Joyce Carol Oates, BABYSITTER: A Novel
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[0:58]Joyce Carol Oates is the author of babysitter an novel
[1:02]She's also the recipient of the National Humanities Medal
[1:04]The National Book Critics Circle
[1:06]Ivan Sandroft Lifetime Achievement Award
[1:08]The National Book Award
[1:10]And the 2019 Jerusalem Prize for Lifetime Achievement
[1:13]And she's been nominated several times for the Pulitzer Prize
[1:17]She has written some of the most enduring fiction of our time including the National Bestsellers
[1:21]We Were the Mulvaney's Blonde and the New York Times Bestseller The Falls
[1:25]Which won the 2005 Pre-Femina
[1:28]In 2020 she was awarded the Cino del Duca World Prize for Literature
[1:32]She is the Roger S. Berlin 52 Distinguished Professor of the Humanities Emerita at Princeton University
[1:38]And has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters since 1978
[1:43]Welcome. Thank you so much for coming on moms. Don't have time to read books to talk about babysitter
[1:49]Thank you. I'm happy to be here. This book completely kept me up at night
[1:54]I absolutely love how you wrote it
[1:57]I am like in it every moment trying to figure out what is happening
[2:03]Like worrying that the scariest thing is right around the corner
[2:08]Like the visual aspect of it like the heels sinking into the hallway carpet
[2:14]Just like every little moment and and even what it's like to be a mom with her gala benefit
[2:20]Like just all this stuff. So I think I just I'm just absolutely loving this book. So thanks
[2:26]Thank you. I'm sticking up. It says a mother that she finally comes through her senses
[2:32]Yes, protecting her children when it came down to it
[2:35]She was basically doing this instinctive good thing
[2:39]Would you mind telling listeners a little about
[2:43]What inspired you to write babysitter and really what it's about?
[2:47]Oh, sure. Well, when I lived in Detroit in the 1970s
[2:52]There was actually in a suburb of the northern suburbs of Detroit. There was a serial killer
[2:59]And he was called by the press babysitter
[3:02]He was also called the Oakland County Child Killer
[3:07]And basically the novel presents this person as he was in real life historically
[3:16]In it's how what I wanted to do was to give it in for give the impression
[3:21]A very realistic psychologically given way of what it's like to live in a world
[3:27]Immediately whether there is a serial killer right there
[3:32]Perhaps a few miles from you
[3:35]You don't know who it is. Maybe he's in a grocery store with you or the drugstore
[3:40]And so when we were living there in 19 in the 1970s
[3:45]It was an existentially very melodramatic and somewhat paranoid time
[3:52]I was friendly with several women. Maybe five or six or seven women who lived in Birmingham and Bloomfield Hills
[4:00]And they're like Hannah and her friends quite well to do
[4:06]Very well educated
[4:08]Really intelligent women, but most of them did not have careers
[4:12]Well, men have had careers except they were married and they were married to quite well to do
[4:16]Man executives in corporations and small businesses
[4:22]So I did really experience that sense of paranoia
[4:26]And fear opening the newspaper every morning and seeing whether the babysitter had struck again
[4:33]He kidnapped
[4:35]Tortured and I think mutilated children between ages of about seven and 13
[4:42]And most of them were boys and a couple were girls
[4:45]It wasn't clear whether he meant to take girls or whether he thought they were boys when he took them so
[4:51]I thought I think it had a sort of home erratic
[4:55]It was a
[4:57]Pedophilia and it might have been homosexual. I'm not sure
[5:02]Now the babysitter was never apprehended and it was thought that there are
[5:09]Speculation about who we might have been law enforcement has some idea
[5:14]So there are maybe one or two people who
[5:17]Might have been the babysitter one of them committed suicide
[5:21]And one of them I think may have died in prison
[5:24]So the novel has this strong core of
[5:31]Reality at sort of a malevolent
[5:34]Radiation like something's radioactive and that's the babysitter. He's there
[5:38]And then around that in kind of orbit are domestic situations and people with marriages and
[5:46]A woman who makes some decisions
[5:49]That turn out to be mistaken. She made some mistakes
[5:54]But I don't feel that she was in any way a malicious or even stupid
[5:59]She sort of made mistakes that women were making in those days
[6:04]Maybe not so much now after me too
[6:07]Women are more alert and alive to being exploited, but I think in the 1970s
[6:13]Not so much. Wow
[6:16]The way you wrote Hannah's character and how you allude to
[6:21]Some sexual abuse perhaps from her own father or you keep calling him daddy and how you dribble that in tell me about that
[6:32]Well, yes, Hannah is a woman who as a girl
[6:36]Had a very kind of anxious relationship with your father
[6:40]He was judgmental. He was sarcastic. He was like the dominant figure in the household
[6:47]The mother was subservient to him, which is very typical of households
[6:52]In the 1950s it was basically like the temple and I think for
[6:57]The patriarchy and that you know mid-century
[7:00]and so girls were
[7:02]either
[7:03]Traditionally trained or
[7:06]Unconsciously conditioned
[7:08]To try to please man to be smiling and gracious and acquiescent
[7:14]And I guess you could say polite and sweet. You know, there's nothing really wrong with being
[7:20]polite and sweet. We all smile over deal
[7:23]But little girls are sort of trained that they should do that if they don't do that
[7:28]Then they get this kind of hostility from the father. So Hannah was really conditioned by a father
[7:34]Who wanted her to be as beautiful as possible as charming and seductive as possible
[7:40]He himself is of rather enigmatic figure. I call him joke or daddy because he often made jokes
[7:47]And he was ironic and he was not really easily understood by his children
[7:52]Well, I feel like there was also this level of you know
[7:56]Unsettledness when she thinks about him and that relationship
[8:02]And I feel like it comes into her relationship with the man in the hotel
[8:07]And somehow it's like a backdrop for perhaps making the decision to visit him
[8:12]I mean the novel opens with Hannah basically a man touches her hand
[8:18]Her wrist rather during a gala and and she decides that this will be the man to suddenly have an affair with in the hotel
[8:27]And you tell it in just the detail of her driving on the windy highway and
[8:33]Looking at the empty gala reception room where she had just had
[8:37]She just co-chaired and got to stand up and preen in front of all the fans and the doubt and the self-doubt
[8:43]And then all of the the the mothering doubt too right you and then when you have her daughter
[8:50]Get very ill like tell me about that
[8:52]So she feels like it's almost a punishment from God that she had made this mistake of going and then of course the
[8:58]Well, I mean, I don't want to give things away, but but fairly early first hundred pages or so the daughter gets very sick
[9:04]So tell me tell me about that plot line and how I love how you have some line about how
[9:10]It unites her and her husband west right when they both are there and scared waiting to see how there were something
[9:17]So unifying about that for their relationship in a way
[9:21]Yes, well Hannah is is a very devoted mother
[9:26]But she's not really
[9:28]Identified by her children in any other way except as a mother. I think she feels that she's that she's on the cusp of turning 40
[9:36]She is still she's a very attractive woman and she has lightened her hair and has nice clothes
[9:42]But she's she said of feels that she's losing her
[9:46]Attractions as a woman. She her her marriage is a kind of
[9:51]comfortable marriage that her husband may not even be always faithful to her. She doesn't exactly know because he
[10:00]gravels a good deal. So what she has in a, she embarks upon an adventure that quickens her excitement
[10:09]and maybe raises her estimation of herself as a woman a little bit. She goes from being somebody
[10:15]who's not noticed in the household, her husband is eating breakfast and looking at the newspaper,
[10:20]you know, he's not really conscious of her. Then he goes away to his office in a very nice building.
[10:26]I know the, I know the tribe very well and I lived there and so I put him in a nice office
[10:31]building. I don't know what it's like now in 2022, but at that time this sort of
[10:39]Fisher Center in New York was maybe like Rockefeller Center. It was, it was pretty classy
[10:45]and, and he's from a very affluent, gross point family. So he's sort of, he has access to a lot of
[10:53]social connections and financial associates that she doesn't understand. I think she just feels
[11:00]that she's lost an identity. She's a kind of non entity. Her children love her, but they love
[11:07]her as mommy, like they're, they really adore her, but she doesn't feel that, that they know her
[11:16]and then Wes of course doesn't even look at her anymore. Now the man who pursues her is,
[11:23]I got meant to give out too much of the novel, but we learn retrospectively that he was zeroing
[11:30]in on her. You know, and that there are predators like that who can be extremely charming. They
[11:36]may be psychopaths of sociopaths and they can just exude such an air of sincerity and and fascination.
[11:48]And he also has a connection, social connections. I think that people get a sense of their
[11:54]worth as they connect with others. I'm kind of looking at the sociology of an upper middle-class
[12:02]society, suburban society, where an individual is sort of bored up by the regard of other people.
[12:11]Hannah is so happy when she gets invited to the right, the friends of the
[12:16]Detroit Institute of Arts, and she's on this committee to do the gala. And I remember those
[12:23]years. I was never part of that society, but my friends were like one year a friend could be
[12:30]the chair of the gala. An enormous amount of work all volunteer, but you're at the head table,
[12:39]the mayor of the city sits with you, maybe the governor comes. You know, you're a woman
[12:46]who's basically a housewife, but you have a well to do husband, and you give money to
[12:54]this charity, and then you become somebody for an evening. You're really a VIP. So Hannah gets
[13:03]she gets that and she's actually applauding and she looks around and sees that these people,
[13:08]they really like her, but at the same time it's kind of a performance and a charade. So I wanted
[13:14]to suggest how kind of touching and real those experiences are. I didn't mean to be satirical.
[13:22]My friends who belong to these organizations were genuinely altruistic, and they were culture,
[13:32]and they were like Hannah and her friends. Kind of keeping up, you know, like the friends of
[13:39]the Detroit public library, the friends of an app, friends of our, friends of the concert,
[13:46]some of the chamber music concert, friends of the symphony, those are all women volunteering
[13:52]your time. And I don't present them satirically. I do present them as somewhat naive and easily
[13:59]victimized. This is one character named Marcella. And she's sort of at the periphery. And she's
[14:05]a little bit like Hannah. And it just mentioned very casually that she's disappeared. And there's
[14:12]like $800,000 missing from her bank account. And like what's happened to her, you know, like she's
[14:18]actually, obviously been exploited. I don't pursue that. But I think the reader would sort of notice
[14:25]you wrote the relationship between Hannah and her housekeeper, imagine like that was so amazing.
[14:33]I mean, you, because you include her interior monologue about her relationship. And then you show
[14:42]why sometimes she's almost snapping because she's feeling so deficient in her own ways.
[14:49]Tell me more about that relationship. What is Melta is actually based on a Filipino housekeeper
[14:56]of a friend who was just such a wonderful person. She was like the heartbeat of the, of the
[15:03]household. She took care of the child. She did the cooking. She did all this. Eventually she became
[15:11]the companion of the wife because there was there was a divorce and the household fell apart.
[15:17]And so this quite attractive, very petite Filipino housekeeper sort of stepped forward. And she had a
[15:29]lot of responsibility. I don't know what has happened to her now because the house was the whole
[15:35]household just broke up. The wife, I think, had a nervous breakdown and became an alcoholic.
[15:43]The husband fled, went to New York. And I think the housekeeper may have,
[15:49]she may have been an illegal immigrant. And she may have just disappeared somewhere. She's
[15:55]probably working for someone else. She was just wonderful. So is Melta was not her name.
[16:03]But as Melta is a portrait, I wanted to really look at kind of these quiet people and households
[16:10]who may be running everything, you know, where that, where that Hannah is out having his
[16:15]twist with her lover and all of the awful experiences, it says, Melta taking care of the children.
[16:21]She makes the data serve that. She takes care of the house. She does the vacuuming, you know,
[16:26]she's sort of holding things together. She drives the children to school. She picks them up.
[16:30]She's just doing everything. Wow. Is this some sort of commentary on that type of mothering?
[16:38]Do you feel like Hannah in her, is a good mother quote unquote? Oh, I don't know that she's
[16:45]not a good mother. I really, again, it's not a satirical portrait. It's more like holding a mirror
[16:51]up to you. It's just that society, you know, if your husband is making a couple million dollars a
[16:59]year or whatever, you know, and you have some children, it's really not all that unreasonable
[17:05]that you have a housekeeper or nanny, you know, you can afford it. You can have two cars or three
[17:10]cars. And the housekeeper or the nanny is really, very, very helpful for women. I have never
[17:19]had a housekeeper or nanny. So I'm not, I'm not writing about myself. But I want to be respectful
[17:25]of people who are different from myself, who come from a different background. I think it's,
[17:32]it's too easy just to satirize, you know, and show caricatures of people. I don't ever really do
[17:40]that. I try not to do that in my writing. So I'm, I wrote a whole novel, a book of American
[17:46]Marta is where I spent a lot of time with people we would call them Trump people today,
[17:51]people who are anti abortion and evangelical Christians. And I wanted to present them
[17:58]sincerely as they are, without presenting them as clowns or bullies or fools or evil,
[18:08]but it was satirical portraits. So I guess as a novelist, I want to present people for myself.
[18:16]Now the reader might feel the reader should have her own opinion. Like the reader might think,
[18:22]oh, Hannah is a bad mother. And Hannah is doing something I wouldn't do. Hannah goes away
[18:28]because she has an appointment with this man. She leaves home and her daughter has a, has a
[18:34]temperature. And she's sort of gambling, you know, should I stay home or keep the little girl at
[18:40]home? And she decides to go off and let the housekeeper deal with the problem. So that's one of
[18:47]decisions that she makes as a mother, which I would guess a lot of mothers make and fathers,
[18:53]you know, if you're a parent full-time, you make little decisions now and then that usually
[18:59]turn out okay, you know, but like you allow a play date with somebody that you wondered about it,
[19:06]then it turned out you're trying to get COVID or something. I mean, you can't really react. I don't
[19:11]think it means anyone's a bad mother. But then Hannah is very guilty and she feels terrible
[19:19]and she thinks that she caused her daughter, gainness on. She thinks it's meningitis but it isn't
[19:27]that serious. And so she vows she's never going to do this again, but she doesn't keep that
[19:32]vow. Even though it seems highly unpleasurable what she goes through. Well again, that's sort of
[19:39]hard to say. I don't think I would, I don't think I would tolerate anything like that. But
[19:45]the thing for Hannah is that she is so utterly bored in the life. She has financial security. She has
[19:55]a husband who's not very attentive to her, but he's there and she has...
[20:00]so she has these meetings with the women's organizations.
[20:03]She doesn't have any excitement in her life,
[20:05]but nobody's looking at her pretending to love her.
[20:10]I mean, it's maybe just a charade.
[20:13]You know, I don't want to give too much away,
[20:15]but she sincerely believes that this man is sexually attracted to her
[20:19]and that this is all very real.
[20:22]The sea was real to her.
[20:23]Again, that wouldn't be anything that I would do,
[20:25]but definitely people do these things.
[20:27]I was not saying her, I was just sort of presenting that.
[20:32]But I do, I mean, really bad mistakes getting married.
[20:36]They just made a mistake.
[20:39]And honest mistake.
[20:42]Can you tell me more about the process of writing this book?
[20:46]And even the decisions you made about, you know,
[20:50]interspersing some of the all italicized,
[20:53]the most group voices from the deceased.
[20:58]Well, it started off as a short story.
[21:00]It was published, it was called the babysitter.
[21:03]So it was a short story, maybe 15, 10 years ago.
[21:07]And I always wanted to go back to her because Hannah is going,
[21:10]it starts off Hannah's driving under to try and express where she's going to
[21:15]the hotel.
[21:16]And then she's with this man, then she comes home.
[21:19]And in the way in the background is the babysitter and the serial killer.
[21:24]He's not in the story, but he's like a prospect,
[21:28]you know, like something in the background.
[21:31]So when I went back to the story, I took the beginning.
[21:34]And then I obviously what we call enhanced or developed it.
[21:39]And this is some backstory.
[21:41]And then I go into the minds of the children who have been victimized,
[21:47]who have been killed.
[21:50]And eventually we do discover who babysitter is,
[21:53]which one can't do in real life.
[21:57]You can't find it's this is not a true crime story in a way.
[22:02]It's like a true crime story in the beginning.
[22:06]But then I actually have an idea.
[22:08]I strongly feel this was probably this person was probably babysitter.
[22:13]He committed suicide.
[22:15]He took his own life.
[22:16]And maybe some people who know that he is when somebody is a pedophile,
[22:23]an active pedophile with a record.
[22:26]You can be sure that other people know about that.
[22:28]There's maybe pedophiles like pedophile, pedophilia rings,
[22:33]and they send things on the internet to one another.
[22:37]And it's a society.
[22:40]It's a secret society that really don't have access to.
[22:45]So the babysitter was probably, it was thought he was part of this pedophilia ring
[22:51]in Detroit, where boys were shared with particularly boys,
[22:56]like who wouldn't protect it by parents who might have single mothers who were prostitutes.
[23:02]And I did do research into that.
[23:04]So I have a little bit of that in a novel.
[23:06]And there are women and girls who are so addicted to cocaine or crack
[23:12]that they actually give up their children for some to a pedophilia.
[23:17]A pedophile, I mean, they actually do that.
[23:19]This is real.
[23:21]And so there's a little bit of that in my novel.
[23:23]But mostly it's set from Hannah's perspective.
[23:26]And when you set out to write this,
[23:30]did you know the whole, all the pieces of the puzzle ahead of time?
[23:34]And then how did you go about writing it?
[23:36]Like how long did it take to write?
[23:38]And oh, is your process like in the writing of it?
[23:42]Oh, well, I'll novel's take place over a period of time.
[23:45]I'll period of months.
[23:46]And I'd always knew the ending because the first chapter is actually the ending.
[23:51]I mean, in the first chapter, it's the ending.
[23:56]So
[23:57]but then we don't know how exactly how the first chapter ends.
[24:00]So I have the kind of bookends or the frame.
[24:05]Yeah.
[24:06]I always knew she was going.
[24:08]And maybe she's got a gun in her hand, but because it's a little heavier than yours.
[24:12]So we are a signal, some to the reader, that the handbag is heavier than usual.
[24:18]Does she have a gun?
[24:19]She's going to use the gun.
[24:20]And she's in her, she's been back in the corner
[24:25]like a trapped rat.
[24:26]And she's being blackmailed.
[24:28]And she's desperate whether in real life, Hannah could actually take out a gun and shoot somebody.
[24:36]I don't know.
[24:37]And this doubtful that she could do that.
[24:40]And maybe she doesn't actually even have to do it.
[24:44]I've always tempted if anybody reads my novels to ask if they really know what happened.
[24:51]But I don't want to do that because it would give away the vibes.
[24:59]But it's very intricately plotted.
[25:01]So it's the second chapter to the end that really ascertains
[25:10]what is going to happen.
[25:12]And then the actual final chapter is leading up to that, if that makes any sense.
[25:19]Yes, I did plot carefully because it is also a mystery and a thriller.
[25:23]So in that genre, you plot everything carefully.
[25:27]So if somebody's a killer, if somebody's been killed,
[25:32]it's your responsibility to solve that crime in the novel.
[25:37]That's a tradition or convention, a mystery detective fiction and thriller.
[25:45]So I did that.
[25:48]Wow.
[25:48]Thank you so much.
[25:50]That's it.
[25:51]Hope that was easy.
[25:54]One time was my favorite character.
[25:56]Oh, yeah, yup.
[25:57]Well, again, I really found it quite riveting and page turning and beautifully written.
[26:07]And I just, you know, haven't come from more of that world.
[26:10]Just totally, I don't know.
[26:12]Just absolutely loved it.
[26:13]So thank you so much.
[26:17]All right.
[26:17]Thank you so much.
[26:18]Take care.
[26:19]Bye bye.
[26:21]Thanks for listening to this episode of Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books.
[26:24]Don't forget to follow me on Instagram at zebioens and at Moms Don't Have Time to Read
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[26:36]Thanks so much to Steve and Ryan at Textures Sound for the Sound Editing.
[26:40]And thank you to Morning Moon Productions for providing this fantastic intro and outro music.