Madeline Miller

speaker

219 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 12 Jul

Madeline Miller’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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The Daily · What’s Epic About the ‘Odyssey’? Everything. · 12 Jul 2026 podcast

is how true and sort of fully fleshed the vision that the writer has is.

I love writing close to the text personally, but I also like overturning it and arguing with it.

And so I love sort of pushing back on, okay, that was Odysseus's version of the story that he's been able to dine out on for, you know, 3,000 years.

Let's have someone else's perspective on these scenes.

So there were moments where I really enjoyed contradicting, but there were also so many moments where I loved going right into the text and picking something up and, you know, transforming it or allowing it to really inform Circe.

One of the most important descriptions of her that really informed the whole novel was the description of her as speaking like a human.

And...

I was like, what does it mean to be a god who speaks like a human?

And so, you know, then as a novelist, my imagination and my invention could work upon that incredibly rich term that Homer gave me.

Well, for me, I started thinking about first what it meant to speak like a god, which is that in the ancient stories, when gods speak to humans, oftentimes humans will fall to their knees and their blood runs cold and their hair stands on end.

There's like this very physical response to being in the presence of a god who is, you know, commanding your attention and showing you their power.

And so if you are speaking like a mortal, it means you sound weak, right?

compared to them.

And so that immediately, in my imagination, put Circe kind of at the bottom of the hierarchy.

And it made her, in a sense, an outcast to, you know, these incredibly powerful gods that she's surrounded by.

In a way, it's like, you know, wanting there to be only one production of King Lear ever, and that's it.

No other productions, no other ideas.

You know, of course you want as many productions and fabulous productions out there as possible.

So I always find it very confusing when people get so agitated.

And I think maybe what they're really saying is, I had an important experience emotionally with one version of this text, and that's great.

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