Douglas W. Milliken

Born of a withdrawn mother and an absentee father. Raised in a household of manipulation and hurt. Hearing occasional rumors-of a shovel fight in the front lawn, of a telephone-cord garrote, of violence exacted like the bite of many knives of different sizes-yet knowing nothing, remembering nearly nothing. This is one possible way of describing the early childhood of author Douglas W. Milliken, whose life in writing-from his earliest personal essays to his interwoven short stories to his concise, often brutal novels-has been defined as much by what is missing as what is written. As if the unknowability of his own upbringing set the mold for the perpetual uncertainty central to his fiction. Yet if you cannot know your origins, how can you possibly know yourself? Collaging memories and research, photographic evidence and interviews both transcribed and reconstructed-soldering together the fragments collected over a lifetime and set against the backdrop of Northern Maine's austere borderlands-Any Less You is the cumulative struggle of an artist to piece together a fractured whole, a family portrait and a broken mirror, even when what's revealed might best be left in the dark.

It seems like a sign of liberation—of adulthood’s indefinite postponement—when Partisans bomb the university and every student’s personal records, from transcripts to debts, are consumed in erasing fire. If nothing else, it lends Margaux the freedom to continue her preferred art form of list-making unfettered by the authority of academia--until she encounters the breakdowns and disappearances and deaths of the people she admires and cherishes most. A monochromatic painter. A BDSM documentary photographer. A transgendered Aphrodite. A mathematician with an invisible cat. Yet as the concrete details of her world dissolve into the abstraction of loss, they also become more rarefied, more essential. Something small enough to be contained. Small enough to be protected. Set in a semi-fictional, post-industrial American warzone, this novel explores multiple facets related to the recent nonfictional decades of constant civil unrest, with a particular focus on the complicated nature of holding a personal creative life amidst a time of constant violence and change. Despite its heavy themes, the narrative is threaded throughout with veins of absurdist humor that invite and welcome us into the familial warmth of the narrator’s memories of friendship.