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?--Marshal Zeringue
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]