01/29/2024
Novelist Johnson (Night Journey)—who published Invisible Writer, an authorized biography of Oates, in 1998—brings together an inviting compendium of his correspondence with the National Book Award winner from 1975 to 2006. Johnson first reached out to Oates in 1975 to express his admiration for her short story collection, The Poisoned Kiss, and what began as a cordial correspondence transformed over the ensuing years into a close friendship. The letters offer insights into Oates’s views on her fiction and the process of writing; for example, a 1999 message likens the process of cutting down the original 1,400-page manuscript for Blonde to “yank out weeds from a garden.” Other selections delve into Oates’s personal life, particularly the poignant letters tracing the declining health and deaths of her parents in the early 2000s. Literary gossip hounds will appreciate some choice tidbits sprinkled throughout (Oates credits Philip Roth’s late-’90s resurgence to the free time he enjoyed after alienating “virtually all” of his friends and lovers), but readers’ attention will flag during the surfeit of messages about Johnson’s fiction. Still, Oates’s fans will enjoy this intimate glimpse inside her life. Agent: Warren Frazier, John Hawkins & Assoc. (Mar.)
"Here, in a stream of intimate correspondence with another writer, we witness the workings of Joyce Carol Oates's vast mind and great heart. We are the recipients of her frank opinions of current events, cultural tides, and writers in moral decline. We are privy to her daily life, her forays into different literary forms, her indignation over class injustice, and her in-the-moment impulse to write stories that contain the conflicted subconscious of our country. I am touched by her fondness for friends, her kindness toward new writers, her doubts about her work, and her criticism of her early writings. And, oh, what an abundance of wit and humor! Oates's letters are clearly among the best of the epistolatory canon, providing rare insight and surprising revelations that enable us to better understand what underlies her great body of work. For this writer, they are a touchstone of inspiration."
"In these warm and empathetic letters to Greg Johnson over four decades, Joyce Carol Oates reveals the evolution of a major literary career. They show her profound dedication to writing and teaching; her humor and pleasure in the texture of daily life; her tender observations of her aging parents; and her prized friendships . . . A captivating and welcoming book."
"Everyone knows that Oates is a powerhouse—a prolific writer of novels, short stories, plays, poetry, essays, and now great letters. These warm, scintillating letters to the young fiction writer who will eventually become her biographer reveal what a modest, compassionate, disciplined person she's always been—the perfect friend, teacher, and critic who has a great capacity for appreciation. These letters take us backstage to her glittering social life and international travels, her twelve-hour writing sessions and her endless revisions, her protective love of her parents, her quiet domestic life, the death of two wonderful husbands, her omnivorous curiosity, and her wondering humility."
"A peek behind the curtain reveals that the wizard is indeed a wizard. Joyce Carol Oates's personal correspondence is profound, observant, witty, eloquent, prolific, and fun. All the qualities we've come to expect from this master are here in an intimate and informal exchange of minds. I loved it."
"It’s hard to think of another writer with as fecund and protean an imagination as the eighty-five-year-old Joyce Carol Oates, who is surely on any short list of America’s greatest living writers."
"The letters provide, as the best ones do, flashes of dailiness that build up over decades into something more substantive."
2023-11-11
A collection of letters invites readers into the prolific author’s life and thoughts.
Oates generously wrote an introduction to Johnson’s selected letters from her, describing a “remarkable collection of prolonged glances into the past, bathed in a sort of warm convivial glow.” Johnson, who’s published multiple books of fiction and nonfiction, including an authorized biography of Oates, first wrote to her from college in 1975. She was supportive of his writing, even offering to write letters of recommendation, and they eventually became good friends. Throughout, Oates displays her witty, humorous, and sly style. In a letter from 1987, she writes about her “adventure” publishing a novel under a pseudonym, desirous of an undetectable “new identity.” Elsewhere, she seeks advice about her work and critiques Johnson’s stories. Oates describes herself as “inward, secretive, and obsessive,” noting later, “I seem always to have loved to write—shamelessly. But at such length!” In addition to novels and short stories, she discusses her “other” career as a playwright. Composing a play about Thoreau “was one of the most fascinating and haunting periods of writing I’ve ever experienced!” She believes John Updike wasted his “brilliant” prose on unworthy characters, and Sense and Sensibility is “slow, dull, didactic, and unsparkling.” Wuthering Heights, on the other hand, is “simply sui generis.” Oates is happy that her Princeton colleague Toni Morrison won the Nobel Prize, and she writes at length about pets, book covers, literary gossip, and her love of boxing. On the writing process, she notes, “Anything is easier than the first six weeks or so of a novel!” In the last letter—from December 26, 2006—Oates mentions an upcoming “elegant” New Year’s Eve party at Steve Martin’s apartment in New York City.
An interesting barometer of Oates’ development as a writer over 30 years.