on secrets & silences: an interview with joyce carol oates
Back in 2011, I glimpsed Joyce Carol Oates going through security in the Philadelphia airport as I flew back to Buffalo after visiting family for Thanksgiving. I’d been busy fussing with my seven-month-old daughter, trying to negotiate the infant seat and all of the baby paraphernalia as I placed my personal items in the bins and sent them through the conveyor belt, when I spotted Oates directly in front of us. As if spotting a fawn or a rare bird in the wild, I froze immediately, not daring to move for fear of frightening her away. So regal, so dignified.
Without moving my eyes away, I elbowed my husband, nodding ever so slightly in her direction. “What are you pointing at?” he asked far too loudly, looking around wildly.
Putting my fingers to my lips to shush him, I whispered, “That’s Joyce Carol Oates,” my eyes still trained on her, hoping she wouldn’t overhear me. She didn’t. Or maybe she just pretended not to notice.
“Go talk to her,” my husband encouraged, but I shook my head. “I don’t want to be one of those fans,” I whispered, shuddering at the thought of intruding on her personal space.
Imagine my surprise as I boarded the plane when I spotted Oates sitting in a front row. I suddenly remembered hearing that she was giving a reading at Canisius College. From my window seat a few rows back, I could just make out the top of her head bent over her reading material. I tried not to stare, marveling that other passengers seemed unaware of the celebrity in our midst.
No doubt the vast majority of writers and poets can walk through the world without being recognized. But Joyce Carol Oates is no ordinary literary figure. One of the most celebrated writers of our time, Oates has been interviewed by Oprah, and earned two National Book Awards, no fewer than five Pulitzer Prize nominations, two O. Henry Awards, numerous Lifetime Achievement Awards, and, perhaps most notably, the National Humanities Medal awarded by President Barack Obama.
Her prominence in the literary world is all the more impressive given her humble beginnings. Born on June 16, 1938, Oates grew up on her family’s farm in Lockport, New York, attending the same one-room schoolhouse that her mother attended, District School #7 on Tonawanda Creek Road in Niagara County. A precocious student, she read voraciously and demonstrated exceptional academic aptitude–say, memorizing over 100 verses from the Gospel of St. John to win a competition even though her family was not religious.
Oates writes fondly of her early years in her memoir, The Lost Landscape: A Writer’s Coming of Age, reminiscing about places that many Western New York readers will recognize–the Lockport Public Library, Kleinhans, Olcott Beach, walking along Tonawanda Creek while her imagination wandered. But her childhood was far from idyllic. Her maternal grandfather was murdered in a Black Rock tavern leading to her mother being given away as a small child to be raised by relatives who owned the farm where Oates later grew up. On her father’s side, her grandfather abandoned his family. Her memoir opens in May 1941, just months before Pearl Harbor, the economic pressures of the Depression still casting a shadow on her family.
Oates says, “Of all places, the places of our childhood are suffused with a kind of ‘animism’–beyond or prior to language, mysterious and ineffable. The atmosphere of a place, the distinctive tone/music/‘feel’ of a landscape–these are essential to me; I can’t write without a strongly visual, vivid sense of place.
“Of course, my particular background was rural western New York State, but I have always been haunted by the small city of Lockport, seven miles north of my family’s farmhouse in Millersport. Thousands of times perhaps I have ‘walked’ in these places, utterly captivated. These are waking dreams, in a way–always fraught with strong feeling, yet usually empty of any human beings.”
The certain sadness mixed with stoicism that permeates her writing feels, somehow, quintessentially Western New York to me.
Despite the family hardships, Oates went on to achieve more than anyone might have imagined. The first person in her family to go beyond eighth grade, she attended Williamsville South High School, wrote for the student newspaper, and earned a scholarship to Syracuse University where she graduated valedictorian of her class.
At 19, she won a national short story contest sponsored by Mademoiselle magazine and continued on to graduate school, earning her master’s degree at the University of Wisconsin–Madison in a single year. There, she met Raymond Smith and married him after a three-month courtship.
This chapter of her life reads like a series of “firsts.” Though she had no experience, she landed her first teaching job at the University of Detroit and fell in love with being in the classroom. Within a few years, she published her first novel, With Shuddering Fall, and never looked back, earning her first National Book Award for them when she was just 31.
After moving to Canada to teach at the University of Windsor in Ontario in the midst of Vietnam protests, Oates started a small press literary magazine, The Ontario Review, with her husband. She returned to the States in 1978 to accept a job at Princeton University where she taught for over 30 years. She did all of this while publishing at the astonishing rate of two to three books per year. Her productivity outpaces the speed of publishing to such a degree that Oates publishes with numerous presses at once and occasionally under the nom de plumes Rosamond Smith and Lauren Kelly.
Given her prolific pace, it’s almost impossible to record how many books Oates has published; as soon as one commits the numbers to paper, the figures seem immediately to change. At last count, Oates has written 56 novels, over 30 short story collections, eight volumes of poetry, several young adult and children’s books, plays, essays, literary criticism on Shakespeare, Emily Dickinson, Herman Melville, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, William Butler Yeats, and James Joyce, and some highly regarded profiles of Mike Tyson and the art of boxing (she’s quite the fan of that sport, as it turns out). On top of all that, she has produced two to three book reviews per year, every year for the last three decades, for The New York Review of Books.
Oates herself would probably offer a more modest perspective on such a cataloging of her honors and awards. When asked about her achievements, she says, “Awards are particularly valuable to a young writer, for obvious reasons. It is so very easy to become discouraged–depressed–when rejected or ignored. At the start of our careers we are thrilled to be singled out for attention, partly because our parents and grandparents are thrilled; our editors & publishers are thrilled. Awards begin to lose their high-voltage charge when people close to us pass away, because no one will care so much about your ‘career’ (or you) as your parents. (In my case, both my parents and also my wonderful grandmother, my father’s mother.) Spouses are likely to be proud of us as well, and close friends. Unfortunately with age we lose these people who have defined us, and no one can quite take their places.”
She continues, “I don’t think of ‘pride’ as a positive value & probably wince when people ask me, ‘What are you most proud of?’ (though I think that I am genuinely proud of the success of a number of my writing students over the years); & I don’t have a general wish about people reading, or not reading, my writing. I don’t think much of these things at all but tend to be focused on specific problems, presented by specific works, each day.”
I spent the entire plane ride tending to the baby but distracted by my lost opportunity, wondering what I might have said to Oates had I seized the moment.
It had been close to 20 years since I’d been racked with anxiety, shaken but utterly absorbed by her novel We Were the Mulvaneys one summer on vacation with my family, so haunted by its depiction of a family destroyed by an unspoken tragedy that my mother asked if perhaps I might be happier reading something “a little lighter.” But I’ve never really been interested in lightness. Besides, Oates has such a way with darkness–a fact I learned in my 12th grade “Short Story” senior seminar when, by sheer coincidence because our textbook was organized alphabetically by author’s last name, I first read Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” in the same sitting as Oates’s much-anthologized “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been,” the suspenseful story that launched her career in 1966.
The underlying darkness of those two stories, that overwhelming sense of violence lurking just beneath the surface, struck me so viscerally that I still think of Flannery O’Connor and Joyce Carol Oates as somehow connected. Only later would I discover that Harold Bloom referred to O’Connor as “Oates’s inescapable precursor.”
But Oates traces her influences back far earlier. “I’ve read & been influenced by perhaps thousands of works of prose fiction over the years,” she reflects, “beginning with Lewis Carroll’s Alice books. It would be impossible for me to discuss any of these in any detail. Writing a story requires finding a ‘voice’ for the characters & this varies from work to work. I don’t have a singular voice but explore various voices which I think of as ‘mediated’–if I am writing about Henry James, for instance, in one of the stories of Wild Nights! I try to compose a narrative voice that echoes James, without parodying or imitating him precisely. So too with stories involving Hemingway, Mark Twain, Poe, & others.”
Looking back at my notes, I see that Oates describes Alice in Wonderland in her memoir as the “singular book that changed my life,” a gift from her paternal grandmother, who also gave her a typewriter when she was 12 years old. In the margins of my own copy, I scrawled “Lewis Carroll–Joyce Carol?” hearing an immediate echo in her name.
Whether coincidental or intentional, it seems clear that writing saved Oates. Whereas Alice falls down the rabbit hole, Oates writes herself out of rabbit holes, finding inspiration in true crime stories in the newspaper to spin chilling tales or channeling her grief after the sudden death of her husband into the candid memoir A Widow’s Story.
“The interest for me is the archetypal/mythical dimension to the ‘real life’ events,” she says, in discussing the research process for her novella Black Water, which parallels the Chappaquiddick accident involving Ted Kennedy and Mary Jo Kopechne. “Behind the tragic-tabloid story of Senator Kennedy & his hapless young woman passenger/victim is the old English & Scottish ballad of the ‘Demon Lover’–the ‘Elfin Knight’–who arrives on a black stallion–out of the forest–entices a young girl to ride with him–& carries her away to her death. This ballad perseveres in countless forms in American folk music & bluegrass–such ballads as ‘The Banks of the Ohio’ & ‘Pretty Polly’–hauntingly beautiful cautionary tales of young girls who ride away heedlessly to their deaths, or go willingly on foot to be murdered by their demon lovers.
“Obviously Black Water differs from these since the Senator does not wish to kill the adoring young woman whom he abandons to drown in his capsized car; but it is a clear variant, & the short novel itself is constructed like a ballad, with repeating phrases ending each short chapter, like the final lines of a stanza. The repetition is meant to suggest also the phenomenon of drowning itself as Kelly sinks into ever-deeper unconsciousness until finally she does not breathe again–she has died.
“My research for Black Water was minimal, but I do recall seeing a diagram of the sunken car at Chappaquiddick with the outline of the poor trapped Mary Jo Kopechne inside. It seemed to me unconscionable that media focus was almost entirely upon Ted Kennedy–indeed, his prospects for a presidential nomination–& that Mary Jo Kopechne as an individual was virtually ignored.”
Reflecting on her bestseller Blonde, which was recently adapted as a film and directed by Andrew Dominik, Oates adds, “My research for Blonde was one or two biographies but primarily watching all of Marilyn Monroe’s films which were available to me, in chronological order. In this way I could witness the growth, development, astonishing acting career of the generally under-estimated Marilyn Monroe.”
Given how much media attention circled around the film, one might imagine that Oates could have been swept up in the frenzy. But she maintains a cool distance: “I’d seen Andrew Dominik’s excellent screenplay adapted from Blonde years ago–it is really masterly, & highly selective; much shorter, of course, than the 800-page novel. I have also seen the beautifully executed film with its stunning portrayal of Marilyn Monroe by the Cuban-born Ana de Armas–perhaps an Oscar-worthy performance; it is a distinctly stylized film, a work of art, suggestive of an elegant horror film, with unnerving camera shots & a very edgy musical score. Not a film for people who expect to see the Marilyn of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes–a film for a select viewer, I think. So intense is Dominik’s Blonde, I had to stop watching it midway & returned after some hours. Not for the ‘faint-hearted’ perhaps–but a powerful accomplishment, certain to be controversial, but, I hope, appreciated for the remarkable achievement it is–a distillation of the subtle portrait of the fated Blond Actress from the novel.”
Perhaps I should say something to her, I thought as the plane began its descent. But what? Should I just thank her for her books? Would that possibly convey how they had stayed with me? How could I articulate something smart but concise in a busy airport when we disembarked? I needn’t have worried. The post-holiday crowds were so impenetrable, I lost sight of her in the terminal.
Six years later, I had the opportunity to contact Oates on behalf of Just Buffalo Literary Center, when we were erecting large-scale “LIT CITY” banners featuring prominent authors who have lived in Western New York along the literary corridor on Washington Street in downtown Buffalo. It took me days to compose a single email asking her permission to be included in the installation, my palms sweaty when I finally hit “send.” I wondered if she’d respond at all but within minutes I received her warm reply. She was so gracious, I regretted my reticence in the airport all over again. Why didn’t I just go up to her? I scolded myself.
Oates herself would never be so reticent, as demonstrated by her Twitter feed, a testament to her intrepid commitment to self-expression, fierce in the face of trolling.
“Twitter has been illuminating in its egalitarianism & grass-roots ‘journalism,’” she notes, “circumnavigating the stranglehold of mainstream media to provide windows into the lives of persons of whom we would never know otherwise. Think of the cell phone-recorded videos that have so captured the public’s attention in recent years–exposing, for instance, (white) police brutality–much of it falling below the radar of what would interest mainstream media to promulgate.”
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When Traffic East invited me to interview Oates, I was grateful for the chance to finally engage with one of the most celebrated and even chided writers of our time. I agreed immediately only to find my reticence creep back in.
How many hours I spent returning to her novels, reading her memoir as well as Greg Johnson’s biography, Invisible Writer, and composing long lists of potential questions for her, only to find that, once more, I could barely bring myself to hit “send” on an email.
I should perhaps note that a large part of my professional life involves interviewing writers–on stage! In front of hundreds, sometimes thousands, of people! But Oates somehow felt too mysterious, too inscrutable. Whatever shyness or silence struck me in the airport all those years ago seemed to settle on me once again.
Perhaps it was the timing. Our correspondence unfolded over email during the second winter of the coronavirus pandemic, against the backdrop of a world reeling in collective grief. A palpable sense of sadness defined our emails, not only because of the pandemic, but also due to pre-pandemic losses–her husband, Charlie Gross, died in April 2019; my mother died that December. I struggled to move beyond the tacit melancholy lurking just beneath the surface. Maybe it was more fitting that way, more Oatesian.
Oates’s writing tackles grief again in her more recent novel, Breathe, a breathless depiction of the sudden shock and surreal unfolding of events from diagnosis to death. Though written before the pandemic and focused on cancer as opposed to COVID, it feels especially timely.
“Yes,” Oates tells me, “this is a very personal novel, whose earliest pages, composed as a sort of entranced prose poem, constitute the chapter titled ‘Hospice, Honeymoon.’ This early material, written in March-April 2019 in Berkeley, is forever linked to that time & place, evoked in the novel as a (fictitious) town in New Mexico, resembling Santa Fe (a place that is also familiar to me). A primitive-seeming, or elemental, landscape … with distinctly different ‘gods’ & a disconcerting history of (white) genocide perpetrated against indigenous people. This landscape & this culture are ‘strange’ to [protagonist] Michaela & her stricken husband Gerard–alienating–mysterious. But they may have been unknowingly infected with a lethal parasite before they’d even come to Santa Terra, from swimming in infected water in a lake in upstate New York… The breathlessness is both literal & metaphorical: our realization that the environment, the land surrounding us, usually taken for granted, may be haunted in its own way by invasive bacteria & viruses… Our realization that we may be ‘haunted’ by the deceased whom we also continue to love & cannot bring ourselves to abandon.”
Looking back, my silence at the airport feels apropos. So much of the scholarship on Oates’s work focuses on her depiction of violence in its many forms–murder, rape, suicide, assault, sexual repression, domestic abuse, the vicissitudes of trauma and everyday tragedies. But I’m fascinated by the secrets and silences in her work–the unsaid as much as the said.
“Secrets!” the narrator of Oates’s We Were the Mulvaneys reflects. “As a child you come to see the world’s crisscrossed with them like electromagnetic waves, maybe even held together by them. But you can’t know. Not, as kids say, for sure. And if you blunder by accident into a secret it’s like you’ve pushed open a door where you thought was just a wall. You can look through, if you’re brave or reckless enough you can even step inside–taking a chance what you’ll learn is worth what it costs.”
Now, when I drive past the Joyce Carol Oates banner as I head to work or while sitting at the red light, I often look up at her face and ponder the mystery of the writer-reader relationship, how deeply writers can touch us through their books, how intimately they can push open doors, break down walls, occupy our minds, plant characters in our memories we’ll never forget without ever knowing they’ve had this impact. What a strange and magical gift.
In the end, I never mentioned during my conversations with Joyce Carol Oates the near-miss in the airport. It remains a secret, an admission better left silent.