Joyce Carol Oates, THE (OTHER) YOU
[0:01]Hi, this is Vivi Owens, and you're listening to the award-winning podcast, Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books.
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[0:38]I was so honored to interview Joyce Carroll-Oats. I really couldn't even believe it when
[0:44]an email came across. My, you know, inbox where she was secede, and I had to confirm our interview
[0:49]for the striker center at Temple Emanuel. I was going to write back Joyce. So excited,
[0:54]but then I was like, how could I just call her Joyce? I feel like, I don't know.
[0:58]So anyway, I interviewed her for the Temple Emanuel Striker Center. It was amazing and
[1:04]hundreds of people were there listening virtually. This is the recording of that interview,
[1:09]which I did that day. And I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. For those of you who don't know,
[1:14]Joyce Carroll-Oats is America's most prolific and celebrated living author. She published her first
[1:19]book at the age of 26, won the National Book Award when she was just 31, and for her 58 novels
[1:26]and scores of plays, novellas, short stories, poetry, and essays won the National Humanities
[1:32]Medal, the Jerusalem Prize, two Ohenry Awards, and has been a five-time finalist for the Pulitzer
[1:39]Prize. We talked about her collection of poems, American Melon Colley, and a collection of stories,
[1:45]the other you. Enjoy our conversation. Hi. How are you? I feel like I can't just call you Joyce.
[1:52]I feel like I don't know. That seems way too informal. So, Joyce is fine. Okay, I'm delighted to meet
[1:59]you. Thank you for doing this program with the Striker Center. I am a huge fan of yours, and your
[2:05]latest works were truly unbelievable American Melon Colley and the other you. I was hoping that
[2:11]as an introduction, you could talk a little bit about why you decided to write these two,
[2:16]especially as they released the same month, and why these two story, why these two now.
[2:22]And I know that that maybe we could start with the poems, which I know came from a lot of
[2:26]different places, and you decided to aggregate them. And let's talk about that if that's okay.
[2:30]Well, yes, for me, my primary means of creative expression, I suppose one could say, is prose fiction.
[2:40]So, I don't write poetry every day. Usually, my periods of writing poetry are sort of very intense,
[2:47]interludes of emotional crisis or stress where everything is distilled and very concentrated.
[2:55]The kind of energy that you need, perhaps for most people to write a novel,
[3:00]is sort of like a long distance runner. And sometimes you have energy for short sprints and things
[3:06]that are much more concentrated. So, I don't really write poetry continuously. The poems in
[3:14]that collection were written in very intense interludes. American melancholy is drawn together by
[3:22]the fact that my husband Charlie Gross passed away in April 2019. So, the book that I've collected
[3:30]these poems have very much to do with the concentration of emotion, of grief, and loss,
[3:37]and looking back at our culture in the 20th century and focusing on subjects like,
[3:44]I have a little section of poems on what we could call scientific male practice or scientific
[3:50]misconduct and some quintessential famous research experiments. But the book is actually
[3:57]book ended by with poems that are about the loss of my husband. So, a book of poems, I think for
[4:04]many poets, is an occasion for some intensity and distillation. I can't really imagine that I
[4:11]would have another book of poems. It's my first book in 25 years. Wow. Well, the way you wrote about
[4:19]your husband's, and I'm so sorry for your loss, was absolutely beautiful, per usual. But even
[4:24]the way you wrote about the hospice experience in the poem at the end, do you mind if I read a
[4:30]a line or two from it? Is that okay? That's fine. When you said, first you have it from your point
[4:35]of view, and you alternate one, two, three, four, et cetera with his point of view. And you said,
[4:41]here, I'll start here. And so on the brink of too late, when no one else is in the room,
[4:45]for a hospice room can be crowded by crowded, meaning more than two people. You tell your husband
[4:50]that you love him so much. What a wonderful husband he has been. And he says, but I failed you by
[4:55]dying. And you protest. But why are you saying such a thing? You are not dying. We are talking
[5:00]here together. And he says, because I am dead. As after the final biopsy, he'd been incensed.
[5:06]They took my soul from me. They took me to the crematorium. I saw the sign. Don't try to tell me
[5:11]I didn't see the sign. And then you say, trapped in the sped like a prison is the car out front,
[5:15]drive the car around. Where are the keys to the car? Joyce, don't leave. Joyce, we need to get the
[5:20]car. Where are the keys? I want to go home. Take me home. Joyce, don't leave me. What did we do with
[5:24]the car? And then at the end, you say after such struggle, you must love the unrippled dark water
[5:30]in which the perfect cold o of the moon floats. It's beautiful and heartbreaking. And I'm so sorry.
[5:40]Thank you. When you were reading that, I almost didn't remember that I had written some of the,
[5:44]I probably am afraid to look at it. I shouldn't say that. I mean, I looked at many times,
[5:50]but maybe not for months. Some things that, you know, though we write them ourselves,
[5:53]we can't really bring ourselves to read them. I mean, that's been true of a lot of my writing,
[5:58]but where the emotions are sort of pushed away by time. And then if you see them again,
[6:05]it becomes very fresh. I almost couldn't believe I had written that. Of course, it's pretty much
[6:11]real life. You know, do you feel like it helps you when you're in the moment? Does it help
[6:15]you sort out your feelings when you write scenes like this and put them in poetic form?
[6:20]Well, I'm really haunted by certain subjects. And so I would say, I'm literally,
[6:27]I mean, literally haunted in a sense that my thoughts just korean around like in a whirlpool.
[6:33]And I tried to, through meditation or other attention to draw away from these areas of like
[6:41]gravity, like this intense whirlpool. And sometimes I can do that. And sometimes I can't.
[6:48]So I sort of concentrate on expressing what, what seems to want to be expressed. So I think
[6:54]that's true for many writers. I mean, looking back at 20th century, you know, famous writers like
[7:00]Eugene O'Neill, he was obviously obsessed with his parents. He wrote so much about his father.
[7:07]Hemingway wrote about completely a woman who were maybe like his mother. We all have areas
[7:14]of being haunted. So writers are those people who focus on it, maybe trying to exercise it or
[7:22]maybe just trying to explore it. Well, I found it interesting that you not only delved deep into
[7:29]your own loss and just to clarify from the chat, I was reading from American melancholy, the book
[7:34]of poems. And not only did you do this, but you literally inserted yourself as the subject in
[7:39]many psychology experiments and having been a psychology major way back in the day to read these
[7:45]from the point of view of the subjects and to even get more information on, you know, some of the
[7:50]researchers themselves and your thoughts on to why they were even doing this, like the relation
[7:56]of the Holocaust. And maybe you could talk a little bit more about Maslow and the Holocaust tie
[8:02]into what you were talking about in the poem. Well, I'm sorry, no Maslow, Milgram, Milgram, not Maslow.
[8:08]That didn't sound right. Well, Maslow was another person that I could write about, maybe some
[8:12]other time I'm interested in him also. But Stanley Milgram was Jewish and he was a young assistant
[8:19]professor. I think at Yale, he was probably like many, many Jews. He was haunted by the phenomenon
[8:26]of the Holocaust and probably I would surmise many of his European relatives probably perished
[8:35]in the death camps. So a Stanley Milgram as a young psychologist wanted to try to understand that
[8:43]phenomenon, how we know that Hitler was insane. He was a homicidal maniac and maybe the high-ranking
[8:50]Nazis were. But the Nazi phenomenon could not have taken place without the cooperation of average
[8:58]people, average German citizens, that large is almost like an industrial apparatus of the so-called
[9:07]final solution that required many, many, many people, thousands or hundreds of thousands of cooperative
[9:15]Germans. So Stanley Milgram is a young research psychologist wanted to understand how anybody
[9:23]could follow orders the way these people did. And so the famous or infamous series of experiments
[9:32]called studies and obedience that made Stanley Milgram very famous and very notorious. And he didn't
[9:40]get tenure at Yale. I think the backlash against him for exposing something about human nature
[9:47]that people didn't want to accept. He really suffered in the backlash and he actually,
[9:53]there wasn't kept out at Yale. He may have gone somewhere else equally prestigious. I'm not
[9:59]remembering.
[10:00]if you went to Columbia or someplace,
[10:02]so correct me if I'm wrong,
[10:04]but Stanley Milgram, I thought,
[10:06]was just astonishing as just as a psychologist,
[10:10]very interesting.
[10:12]At the same time,
[10:13]we feel, and looking at his experiments,
[10:16]that he too was experimenting with people.
[10:19]He wasn't telling them quite the truth at all.
[10:23]He wasn't telling his subjects
[10:26]that they would be experimented on.
[10:28]So maybe in a way, he was trespassing.
[10:32]That's probably the bottom line of that poem
[10:34]that I wrote.
[10:36]It's questioning Milgram himself.
[10:38]And I think that's one of the themes
[10:40]that you touch on in so many of these poems
[10:42]is who has the right to exert their own theories
[10:47]on other people and their own will on other people,
[10:49]whether it's a man not treating a woman right
[10:52]in a relationship or a science experiment
[10:55]or any of these ways,
[10:56]I feel like you're meditating on the meaning of power
[11:01]and what makes someone sort of a victim as well.
[11:05]I feel like it was just kind of coursing.
[11:07]And then of course, as you said,
[11:08]book ended with your own loss
[11:10]to make a very powerful package of reflections
[11:14]designed to really make the reader think through all of that.
[11:18]Well, you said you were a psychology major,
[11:20]so you obviously studied the famous experiment,
[11:22]little Albert.
[11:24]Yes, the conditioning.
[11:26]How easy it is to condition.
[11:28]You can condition anyone of any age,
[11:30]but particularly an infant who had no volition
[11:34]and had no protection.
[11:36]His mother really sort of gave him over
[11:39]to this experiment.
[11:40]Of course, his mother, I think, was a cleaning woman
[11:43]and she only got, she was paid like $1.
[11:45]You know, it was very sad, but little Albert,
[11:48]he was a victim about such an experiment.
[11:51]We would consider incredibly cruel today.
[11:55]And of course, you point out,
[11:56]nobody deconditioned all the subjects and all of these studies.
[11:59]No one took the time to get them sort of back to normal.
[12:01]Instead, they just sort of let them into the world
[12:03]to fend for themselves.
[12:05]It is amazing.
[12:06]John Watson is considered the father of American advertising.
[12:11]You know, the advertising was a commercial replication
[12:14]and application of the ideas of Pavlovian conditioning
[12:18]on human beings where you condition them
[12:21]to purchase your Cadillac or your deodorant
[12:24]or your shampoo and you're doing that with images
[12:27]that are usually visual.
[12:30]And it's usually like an magazine or later on television
[12:33]where as they original experiments,
[12:35]of course, were in the lab and they were actually
[12:37]with people, with living people.
[12:40]Well, the other poem I loved in this collection, by the way,
[12:43]was when the couple was, you call it too young to marry,
[12:47]but not too young to die about the couple
[12:50]that he said together beneath the ice
[12:53]in each other's arms.
[12:54]Jean-Marie's head rested on Troy's shoulder.
[12:56]Their hair had floated up and was frozen
[12:59]and their eyes were open and the perfect lucidity of death.
[13:02]Calmly, they sat upright, not a breath, just so beautiful.
[13:06]And then you said, yet you could believe they might
[13:08]be breathing for some trick of scintillate light
[13:10]revealed tiny bubbles in the ice and emotion like a smile
[13:14]and Jean-Marie's perfect fate.
[13:16]So it was about a couple that fell into the ice
[13:18]and this couple is young and you said, you know,
[13:20]they weren't even old enough to get married.
[13:22]And yet they were hugging each other and like they seemed so happy
[13:25]and eyes wide open as they faced death together.
[13:28]I don't know, it was the image.
[13:30]It reminded me of like the scene in the Titanic movie
[13:32]when the couple is spooning and bed and the water is coming
[13:35]and they're just at peace clutching each other.
[13:38]And I just feel like, I don't know,
[13:40]it was just a perfect poem of love in all its form.
[13:44]Oh, thank you all.
[13:45]Thank you.
[13:46]That appeared originally in the New Yorker
[13:48]and it had the sort of narrative look to it
[13:52]that it's like a story that unfolds.
[13:54]We are told by somebody reminiscing about when he was
[13:57]in high school, everybody was in awe of these very beautiful
[14:02]and handsome, this couple, you know,
[14:04]they were very beautiful.
[14:05]They were like the most popular couple and very envy.
[14:09]But then they had a kind of suicide pact
[14:12]because they weren't allowed to get married so young.
[14:14]So the boy drives them out into the ice
[14:17]which becomes soft thinner as you move away from shore.
[14:21]And then the car broke through the ice and they sink down
[14:26]and they drown together in the sort of perfect union.
[14:30]And then the ice closes over above them
[14:33]so they could be actually seen through the transparent ice.
[14:38]And it's like the way we freeze memories,
[14:41]like romance and nostalgia are frozen back in time.
[14:46]Probably there are no emotions.
[14:48]Quite as strong as our adolescent emotions,
[14:52]the sort of frozen back there connecting with our high school,
[14:56]like the corridors and the stairways and the lockers
[15:00]and the classrooms of a high school,
[15:02]for people who'd gone there,
[15:04]I just fraught with emotion,
[15:06]all kinds of adrenaline, you know,
[15:09]somebody else looking at it sees nothing.
[15:12]But the people who were once there and once teenagers,
[15:16]they feel so strongly.
[15:18]Oh, I'm glad you said that because my kids
[15:20]who are in kindergarten and first grade go to that,
[15:23]my same school where I went to high school.
[15:25]And I often find myself like lost in my own memories,
[15:29]walking through and have to be jolted back to the bag
[15:31]that somehow I have kids next to me or who were like,
[15:35]how do I have kids?
[15:36]I feel like I'm 14 whenever I walk through the hallway.
[15:38]So yes, there's something about.
[15:40]Yeah, that's a wonderful image.
[15:42]I mean, I could see writing a poem about that.
[15:45]You know, you're with your own children in this building
[15:48]and they are forming their memories and their emotions.
[15:52]And you're right beside them as like the two generations
[15:55]and different decades.
[15:57]And it's so rich.
[16:00]It's such a rich subject for a poem.
[16:02]I'm not such a poet, but maybe I'll try writing an essay about it.
[16:05]Now that you've inspired me to do that.
[16:07]You can write a poem about it.
[16:09]You can write a poem from the point of view
[16:13]of the person thinking it, who's not necessarily you?
[16:17]I mean, anybody can write poetry, I think,
[16:21]from a narrative voice perspective.
[16:23]Like it's not you.
[16:26]It's not lyric poetry, but it's like a narrative monologue.
[16:29]If you could certainly do that.
[16:31]Well, that's the question really about poetry
[16:33]that I wonder and I was wondering
[16:35]while I was reading your collection
[16:36]is what necessarily makes it a poem?
[16:39]Could I take a paragraph that I wrote in an essay?
[16:42]And if I change the form, would it become a poet, a poem?
[16:47]Like how do you know it's a poem?
[16:50]I know that sounds ridiculous,
[16:52]but some lyrical language, if you morphed the form of it,
[16:57]I feel like could be more poetic.
[16:59]But how do you know when you have a poem versus a paragraph?
[17:03]Well, it's a good question.
[17:04]Poetry is essentially very experimental,
[17:07]working with language.
[17:09]I think that you can take any passage
[17:11]that you care about.
[17:12]You have to have some emotional investment.
[17:15]That is the secret of poetry.
[17:18]When we read poetry like Shakespeare or Mary Oliver
[17:22]or Sharon Olds or Audemie Cole,
[17:25]we're sort of reading this encapsulated
[17:27]intense emotion that's been really polished
[17:30]and maybe like a stone that's been made smooth
[17:34]and aesthetically beautiful.
[17:36]It's not raw emotion.
[17:38]It's not like somebody screaming.
[17:40]But it's been sort of shaped.
[17:42]So anything that you personally care about,
[17:46]you could work into a poem if you took time.
[17:50]It's a meditative act.
[17:54]A much of my writing time is spent walking or running
[17:58]and thinking.
[18:00]In other words, maybe 80% of writing is thinking beforehand
[18:06]of the tone that you want
[18:07]and just trying to choose the sort of vocabulary.
[18:11]The actual writing time is secondary.
[18:14]So tell me about your running.
[18:17]How much running do you do?
[18:19]Well, I try to run every day.
[18:21]When it's cold, I don't go out as much.
[18:24]And I sometimes I run and walk and run and walk
[18:28]sort of walk very fast.
[18:30]If I'm with other people, I walk,
[18:32]and I have some women friends with whom I go walking.
[18:35]In a pandemic, we meet two or three times a week.
[18:38]And we just sort of walk, no matter how cold it is,
[18:41]we sort of bum the lock just to get exercise.
[18:44]And when I run alone, it's more beneficial for my writing.
[18:48]When I'm with other people, we tend to be talking,
[18:52]which of course is distracting.
[18:53]And when it's warm weather, I can run quite a bit.
[18:57]And I would go out every day,
[18:59]usually in the late afternoon.
[19:01]And I sort of think about my writing.
[19:04]I live outside Princeton about four miles.
[19:06]It's a semi-rural area.
[19:08]They're country roads.
[19:10]So I can be running past, pastures of sheep and cattle.
[19:16]There are farms here.
[19:17]Well, do you listen to music?
[19:19]Or you just let your thoughts gestate?
[19:21]Oh, I wouldn't listen to music.
[19:23]I would do it.
[19:25]You have to think and concentrate on your writing.
[19:29]Well, and you don't have any pain.
[19:31]I'm like astounded by this because it hurts my days.
[19:35]And I'm like, in my 40s.
[19:36]But anyway, no, I don't have any pain.
[19:39]But I found that if I had pain like a knee a little bit,
[19:43]if I just don't run on it for a couple of days,
[19:45]it goes away.
[19:47]But I think that we have to be careful
[19:50]if you have a little bit of pain in your knee,
[19:52]many people just want to keep on running and saying,
[19:54]well, it's like, I won't let this stop me or it's nothing.
[19:59]But I think that.
[20:00]That's a mistake.
[20:00]I think the best thing is to stop running for a couple of days.
[20:05]Wow.
[20:06]And then your other recent book, The Other You,
[20:09]the opening story in this collection
[20:12]was so interesting.
[20:13]It was literally what I think about all the time
[20:16]is what could my life have been like?
[20:17]What if I hadn't have had kids?
[20:19]What if, and of course, you pin it on a moment
[20:21]where a woman ends up not taking this exam that she should take
[20:24]and that she would have aced because she was super smart
[20:27]and it becomes like, you will versus the other alternative
[20:31]of life, which everybody must think about from time to time.
[20:35]What if, what if this had happened at this moment?
[20:37]Would I not have had my kids?
[20:39]What would have happened to them?
[20:40]What if I, you know, what if, what if, what if, what if?
[20:42]It's amazing.
[20:43]And I think the pandemic, being in quarantine
[20:46]and isolation for a year, has made many of us
[20:49]really think about alternative lives.
[20:52]Yeah, well, it's not only that, but you, you know,
[20:56]I don't know how you met your husband,
[20:58]but say you met your husband at a university
[21:00]or you got introduced by somebody, you'll be very easy
[21:04]not not to have met, you know, like what would your life be?
[21:09]Obviously we'd still be alive, but we would have lives
[21:13]that were radically different from the lives that we have.
[21:16]I actually, I'm divorced and remarried.
[21:18]And sometimes I keep marveling at the fact
[21:21]that my life has become the other life
[21:23]that I wondered if I could have.
[21:25]And I literally like sometimes drive down the same street
[21:28]with my second husband and the two kids I had later in life
[21:32]and living in a different house.
[21:34]And I think I can't believe that I was like,
[21:36]it was just me, you know, 10 years ago driving down the street
[21:39]in a different car and it's living in a different house.
[21:42]Yeah, it's really crazy.
[21:44]Where do you live?
[21:45]Well, I live in New York City, but I was talking about, you know,
[21:48]in Long Island, down in the Hamptons,
[21:50]where I grew up and going since 1979.
[21:53]So I've been traveling the same streets this whole time.
[21:58]And we'll have a similar situation
[21:59]because the house I live in now with my second husband
[22:03]is only about three minutes away from the house
[22:06]that I lived in with my first husband who died, Ray Smith.
[22:09]He died in 2008.
[22:12]I go by that house all the time.
[22:14]I go out of my way to go by that house
[22:17]that I remember my life there.
[22:20]And I have a kind of dream like nostalgia
[22:22]how I could actually walk in that door
[22:25]and let the house would be there
[22:27]and all the rooms come back.
[22:29]And then my first husband would be in his office
[22:32]where he was, he was an editor.
[22:34]And like everything is like a hallucination.
[22:37]But then it's actually 2021, you know,
[22:42]and not only have I lost that first house,
[22:44]but I lost my second husband.
[22:46]And so I'm in this house alone.
[22:49]And I mean, life seems to be so like a dream,
[22:54]I think, partly because of the isolation of the past year.
[22:58]And yet, you know, we're still here.
[23:00]We're still living our lives.
[23:02]Well, it's crazy that on top of all of this
[23:05]and the loss and everything,
[23:07]that then everyone has to be thrown into this period
[23:10]of time where you have to rethink everything
[23:12]because you're alone, it's your thoughts
[23:14]for so much of it as well.
[23:15]It's like a cruel joke in a way, but anyway.
[23:18]But for you, you've probably been in quarantine
[23:20]with a family.
[23:21]So probably you have a lot of attention paid to children.
[23:27]I mean, probably it's been,
[23:29]you haven't been alone as much as somebody else.
[23:31]So you probably have had a different kind of,
[23:34]a radically different kind of experience.
[23:36]Yes, there have been moments where I would love to be alone.
[23:40]Yes, I've been, you know, my kids have mostly been
[23:42]in remote school for this whole time.
[23:44]And I have four kids.
[23:46]And yeah, it's a lot.
[23:47]I have not had a lot of time alone.
[23:48]So, but everybody, everyone, everyone's plate
[23:52]has been so rearranged.
[23:54]We've all had to learn how to sort of eat again,
[23:56]if you will, during this, during this time.
[23:58]Yeah, I would guess that you as a mother have found time
[24:03]maybe late at night or early in the morning
[24:05]when people are sleeping,
[24:07]then you found some special sacred quiet time for yourself.
[24:11]Well, honestly, that's part of why I love doing these interviews
[24:15]and why I love doing my podcast and meeting people
[24:17]like you and having conversations
[24:19]because while this isn't a loan time per se,
[24:22]it's when I talk to people,
[24:23]that's how I get in touch with like who I am when I'm not,
[24:26]you know, picking up toys and you're doing the laundry
[24:29]or all these like day to day things like this is such a gift.
[24:32]It's like connects me not just to the person I'm talking to
[24:34]but to myself.
[24:35]I don't know if you feel that way when you ask others.
[24:38]Well, I remember my friend Tony Morrison,
[24:40]when she was my colleague at Princeton,
[24:43]she had a busy life and she was teaching and so forth.
[24:46]So she would get up at five in the morning
[24:49]and do her writing.
[24:50]She would sort of get up early and do her writing.
[24:53]That's, you know, working on novels like Beloved.
[24:56]In other words, she found a time,
[25:00]probably she would rather be asleep, you know,
[25:02]like most of us, but Tony found a time
[25:05]that was the sacred time.
[25:07]And I try to do that too.
[25:09]I find that because I don't have a domestic schedule
[25:13]I can waste a lot of time, you know.
[25:16]When my husband was living and we had more of a schedule,
[25:20]we would do things together.
[25:22]And of course, we were out in the world at that time.
[25:25]My life was a matter of a daily schedule.
[25:28]So I would get a lot of writing done.
[25:30]But now with an open sort of timelessness,
[25:34]you think, well, I have all day long to work on my novels.
[25:37]So maybe I'll do this chore first or answer some emails.
[25:42]In other words, if you're more busy
[25:44]and connected with other people in the world,
[25:47]I think you actually get more done.
[25:49]Yeah, it's like, give a busy person something to do
[25:51]and it'll get done in two seconds.
[25:52]But are you working on a novel now?
[25:56]Oh, yes, I have been working on a novel very intensely
[25:59]since the pandemic began.
[26:01]I think that it's been a great silence
[26:04]and putting together the poems for American melancholy
[26:08]and using the photograph on the cover of the book
[26:10]is a photograph taken by Charlie, my husband,
[26:14]of Lake George, which was his favorite place
[26:18]in all the world.
[26:19]And there are two little duff.
[26:21]You can just sort of see a duck couple,
[26:24]like that's most of it.
[26:26]It's so melancholy, these two little,
[26:29]this little couple of duff, ducks on this choppy lake
[26:34]and sort of like symbolic of the marriage, I suppose.
[26:39]And it seemed like just a perfect cover
[26:41]for that particular book.
[26:43]And the pre-dumb in a tone is melancholy,
[26:45]but there are some poems that are meant to be funny
[26:48]like the one about the cat, the different kind of cat,
[26:52]dot, cat, a real dog girl, you know,
[26:55]and there are a few, and one about Marlon Brando,
[26:57]supposed to have some humor in it.
[26:59]So it is an all-mail in town.
[27:02]And then also with the other you,
[27:04]the story called the unexpected
[27:06]where the woman writers,
[27:08]she's not young any longer.
[27:09]She goes back to her hometown,
[27:12]which is the hometown of the first story, Uville.
[27:16]And then she meets these people
[27:17]like went to high school and grade school with her.
[27:20]And they're also jealous of me.
[27:23]And they keep asking her these awful questions,
[27:25]are you sorry that you didn't have any children
[27:29]or are you alone or could you do your career over again?
[27:32]Or, you know, the questions that they put to her
[27:35]are really kind of niggardly and nasty.
[27:38]All that is meant to be somewhat funny,
[27:41]you know, in a dark, humorous way.
[27:44]Even the one about the friend waiting for her friend
[27:47]to show up late at the restaurant at the vegan place
[27:49]and you're like, they didn't even really love vegetarian food.
[27:51]But you know, like they thought they should be there.
[27:53]And even how you kind of joke that one of them had another child
[27:57]because the other had another child and they were funny.
[28:01]Well, I think that women, women, friends
[28:03]who have known each other a long time
[28:05]are really like sisters.
[28:06]And they're very supportive emotionally.
[28:09]And there's a kind of a quiet intensity.
[28:13]The friendship goes on for so many years
[28:16]that they know each other so well.
[28:18]Some of the bonds are even stronger
[28:20]than between a husband and a wife
[28:23]because the wife doesn't always want to tell the husband,
[28:25]you know, some things where you're more likely to tell
[28:28]a woman friend, my friends and I recall ourselves
[28:31]like a girlfriend's, it's hard to believe
[28:34]that we're well beyond being girls
[28:36]because there's a kind of girlish connection of often humor
[28:40]and, you know, teasing and playfulness
[28:43]that you'll find among women, friends.
[28:46]But the women, friends, that story is one of my favorites.
[28:50]And there are three stories in the collection.
[28:52]I'll set it the same vegetarian restaurant.
[28:55]It's a place that I knew in Berkeley
[28:57]that Charlie and I would go to.
[28:59]One of these menus with all this, you know, lots of kale.
[29:03]Lots of organic and things that don't sound,
[29:07]but they don't really sound very appetizing,
[29:10]but they're politically correct.
[29:14]Although you end up having like a bomber show up
[29:17]at this restaurant.
[29:18]So in the past, and there's a lot of history
[29:20]to the restaurant in the story.
[29:21]So it's not exactly like this.
[29:23]It's not like this.
[29:24]It's not like this.
[29:25]In each story, he shows up somewhere in each story.
[29:28]One story, he seems to be there, another story.
[29:32]He hasn't been there and another story.
[29:35]You sort of hear what he's thinking is,
[29:38]he himself is so dissociated.
[29:42]Like he wants to set off a bomb
[29:44]and he wants to cause a catastrophe.
[29:47]But he doesn't really comprehend that he's going to die.
[29:51]Like he sort of thinks to himself,
[29:53]well, this isn't really going to happen.
[29:55]Is that, you know, like I didn't do very well
[29:57]in chemistry and science and high school.
[30:00]I'm really not going to be successful, and I think probably a lot of people who do desperate things may be including suicide, a part of their brain is thinking, well, this is not really going to happen, you know, I'm just going to sort of play through the gesture, which is somewhat theatrical.
[30:17]Suicide bombing is so theatrical, you know, it's probably rarely achieves any kind of goal at all, except to destroy human life, that there must be some element of dissociation, that the person doesn't really think he's dying.
[30:35]But with some religious oriented or politically religious oriented suicide bombings that they actually think they're going to go to heaven, so they're going to be in some other dimension, they don't really think they're just going to be an island.
[30:48]So, with that kind of a suicide gesture, there must be some element of hallucination and fantasy. When you start a new project as sort of a living literary legend who's won all these awards and you must feel a sense of accomplishment and confidence in your writing.
[31:08]When you start something new, do you ever feel worried like that it's not going to be good or like your luck is run out or do you approach everything like knowing what you want to say or like what is it like when you start a new project like the novel you're working on now.
[31:21]The idea that writing is a kind of activity it's cerebral and also an emotional so you know that you're going to do some writing if you're a writer like next Monday you're going to be writing.
[31:34]So you have this sort of a ferocity of your name to to be creative. So what what you're going to do with that you know it's like harnessing some power.
[31:45]You're going to work on a poem, I even went on a short story or I didn't work at a novel. You're sort of choosing what to do with this yearning to to write or to compose something.
[31:59]You're probably going to be limited to writing about that particular subject.
[32:05]If you look at the very last paintings and van Gogh's life which are very thick, the paint, the brush strokes are very thick and they're all natural scenes like of the sky and the landscape.
[32:22]And the sun or flowers. It's a really very thick. You can feel that the artist again goal was totally in the throes of a kind of dream like intensity of emotion that maybe he couldn't really control.
[32:38]So it's a kind of benign compulsion.
[32:42]It's benign because it's productive. It's not that somebody is just washing your hands, you know over and over again in a non productive way.
[32:51]So if you are a writer and I'm friendly with Margaret at where we're almost the same age and we sort of came a page in Canada when I lived in Canada, Margaret was a rising.
[33:02]I mean very rapidly rising poet and I was writing prose fiction books, but I think Margaret at would probably share us with me this feeling that you never really
[33:14]have mastered anything.
[33:16]You know, you do know from the past that if you work at sort of diligently every morning and as long as you can, you will achieve something.
[33:25]But you don't know how hard it will be. You don't know how long it will take. You don't know how miserable you might be.
[33:34]So it's about to answer your question. It's both something that's that is familiar because you've done it before, but unpredictable.
[33:44]Because you don't really know what it's going to be a writer whose written novels is challenged not to repeat herself.
[33:54]So this is a really long novel you can see that this is a family novel with about with the parents and about five children.
[34:19]The next novel which is coming out in August is much shorter. It's about a marriage after the husband has has died. It's very much a sort of memoirist novel which is really only about two people
[34:34]with some people in the background. Whereas this long novel is about about seven people and I'm moving from one person to the other and has a lot to do with politics in America right now.
[34:48]The new novel is very intense and limited to two people almost nothing really almost nothing at all about politics in America, mostly the emotional intensity of losing a spouse being unable to save the spouse in any way and then being haunted.
[35:09]Most of the novel is about the aftermath of a loss and how we're haunted by grief, but in a novel literally haunted by thinking she sees the husband.
[35:20]And maybe she really sees the husband, you know, we don't really know. So that's an example of how because you've written one thing.
[35:28]The next thing you do it might be much shorter. Or the next thing you do it might be a book of nonfiction. It's sort of reacting against what you've done most recently.
[35:39]Sounds like it could be a play. You know, can you see it maybe.
[35:42]No, no, it really couldn't be a play because it has a has a lot of all hallucinatory passages that are very dreamlike.
[35:49]And they're in this unfamiliar setting. I think that losing somebody takes you to a new world. And literally they're a new Mexico. They're in a place sort of like Santa Fe, but not it's not Santa Fe, but it's like Santa Fe.
[36:04]And the landscape is that beautiful. The beautiful landscape of of New Mexico, which is really inhuman, you know, it's an austere.
[36:17]Russ read mountainous landscape.
[36:23]Without much green in it.
[36:26]And sort of like Georgia or Keith country very austere.
[36:31]And sort of lunar it's like you're right on the moon or on another on the Mars or someplace. So that's where this this novel sort of plays out.
[36:41]Whereas the novel that I've been showing you was actually set right much of it set right in the room. I'm in right now, because it's because it's very much an autobiographical novel.
[36:52]And the widow in this novel is living in the house like my house.
[36:56]So I've done some zoom into interviews about this novel, which is so weird because the woman in the novel is in this room a lot.
[37:06]It's really in the same the same room. What is the title. Someone's asking in the chat. What's the title of the novel going to be. Does it have one yet.
[37:14]Yes, it's called breathe.
[37:16]Oh, it's going to be great. Yeah. Well, we all have the hospital vigil. I don't feel me. Only one who's ever gone through it, but I have actually written about the hospital vigil.
[37:27]In the other, you know, the hospice. We all go through it where you're at the hospital all day long and leave at night and come back in the morning and and you get to know the elevator you take and you walk down the corridor, you go in a certain room.
[37:45]It's so. I don't know. It's like it's a universal experience and each person suffers it or endurance it alone, you know, we are all alone at the same time it's universal.
[37:57]Do you have any advice for someone just starting out who wants to be a writer or trying to be a writer.
[38:04]Well, I teach writing a writing workshop all every semester I teach in the fall I teach at NYU and I teach at Princeton and right now I'm teaching a course at Rutgers of course they're all zoom.
[38:19]I have about 15 just by accident all women. In fact, Margaret at was going to visit our class today and writers are people who've been reading. I think that we become writers because we read when we're young when we're very young and maybe our parents read to us, you know, children's books with pictures and the parent reads this little text and after a while the child.
[38:46]I've heard the story many times and the child starts to read. I think that's how parents teach their children to read, you know, in literate cultures, did you do that sort of thing like reading to your children.
[38:59]I still do that type of thing just like my mom did to me and yes, I love it and sometimes they're like they love it, but usually I'm so tired at that point of the night.
[39:09]So why do I always say this for the night when I'm my most tired, why don't we read it like three in the afternoon when I'm full of energy but and they're like, they love it, they love it.
[39:19]Not like they were all cuddling in bed and then they fall asleep and their mother's reading to them I think that's really lovely.
[39:27]Yes, no it's nice and I try to remind myself when they ask for a second book.
[39:31]It's not like they're asking for iPad time like I should give them a second book. It's a second book.
[39:36]I wish I had my children's book here. They show you because I have written a number of children's books, but they're in another room so.
[39:44]They're all about kittens.
[39:48]Yeah, each book is about a kitten.
[39:51]I will stock up on your children's books now that.
[39:56]So thank you very much is a lot of.
[40:00]Great thank yous in our chat and thank you, Joyce and thank you, Zippy.
[40:06]Thanks for listening to this episode of Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books. Don't forget to
[40:10]follow me on Instagram at Zippy Owens and at Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books. Also sign
[40:15]up for my newsletter at zippyowens.com and sign up for my virtual book club and meet lots of authors
[40:20]on Zoom every other week. Thanks so much to Steve and Ryan at Texturesound for the Sound Editing.
[40:25]And thank you to Morning Moon Productions for providing this
[40:28]fantastic intro and outro music.