Oates has never written a novel on a computer, nor would she. She bought her a toy typewriter and then, at 14, a real one. It was her paternal grandmother, Blanche, who, seeing her granddaughter’s sympathy with storytelling, organised six-year-old Oates’ first library ticket. For Oates, it seems more a way of life.Īs a young child, growing up on a farm in Millersport, New York, she doodled stories, often featuring chickens and, yes, cats with fur of many hues. ![]() Yet she steadfastly writes “professor” as her occupation when filling in forms, never “writer”. Even Blonde, one of those Pulitzer finalists, is a kind of horror in the way it explores the division between Monroe as a performer and Monroe as a person. ![]() She has five times been a Pulitzer prize finalist and is often considered “America’s foremost woman of letters” (a description thought to have been coined by John Updike), celebrated for dark and precisely observed fiction that splices violence and tenderness. You would think Oates had no such worries now she has been acclaimed as a writer since her fourth novel, Them, won the US national book award in 1970. Oates says that Babysitter – a thriller that is poetically watchful of the mind of its protagonist, especially as she approaches turning points – “is also based on the risks we take in writing: spending years of our life on a project” without knowing what, if anything, the time will yield. But her writing metabolism has not faltered. “Well, I usually run and walk, run and walk,” she says. She has spoken before of her daily runs, an hour each evening, in which her mind “flies” with ideas. In the evenings, she watches TV and films, often with Zanche stretched beside her, and she tweets. She teaches creative writing at Princeton and this morning has already taken a walk with a group of friends. She seems to regard the whole business as unremarkable, yet the maths is mindblowing: nearly 60 years of writing, divided by all those novels, plus novellas, short story collections, essays and book reviews. ‘If I can just get this finished …’ I guess I just kept on with that.” If you publish your first when you’re quite young, you feel: wow, maybe there will never be another one. ![]() “I never thought that I would even publish one book. Unfortunately, this suggests that the salient feature of her output is its quantity. The approach has yielded so many books that the epithet routinely attached to Oates is “prolific”. She waves away the question as if counting is for people who have nothing better to do. According to her publisher, it is Oates’ 61st novel, although no one seems certain, least of all Oates. The film adaptation of her 2000 novel Blonde, a fictionalised account of the life of Marilyn Monroe and “the most difficult novel” she has written, is to be released on Netflix next month, while Babysitter is unflinching in its detailing of sexual assault before the #MeToo era. She is 84, but her work remains exceptionally relevant. We are speaking before the publication of her novel Babysitter, inspired by a serial killer who murdered children in the 1970s in the suburbs of Detroit, where Oates lived at the time. She is friendly, but not in a way that makes her less forbidding. “She hopes we won’t interfere with her nap,” Oates says, in a voice that sounds mildly warning. She lets the camera linger on Zanche, who is amply provided for – she also has her own “catio” garden. We are speaking on video and Oates pans around the room – large, book-lined – to show me it. J oyce Carol Oates is on her feet in her study, looking out over woodland in rural Princeton, New Jersey, while her maine coon, Zanche, sprawls atop a swanky white cat tower.
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