Exploring decades of literary friendship: Joyce Carol Oates’ Letters to a Biographer

Joyce Carol Oates is sifting through old letters. Some were written nearly half a century ago. Reading them in chronological order is akin to your life flashing before your eyes, the 86-year-old American author explains from her home in New Jersey: “One part of me wants to look at the past, but another part feels so sad that so many people are gone.”.

There are some occasional references to petty jealousies and healthy literary rivalries too. Carol Oates, after all, befriended some of the most famous American writers of the 20th century, including Truman Capote, Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, Joan Didion, Susan Sontag, Norman Mailer, Cynthia Ozick, Stephen King, Toni Morrison, Kurt Vonnegut, Margaret Atwood, and John Updike.

One night, in a rage, he set fire to their home. Carol Oates witnessed the incident through an attic window, from the safety of her own home. The memory resurfaced decades later. “When I was a little girl, I was just experiencing things and not questioning them, but then later I started to interpret them when I wrote them down,” she says. “There were many things, for instance, about my own family that I didn’t know that I found out about much later.

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