I interview Oates on a Tuesday afternoon via Zoom.
Oates is not at home in Princeton, New Jersey, but traveling in New Mexico.
It is 11 a.m. where she is.
She sits on a patio in front of sliding glass doors and wears a baseball cap.
We have talked for half an hour already by the time I bring up the tweets.
Oates has been gracious, forthcoming, and thoughtful on all topics.
We have discussed how the novel resonates 22 years after publication, whether it feels different post-MeToo.
We have discussed her latest book,Babysitter, which was published by Knopf last month.
Finally, when I can put it off no longer, I ask her about Twitter.
How does she approach it?
It doesn’t really seem like something that’s engraved in stone, Oates says.
It’s more like I’m just talking, like you talk to your friend on the telephone.
She adds, Im always surprised when anybody cares.
Oates has 223,000 followers.
They are quote-tweeted, screenshotted, dropped into group chats.
Frequently, she offends the same publishing community that celebrates her.
In our conversation, Oates provides a more nuanced explanation of what she meant.
Of course, I don’t think that white people have been disadvantaged, she says.
White male writers have been the mainstream for millennia, but I would just assume that everybody knew that.
She tells me she was referring to unpublished students who will never be given an opportunity.
I agree with that.
The identity issue is very complex, because we do want to have diversity.
Online, some of this context wasnt apparent.
I have a few guesses as to why Oates posts provoke such emotional responses.
One, they are genuinely funny and/or incendiary.
Two, the platform rewards overreaction.
Yes, she is prolific.
And she certainly can write more, he adds.
Its funny how this makes it sound doable.
More interesting is that Oates is equally comfortable in all forms.
This, says Halpern, puts her in a rarefied group of writers.
Oates friend, the Pulitzer-winning author Richard Ford, refers to this versatility as her literary polymathism.
He continues, I liked the way she completely inhabited herselfas writer without stint.
Even in spite of this confidence, Oates tells me that writing a new book never gets easier.
Each book, she says, has a different set of problems.
There’s something idiosyncratic about any work.
I have friends with one book published, but the second book is much harder.
It’s like they’re stumbling.
There is a slippery quality to the events in the novel.
Oates work is often this dark.
Her writing is characterized by tragedies like these, in addition to sexual violence and every manner of abuse.
Compartmentalizing, she tells me, is part of our human mechanism for survival.
The book distills Marilyn’s life, adds some characters, combines others.
Elements of biography mix with pure fiction.
The register of both the book and the movie hovers between horror and melodrama.
The film is sometimes in black and white, sometimes in color.
Flashbulbs are used so often that I was warned ahead of time.
Later, the viewer witnesses a speculum being inserted into Marilyns vagina from inside Marilyn.
She found the experience of watching the film emotionally draining.
The material has a new relevance post-MeToo.
I can see that Norma Jeane Baker was such a victim.
At the time it was first published, it got a mixed reception.
Some critics took offense at Oates distillation of Marilyns life, her composites and additions and streamlining.
Some had aesthetic objections, to its maximalism, to its ugliness.
Oates does not approach Monroe as a fan, says Showalter.
Marilyn Monroe has been dead for 60 years, but national interest in her never abates.
She brings out a protectiveness in people, and, even now, that protectiveness has a disturbing edge.
This summer alone there were no less than three Twitter discourse cycles about her.
The second debated whether Ana de Armas accent makes her unsuitable for her starring role in the movie.
She says there is a difference between writing about someone you know personally and someone as iconic as Monroe.
She said, I think anybody can write about Abraham Lincoln.
We can all write about World War I.
There are things that belong to the collective unconscious.
But, she continues, If I write about John Kennedy, it scarcely matters to John Kennedy.
There’s no diminution of him.
There wouldn’t be any adversity there.
Its like the Grand Canyon.
Concluding a Zoom call is always anticlimactic.
The moment of lag, before the window closes, when both parties just blink at each other.
It is in this lag that I wonder to what extent I am writing about the Grand Canyon.
To what extent does Joyce Carol Oates belong to the public domain of the mind?
If celebrity makes it hard to see someone, internet celebrity muddles things further.
Twitter creates a false sense of access and knowability.
It fosters misunderstanding, maybe by design.
You have to log off to read them.
