The author Joyce Carol Oates is best known for being one of the country’s preëminent fiction writers. She is second best known for being prolific. She is third best known for posting unfiltered, helter-skelter, and occasionally baffling thoughts on Twitter, a platform on which she has achieved unexpected late-career notoriety. In August, Oates published “Babysitter,” her latest novel, which joins a towering stack of poetry, essays, criticism, and short stories, including the much anthologized “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” Ripped partly from the headlines of nineteen-seventies Detroit, “Babysitter” follows a sheltered and perfumed housewife who begins an affair with a man she knows only as Y.K. Meanwhile, a serial killer is on the loose, gruesomely murdering children. The book returns to and reconfigures some of Oates’s predominant psychological themes—the messiness of desire, the shame of pleasure—as well as some of her predominant social themes: violence against women, the essentializing prisons of race and class.
At the end of September, “Blonde,” a movie adaptation of Oates’s 2000 novel, which converts the stuff of Marilyn Monroe’s life into hallucinatory fiction and is widely regarded as Oates’s masterwork, will be available for streaming on Netflix. “Blonde,” the film, stars Ana de Armas and was directed by Andrew Dominik. “Blonde,” the book, exceeds seven hundred pages yet distills its author’s career, expressing as transcendently as she ever has her gothic, gory sensibility and interest in gendered archetypes. Oates has called Marilyn Monroe “my Moby Dick, the powerful galvanizing image about which an epic might be constructed, with myriad levels of meaning and significance.” The novel explores Hollywood as a microcosm of American artifice and exploitation. It also elaborates a vision of men as perpetrators and women as victims. “All dead birds are female,” Marilyn thinks, in the prologue to a ghastly assault. “There is something female about being dead.” (Hannah, the protagonist of “Babysitter,” is prone to similar musings. “If a woman is not desired,” she decides, “a woman does not exist.”)
The past few years have not been gentle with Oates. In 2019, her second husband, the neuroscientist Charles Gross, died; eleven years prior, she’d lost her first husband, the editor Raymond J. Smith, after he contracted pneumonia—an experience she wrote about in her first memoir, “A Widow’s Story.” When I caught up with the author, in mid-September, she was juggling her fall teaching load (she is the Roger S. Berlind ’52 Professor in the Humanities, Emerita, at Princeton and is also teaching at Rutgers), her daily writing practice (she devotes between five and ten hours per day to her craft), and interviews about “Babysitter” and “Blonde.” We discussed the appeal of underdogs, the smell of piano keys, and the vagaries of having one’s work adapted for the screen. We also tussled over autofiction and the mythic Male and Female. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
I was just thinking about Marilyn Monroe, and about Hannah, the rich, elegant blonde in “Babysitter,” your most recent novel. Some of your most iconic creations—Connie in “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?,” Iris in “Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart”—have been seemingly pure blond women threatened by spoilage. Would you agree that this is a theme? And, if so, why do you find it alluring?
A theme in my writing, or generally?
Your writing.
Oh, no, no, no. I’ve written many, many, many novels and short stories. You’ve just singled out the ones you’re asking about. You’ve talked about three or four titles that are about blond women. But I’ve written, let’s say, fifteen hundred stories. It’s tautological, your question. Each project that I work on is fairly independent of the others.
But those characters are so evocative. I assumed that they must have held a special fascination for you.
Well, it’s hard to say. If you are a writer or an artist, each project you work on is actually very special and challenging. Each project exerts its own challenges and its own gravitas. I’m probably drawn to writing about relative underdogs or people who’ve been marginalized or impoverished or disenfranchised. They don’t have to be blond girls or women. They could also be men.
I’ve written about boxing, which is an analogue, I think, with the whole drama or the iconography of Marilyn Monroe and other young women who were starlets in those days, the late nineteen-forties and nineteen-fifties. An analogue with boxers who were also exploited. These are working-class Americans who had no unions to protect them.
Certainly Norma Jean Baker was one of hundreds of thousands of starlets who were exploited by the studio system, by male producers and directors, and by Hollywood people. She wasn’t like Elizabeth Taylor, who came from a different class in society. She didn’t have the protection of a family. Her mother was often institutionalized.
She was like a girl in a fairy tale. And she had to make her own way. She was working in an aircraft factory when she was only about sixteen, and she was doing the kind of work where she was breathing in fumes. If she’d stayed working at that factory for long, she might’ve gotten some illness. Had Norma Jean Baker not become a starlet, and then become Marilyn Monroe, she would’ve been used up by the world of capitalism. Maybe she wouldn’t have lived long. That’s what I’m drawn to more than there being a blond woman. I’ve also written about Mike Tyson, and other boxers who’ve had similar experiences. That connection is probably a little closer to what I’m interested in.
You told your biographer that you were inspired to write “Blonde” after seeing a photo of the seventeen-year-old Norma Jean. You said that “this young, hopefully smiling girl, so very American, reminded me powerfully of girls of my childhood, some of them from broken homes.” Could you say more about what these girls were like, and how you knew them?
I came from upstate New York, western New York, north of Buffalo. It was not a very prosperous community; there were broken homes, families where the father was an alcoholic and there was a good deal of brutality.
My family was actually quite unusual. We—my parents and my brother and I—lived with my mother’s parents. So we had a multigenerational farmhouse and more stability, but I went to school with these other girls who were often victimized. Their fathers may have been drinking, or they may have been ill, or they abandoned the family. Norma Jean Baker is one of those girls.
I hope I’m not cherry-picking, but I did notice a kind of familial archetype in many of your books: remote dads; involved, ambivalent moms; siblings who don’t necessarily get along. Do those dynamics resonate with your own experience?
A writer holds a mirror up to life. So I’m writing about life in America. I don’t think anything that writers do should be reduced to just their own families. Say somebody is writing about war or the Holocaust—it’s not related to their own family. It’s basically something that’s in the world. We are dramatizing it, holding it up for others to examine. I’ve written so many books. I certainly exhausted my own life long ago.
You’ve written that you inherited your father’s musical “temperament,” if not his musical talents. It made me curious about the role of music in your writing.
Music is very important to me. I love to hear music, and I’m very drawn to piano music. I have a sort of romantic, emotional attachment to the piano—even smelling the piano keys, just touching them, depressing a chord. It has a lot of emotional resonance with me.
But, with my writing, there’s a kind of mediated voice. I try for the music of different people’s voices; the voices change from person to person. I spend a lot of my time hearing music in my head or singing to myself, the way people sometimes do.
“The music of different people’s voices.” In some ways, I feel like the music in your work is the voice of mass culture. You weave in lyrics from pop songs. I’m thinking particularly of “Where Are You Going” and “Blonde.”
Hmm. The other night, I saw the movie “Elvis,” which is relatively new. It hearkens back to a time in our culture, in the nineteen-fifties, when there was a new music, a Black-influenced music from the South making its way nationally.
It was perceived to be insidious and un-American. Segregationists and white supremacists were very upset at what they called this Black music that was making its way. And Elvis Presley was the conduit. He was the liaison. He was singing songs and making music and also, in his live performances, doing moves with his body that he had seen Black musicians do. Most white audiences had never seen those moves.
That’s basically the theme, that Elvis represented a kind of pagan break with staid Christian culture. There was the white middle class being besieged by a Black wave of rhythm and blues. Have you seen that movie?
I haven’t. No.
I don’t think that it’s a perfect movie. But I do remember that rock and roll, and rhythm and blues was considered a war on decency. Preachers and priests were giving sermons against this music. It was a clear generational break. When I wrote “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” in the nineteen-sixties, young teen-agers were in thrall to music, to rock and roll music.
The music feels disruptive, or subversive, in your story. I’m reminded of other elements of your style—all the italics and parentheses and cascading repetition. And, thematically, your novels can be pretty violent and extreme. There’s graphic rape, murder, child abuse. Do you find yourself drawn to excess?
Well, I’m writing about America. I’m holding a mirror up to reality. The writer or the artist is in control of the frame—there’s a frame around the mirror, there’s a frame around a novel—it’s not infinite. You’re selecting and limiting and presenting a certain vision. For instance, Shakespeare is drawn to tragedy. The comedies are wonderful, but it’s the tragedies that are profound, and always about violence. There is no tragedy as a genre without violence. People who write detective or mystery novels—of course they’re drawn to murder because murder is the ultimate crime.
What do you make of contemporary literature? Do you think we’re valuing the right things?
Are you—did you really just ask me what I think of contemporary literature? That’s a question?
I can narrow it a bit—
What do I think of contemporary life? What do I think of the twentieth century, or the medieval period? It’s an insanely vast question.
Well, I wondered whether there were particular trends that you liked or disliked. I was thinking of your tweet from March of 2021. You were talking about autofiction, which blurs the line between a novel and an author’s memoir or journal. You wrote, “Strange to have come of age reading great novels of ambition, substance, and imagination (Dostoyevsky, Woolf, Joyce, Faulkner) and now find yourself praised and acclaimed for wan little husks of ‘auto fiction’ with space between paragraphs to make the book seem longer.”
Yes. I was thinking if you were a writer and, say, in your twenties or thirties, and you had studied these great works in university. But then you yourself are writing something relatively short and not very ambitious. How strange it would be, you know, to be praised for what you were doing when you would know, of course, that you’re nothing like Toni Morrison or William Faulkner. But all my tweets are very ephemeral. This one was written after I had been a judge for the Anisfield-Wolf awards. Do you know what the Anisfield-Wolf awards are?
No. What are they?
Oh, that’s so sad. You’ve never heard of it. Well, they consider it to be the Black Pulitzer. The awards are given to writing that deals with race, particularly in America. Percival Everett was our prizewinner in 2022. He was my nomination.
He writes about lynching in America. Really profound writing. So, when I was contrasting that to autofiction, it just seems so extraordinary that you have a body of writing about subjects of great tragic and political significance set beside these very autobiographical minimalist works of fiction.
It’s not that I care. I don’t care what people write. I encourage my students to write out of their strength, so if they’re really strong in writing about themselves, and confessional memoirist work, then that’s what they should do. But, taking a broad view, I guess I admire work by Percival Everett and John Edgar Wideman a little more than work about easier subjects.
So, to clarify what constitutes “ambition,” it’s a social, not an individual, lens?
Well, we can say, for instance, that “Middlemarch” is a very ambitious novel. There had never been a novel quite like it before. There had been novels, of course, before that, more entertaining novels, or novels that were didactic. But [George Eliot] brings everything together. And Toni Morrison’s novels are ambitious. They’re not necessarily long. Toni was writing in a distilled way, a poetic way, but she wasn’t just writing about herself or something that happened to her. There’s a scope, a sense of history.
“Babysitter” spends a lot of time on Hannah’s self-loathing and her petty anxieties and vanities. There’s some overlap between her psychological portrayal and the way that autofiction narrators present themselves.
I don’t understand your question.
We’re drawing a distinction between a kind of grand literary sweep and the small-minded concerns of the self. But I guess I’m saying that I appreciate when your characters have inner lives.
Hannah is having experiences that are particularly relevant to the Detroit of that time, to the racial tensions and paradoxes of living in a big American city.
I had lived in Detroit myself, with my husband. I had friends who lived in the suburbs. It was a time when white residents were fleeing. Babysitter, the real serial killer, was a white man, but it was thought that he could have been a Black man preying on white children. White people thought that—wrongly. Their racial animosity was not borne out by reality.
You’ve said that you’re not sure that you have a self, a personality. What did you mean?
I think most people don’t have strong personalities in themselves. Much of what we present to the world is in response to the people around us. I guess it could be called role-playing. In visual art, the personal self thins out. The great canvasses by Mark Rothko don’t seem to have any residue of a person. They’re shimmering. They’re just phenomenal, such exquisite, subtle beauty.
Your writing is full of indeterminacy and irresolution. It’s lifelike, in that way. But its complexity, to me, is less on the level of individual characters and more about something deeper, which you’ve sometimes called the “impersonal.” Could you talk more about that?
I’m drawn to impersonal or transpersonal experiences. Life and death. People describe these experiences in archetypal ways that all sound alike. Giving birth, which I’ve never done, that’s another transpersonal experience that many people have had. I’m interested in the mystery of personality, how our personalities arise and then how they fade.
Your work has explored a specifically female experience of marriage and widowhood. The meaning that women attach to men, their husbands, their homes, and what happens when those things fall away.
Whenever we lose somebody very close to us—it could be a parent, a spouse, a sister, or a brother—that violent, visceral loss is difficult to talk about. People don’t know what to say. People lose their dogs and cats and they suddenly collapse. They keep seeing the animal around the house. There’s that element of loss that is visceral and not amenable to rationality. The closer you are to someone, when you lose that person, the more your own personality is shocked. It’s like getting hit over the head with a hammer. Grief isn’t an idea. It’s actually something like an illness. It’s an interior loss that you probably never get over. I know people who lost a parent when they were children and feel like they’re not whole.
In your work, we meet characters whose vulnerabilities we feel, their failures and their losses. But you also seem to have thought deeply about resilience. For instance, I loved your line, from “The Lost Landscape,” about “rejoicing in our elusive catness.” What did you mean by that?
Cats can keep going. A cat can be suffering and not let you know. You realize only when they get suddenly ill. They’re private animals. When they know they’re going to die, they want to sneak away from the house, into the woods. They have their own strange dignity. And they’re very resilient up until that point. Probably dogs can, too. They can go without eating for quite a while, if they’re trapped. And perhaps people can as well.
I’ve noticed that you often write about experiences women have that only other women really understand, and the same for men. You’ve suggested that “there is a mysterious and terrible brotherhood of men by way of violence,” one that excludes women. In “Babysitter,” you write, “The curse of the female, to so badly need love.” And “a man’s hunger: less personal and particular than in a woman.” There are a lot of moments like this! Are you channelling Hannah here? You seem to have strong views about the masculine and the feminine.
I don’t know that those are my particular views. They’re relevant to the novel. Hannah is a certain kind of person. I’m a philosophical writer; I’m interested in ideas and themes. I can dramatize an idea that I don’t believe in myself. People don’t seem to understand that, if you’re a novelist, you basically like characters and different personalities, so each personality may have his or her own gravitas and convictions. And they may not be at all the same, and so they have a kind of adversarial relationship. But I think a novelist who is sympathetic with her characters will make all the characters seem believable.
I wrote a novel, “A Book of American Martyrs,” which looks at both sides of the division, in America, between the anti-abortion people and the liberals, or the abortion providers. I wanted it to be symmetrical, balanced. When you’re reading about the anti-abortion evangelicals, you are reading about sincere people. They really believe these things. They believe in God. They believe in Christ. They believe in a sanctity of the fetus. They believe that a fetus is a soul. And they believe in souls. On the other side, you have people who are agnostic or secular. They don’t believe there is a soul, or a God. When you’re a novelist, you want to give all sides of a subject to make it more like life.
But the quote about how violence creates a mysterious and terrible brotherhood of men, though, was from a piece of nonfiction. I think you were writing as yourself.
That’s boxing.
Oh.
I don’t think all men are unified or bonded in violence. Boxing celebrates male violence and self-sacrifice. Now there are women boxers. When I was writing about boxing, women boxers weren’t that prominent. I wouldn’t say all men [are violent], but, when you’re writing a piece of creative nonfiction, you might overstate things.
As I said, I’m a philosophical writer; I examine propositions and ideas. What I might have examined in 1981, or 2003, is not necessarily what I believe now, but these are propositions that somebody believes. I’m not writing propaganda from one point of view. As a novelist, I’m interested in the drama of life, I think, and in seeing how different personalities play out. Shakespeare is this supreme dramatist, and you wouldn’t necessarily say that Shakespeare is Hamlet, that Shakespeare is or is not Macbeth. He’s all of those people, but he’s also none of them. You could argue that there was something of Shakespeare in Iago. But I would identify more with somebody like Shakespeare than I would with a polemical novelist. I’m more interested in a dramatization of conflict.
In some ways, “Babysitter” struck me as a novel that wanted to dramatize different aspects of MeToo.
[Hannah] is quite masochistic. She has an abiding sense that she deserves to be punished—it may be that she is already dead. The whole novel could be posthumous. But the story is also about a young man named Mikey, and he's redeemed in the sense that he rises up and he does all of these things that he doesn’t really want to do or intend to do. Then he realizes that he could save somebody’s life, so he saves the life of a little boy, and he ends up killing Babysitter. So Mikey comes along as heroic in an ironic way.
I’d love to talk about the “Blonde” adaptation. Your novel “Blonde” is twenty-two years old. How did the film come about?
Andrew Dominik sent his screenplay to me a long time ago. I was impressed because he had distilled eight hundred pages. It was a long project, and I didn’t have anything to do with it. Every once in a while, Andrew would get in contact with me.
First, he wanted Naomi Watts to play Marilyn. Then he couldn’t get the money, and she aged out, which is an awful expression. Then he had another young woman actress, and she aged out because we’re talking about twenty years.
So finally, Ana de Armas is just the right age. Andrew wanted her right away, and he knew he wanted her. But I had very little to do with it. I saw the almost-final cut, they sent a kind of embargoed film, and I had to see it within forty-eight hours. They’re so afraid of these films being pirated. I had to stop watching about midway through. The film is emotionally exhausting.
It’s not a feel-good movie. Many films about Marilyn Monroe are kind of upbeat and have a lot of music and singing. She’s very beautiful and sweet. This one is probably closer to what she actually experienced. The last few days of her life were brutal.
Were you pleased with how the movie turned out?
Oh, yes. It’s a work of art. Andrew Dominik is a very idiosyncratic director, so he appropriated the subject and made it into his own vision.
How were your visions different?
I think Andrew’s vision is parallel with my own, or identical to my own. But he also made a movie that’s unique. He chose the music, the costumes, the lighting; he did the directing and the casting. Casting Ana was controversial because she’s Cuban. She had to have English-diction lessons so that her accent was not so noticeable. She had to wear wigs.
She did a superb job. She becomes Marilyn Monroe. It’s interesting: people are surprised when actors act, but some actors really are chameleons. Others always play themselves. Particularly comedians. They are good, and funny, and people love them, but they’re not really actors. Whereas someone like Laurence Olivier or Richard Burton . . . Dustin Hoffman is quite brilliant. Al Pacino, especially when he was younger—he was a very, very good actor.
Did you have any favorite moments in the movie, or in Ana’s performance?
Norma Jean is played by a child actress who is very good. You sort of get to know her, and her mother is just so troubled. It’s a pathetic relationship. That’s the first movement, before the leap in time that brings us to the young woman, Ana de Armas. All the parts are quite fascinating. It’s gruelling, though. It’s almost three hours long. I had to stop watching it, go away for a couple of hours, and come back. It’s demanding of the viewer. The last quarter is very hallucinatory. Marilyn Monroe is addicted to barbiturates, and she’s suicidal; she’s losing her mind. She descends into a surreal world, one that is astonishingly vivid, and you almost feel that you’re losing your mind. I remember a certain immersion: it’s not a movie that you’re watching so much as being immersed in. Not for the faint of heart.
How do you feel about the NC-17 rating?
Oh, I don’t have any particular feelings. I don’t know much about these things. The real things that happened to Marilyn Monroe are much worse than anything in the movie.
So when you thought it was challenging to watch, or demanding, it wasn’t about the sexual content so much as the emotional annihilation?
When she’s in the hallucinatory state and she’s being used by people whom she had revered and loved, or thought she’d loved, it’s heartbreaking. The last day of her life, she was in a state of utter desolation.
She pinned a lot of hope on John Kennedy, which was such a fairy-tale idea. And her marriage to Arthur Miller had disintegrated. I always liked Arthur Miller, but when I read that play [“After the Fall”], I felt it was a betrayal of intimacy. A husband and wife have a certain intimacy. How could he write this play? People just really let her down.
Because of the MeToo movement, there’s much more latitude in listening to or paying respect to women who have been victimized. Before Harvey Weinstein, there wouldn’t have been as much sympathy. People would say, “Oh, you’re exaggerating,” “It wasn’t that bad,” or “You’re just saying that,” or “He didn’t really rape you; you’re making it up.” But now, since MeToo, people are more respectful of how women are exploited.
Last question. What are you working on now?
I’m finishing up a novel, set in the nineteenth century, about a composite figure based on three historical people. Do you know who J. Marion Sims is?
Yes. The name sounds familiar.
The father of American gynecology. And then a man named [Silas] Weir Mitchell [who pioneered the rest cure]. He was the doctor referenced in “The Yellow Wallpaper”—very famous in his time, though not so well known now. And Henry Cotton, the director of the New Jersey Lunatic Asylum. That’s what the place was called; not too far from where I live.
My character victimizes women, but the novel has a positive ending: the women band together and resist him. It’s a surreal novel that’s based on real people and real incidents. There are lots of hysterectomies and sterilizations. The novel is called “Butcher.” ♦
Sourse: newyorker.com
