Monday, October 21, 2019

Joyce Carol Oates

Joyce Carol Oates is the author of such national bestsellers as The Falls, Blonde, and We Were the Mulvaneys.

From her CrimeReads interview with Thomas Pluck:

TP: Your latest thriller is Pursuit, which chilled me to the bone. It’s like a Grimm’s fairy tale updated for our time, on the danger of disallowing our loved ones to have secrets… Can you tell us briefly about the genesis of this story?

JCO: I had been haunted for years by the same “vision” that haunts the young woman protagonist—I think it was an emblem to me of the absolutely worst, most horrific & appalling thing that could happen to anyone. Which is why I eventually created an entire short novel about it, and made that novel (unexpectedly, I hope) a tender story honoring marital love. (I know—it sounds virtually impossible in our #MeToo era of terrible men and their enablers to seriously/positively depict marriage—yet all around us are marriages of people who truly love each other.)

I have usually focused on conflicts within the family & marriage—(of course: art is about conflict, unavoidably)—& had wanted to write about a genuinely idealistic young husband in love with a mysteriously wounded/ elusive young wife. So, there are dramatically contrasting marriages in Pursuit—the marriage of Abby & Willem & the marriage of Nicola & Lew Hayman (himself a victim of...[read on]
--Marshal Zeringue