Richer than Musk: Joyce Carol Oates on her 88 years of watching, writing, feeling and loving
The writer made headlines when she accused the world’s wealthiest man of lacking joy, culture, a sense of beauty … Meanwhile, her own life has
The writer made headlines when she accused the world’s wealthiest man of lacking joy, culture, a sense of beauty … Meanwhile, her own life has been an attempt to understand and explain the world. She talks us through her latest book ‘Many people, including myself, spend a lot of time thinking about the past. And if you’re living in the same house you were living in with a spouse, the spouse is all around.
Nonetheless, it’s not healthy to live in the past; I think we all know that.” Joyce Carol Oates is speaking to me from a book-lined room – one that makes you finally understand what “den” means – at her home in Princeton, New Jersey. She teaches at Princeton University as well as teaching advanced creative writing at Rutgers, also in New Jersey. The author turned 88 this month, but she looks little changed from the 1960s, when she came to prominence: weightless like a sprite, focused and serious like a librarian.
She has been a prolific writer, with more than 60 novels and many volumes of short stories to her name, earning her five Pulitzer prize nominations and a Book award, among others, since the start of her career. Blonde, a haunting, fictionalised account of the life of Marilyn Monroe, Them, part of the Wonderland quartet, and Zombie, loosely based on the serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer, are often name-checked as career highs, but her consistency is striking.
When she wanted to write mysteries, she did so under the pseudonyms Rosamond Smith and Lauren Kelly. Her works of nonfiction, mainly criticism and memoir, would constitute a career on their own. Continue reading...
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