Joyce Carol Oates Interview (page: 3 / 9) National Book Award	Print Interview

You had this creative disposition, yet your parents had to deal with pragmatic survival issues. Were you more or less a free creative spirit in the home? Was there any kind of value clash?

Joyce Carol Oates: I was always interested in writing and reading, but I had many chores to do.

I did a lot of work around the house and around the farm. I remember cutting the lawn -- not with a power mower, but with a hand mower -- when I was fairly young. So, it wasn't that I was a free spirit. I was not a free spirit. I fit in with the household in the way that people do in farm communities. Everybody's working, basically. But I think I had my own private imagination as we all do. And I just found a way to have a private space in my own imagination somehow.
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Did you feel that you were different from the other kids?

Joyce Carol Oates: It's hard to say how we compare to other people. We each inhabit our own personalities. I have often felt that I'm a very neutral being and that I have almost no personality.

I'm drawn to writing partly because I'm fascinated by the mimetic process. That is, to describe a scene that moves me emotionally, to render it into language so that it may evoke the same emotion in a reader. I find that I'm in love with the external world, and writing is a way of conveying that.
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But as far as my own personality's concerned, it's as if I'm a neutral or transparent medium. One thing comes, by way of the medium, into being a book or some writing. I don't know whether I was different from other people. Perhaps I am. Perhaps no one has a personality, and people are inventing themselves in the context in which they find themselves.

Did you have any major setbacks while you were creating yourself as a writer?

Joyce Carol Oates: Major setbacks? I have minor setbacks probably every day of my life. I have a friend in Princeton, who's a writer named John McPhee. He says every writer has a mini-nervous breakdown some time in the mid-morning but keeps going. I guess that's about it. Each day is like an enormous rock that I'm trying to push up this hill. I get it up a fair distance, it rolls back a little bit, and I keep pushing it, hoping I'll get it to the top of the hill and that it will go on its own momentum.

I'm very deeply inculcated with a sense of failure for some reason. And I'm drawn to failure. I often write about it, and I'm sympathetic with it I think, because I feel I'm contending with it constantly in my own life. A sense that there is a movement toward light or illumination which requires strength and ingenuity. But then there's another contrary force that pulls us back into defeat and a sense of giving up. I feel, probably, that I'm in the throes of that contest every day of my life, virtually.
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Was there ever a day when you felt like giving up?

Joyce Carol Oates: I've felt like giving up many times. It's hard to talk about now, because one cannot convey the depth of the emotion. When one talks about something retrospectively, it seems to be under control, but during the experience, there was no sense of control.

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