Species Loneliness and Making Kin in Lydia Millet’s Extinction Trilogy

The specters of grief, mourning, and loneliness haunt Lydia Millet’s extinction trilogy, which includes How the Dead Dream (2008), Ghost Lights (2011), and Magnificence (2012).1 In each novel, Millet offers a sustained exploration of loneliness as one of the dominant emotional and psychological conditions of the Anthropocene. Her novels seem to be in keeping with E. O. Wilson’s suggestion that rather than calling our current time period the Anthropocene, we should call it the Eromocene, or “The Age of Loneliness” (19). Wilson’s notion is supported by a recent report that found approximately half of the US adult population is considered lonely, with increasing rates of loneliness ascribed to multiple causes, such as post-pandemic isolation, social media bubbles, and technological changes in how we interact (“Our Epidemic” 9, 19–21). However, within the context of Wilson’s argument, we live in a world that is literally more crowded yet lonelier than it has ever been and, thus, the scale of loneliness should be understood on a planetary level and directly linked to biodiversity and species loss due to human activities that are accelerating the rate of mass extinctions beyond natural evolutionary patterns. Linking the trilogy’s novels is the narrative trajectory of three interrelated characters who, in their work of mourning their human losses, turn to the nonhuman world for comfort, only to discover more loss, grief, and loneliness. In other words, the novels intertwine around questions of affect that begin with a human focus on grief and mourning but quickly extend to the more existential loneliness of confronting the escalating rate of endangered and extinct animals.