sees splendour in squalor, has empathy for her abusers and possesses a gentle naiveté that arms her with wonder and warmth, rather than rage and contempt.
Millet is simply stellar in this, her fifth novel – inventive and captivating, her choice of narrative style feels purposely primitive. Objects and locations often go unnamed – instead, Millet chooses to employ the slightly lucid, cryptic descriptions. The character isn’t even aware of how old she is: "I would seem to be eighty. But I am not eighty. I do not think I am forty, even."
My Happy Life elegantly speaks to the struggle of survival and to the heartache of isolation and neglect. Its solitary character strives to simply exist. She doesn’t downplay her hardships because she truly doesn’t understand that she is troubled. What some would view as dreadful, she sees as conventional. Her style of existence is reminiscent of a rat’s life or a cockroach. She scrapes by with only a slight sense of purpose and a tremendous amount of will, giving us a sense of what it would feel like to truly be invisible.
Born in Boston and raised in Toronto, Millet seems to specialize in the inner workings of quirky characters – it is clear she has a unique take on the human psyche. This must stem from the intriguing life she has led thus far, from copy editing for Hustler and S.W.A.T. (a gun magazine) to obtaining her master’s degree in environmental policy at Duke University.
My Happy Life is softer than her previous book, Oh Pure and Radiant Heart. It leaves her audience with a sense of honest hope in its conclusion, and that the meek, indeed, should inherit the earth. |
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