Dean Decetes, a pornographer with messianic delusions, spins out of control in Los Angeles, where he spends his time drinking himself into a stupor, getting beaten up by strangers he's reckessly insulted, stealing credit cards to pay for sex, being arrested, begging favors, and mounting a PR campaign to make himself famous, with the help of a "loyal footsolider" — a porn-loving midget he met in jail. Meanwhile his pious, romantic spinster sister, who reluctantly keeps house for him, busies herself writing quasi-religious love notes to the boss she worships at the statistics company where she works, and her co-workers — an obsessive-compulsive Christian Scientist in a twisted marriage and a promiscuous, depressed blond bomb-shell — become enmeshed in her life as she dreams of ridding herself of her freeloading brother and being carried away on a white horse by her employer. Next door, a teenage math genius runs away from home after her mother humiliates her in school and hooks up at a bar with Decetes's suicidal editor.

The story is told from five points of view — those of Decetes, his sister, the lonely blonde, the Christian scientist & the high school math genius — over three days which the five lives collide as they all mount blundering searches for love and meaning.

"With a sharp eye for small details, a keen sense of the absurd and strong empathy for its creations, Everyone's Pretty is both prism and truth." Washington Post

"Lydia Millet's meandering tale of an alcoholic pornographer with a messianic complex is funny, dark and surprisingly tender in unexpected places....Pure poetry." Montreal Mirror

"...Everyone's Pretty is so transgressive, so wildly and beautifully dark, that it's like a breath of fresh air in a stale literary environment overrun with too-clever postmodernists." Tuscon Weekly

"The book impressively teeters on the edge of total inanity, each scene becoming increasingly uncomfortable, then unraveling out of control." Village Voice

Written by the acclaimed author of My Happy Life and George Bush, Dark Prince of Love, 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.

Lydia Millet lived in Los Angeles from 1991 to 1994, where she worked as a copy editor at Larry Flynt Publications (of Hustler fame) for two years. Subsequently she recieved a Master's in Environmental Policay at Duke University and now lives and writes full-time on an isolated spread in the desert near Tuscon, AZ.