Joyce Carol Oates on True Crime, Her Improbable Life, and Joan Didion

In the third episode of Private Life, Joyce Carol Oates joins Jarrett Earnest for an expansive conversation on everything from Joan Didion to serial killers. They discuss “New York: Sentimental Journeys,” Didion’s essay from the Review’s March 7, 1991, issue about the Central Park Five, the rush to judgment in a sensational murder case, media mythmaking, and sentimentalized narratives about crime. The conversation also touches on the state of long-form criticism, true crime’s grip on pop culture, and the elusive art of the novella, and Oates reflects on her writing (including three essays about murderers that she wrote for the Review: “‘I Had No Other Thrill or Happiness,’” “The Mystery of JonBenét Ramsey,” and “Death in the Air”) and the improbability of her life. 

Joyce Carol Oates’s many novels, essays, short stories, poems, and works of criticism have addressed subjects ranging from boxing to Marilyn Monroe, often exploring the dark underbelly of American life. She is a Visiting Distinguished Professor at Rutgers–New Brunswick and her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and Harper’s, among many other publications. She has been a contributor to The New York Review of Books since 1992, when she wrote “The Cruelest Sport,”  about boxing, Muhammad Ali, and masculinity. Her most recent novel, Fox, about a predatory English teacher at a New Jersey boarding school, came out last year. Read the essays discussed in this episode with a subscription to The New York Review of Books, which, in addition to twenty issues a year, gives you access to our full archive since 1963, searchable on our website.

Read the essays discussed in this episode:

New York: Sentimental Journeys

I Had No Other Thrill or Happiness

The Mystery of JonBenét Ramsey

Death in the Air

The Cruelest Sport

Creators and Guests

Host

Jarrett Earnest

Jarrett Earnest has contributed essays to the New York Review of Books on artists ranging from Tom of Finland to Jack Whitten. He is the author of What it Means to Write About Art: Interviews with Art Critics (2018) and Valid Until Sunset (2023) and has edited several collections of criticism, including volumes of Dave Hickey and Peter Schjeldahl as well as artist's writings by Nayland Blake and Jesse Murry. His curatorial projects include the acclaimed 2019 exhibition "The Young and Evil" at David Zwirner gallery, New York.

What is Private Life: A New York Review Podcast?

Private Life is a podcast from The New York Review, hosted by contributor Jarrett Earnest. Each episode offers intimate, in-depth conversations with distinguished voices from across the literary landscape—about their lives, their work, and the ideas that shape both. Along the way, they revisit pieces from the The New York Review of Books's robust sixty-year archive (some episodes of the podcast will feature newly recorded readings of these classic essays) to situate arguments within contemporary culture. The show also includes discussions of titles from our book publishing arm, New York Review Books, featuring talks with translator Mark Polizzotti on Andre Breton's surrealist masterpiece Nadja and musician Richard Hell on the re-issue of his novel Godlike. Other early episodes find Joyce Carol Oates ruminating on true crime, while Darryl Pinckney opens up about the perils of memoir and his formative friendship with essayist Elizabeth Hardwick. 

Private Life is a personable, expansive invitation for longtime subscribers and a new generation of readers alike to connect with the past, present and future of The New York Review. 

Jarett Earnest: This is Private Life, a New York Review podcast. I'm Jarrett Ernest, and today I'm speaking with Joyce Carol Oates. Joyce Carol is a prolific writer who's examined the last half century of American life through some of its grimmest cultural mythologies in novels like Zombie from 1995, loosely modeled on the crimes of Jeffrey Dahmer, or Blonde from 2000, her epic retelling of life of Marilyn Monroe. Or My Sister, My Love from 2008, which is a version of the JonBenet Ramsey murder case, or more recently Fox from 2025, which follows a teacher preying on girls at an elite private school. Oates is also a long-time contributor to the New York Review of Books, starting with her meditation on boxing, the cruelest sport in 1992, and has gone on to cover everything from literature to true crime to serial killers. As in her recent review of Caroline Fraser's 2025 book, Murderland. But we start this conversation by talking about Joan Didion's essay, New York Sentimental Journeys, which was published in the New York Review of Books in 1991 and analyzes the media coverage and much else surrounding the Central Park Five. Well, I'm very happy to talk with you today. And when I invited you to have this conversation, I said, what would you like to talk about from the history of the New York Review of Books archive? And you immediately said this particular Joan Didion essay, which when you reviewed a biography of Joan Didian for the review, you said, you described it as corrosively brilliant, sentimental journeys about the Central Park Five. And so I'm really excited to hear more of what it is about this essay that stayed with you.

Joyce Carol Oates: Well, it's a good question, and I re-read the essay for the first time in many years. But I'm most impressed with the extraordinary intelligence and the research that Joan did with her work. It must be 40 pages long or so. And I don't think that I've ever written anything comparable in, you know, in terms of non-fiction where I've gone into a subject and Joan. Doesn't just talk about the Central Park Five, of course she's talking about the history of Central Park and the situation, very fraught racial complexities of New York City at that time, including the Twana-Brally case, which had been recently adjudicated, and many other things. So my immediate It's sort of like this dazzling sun, basically. I had remembered it more as focused on the Central Park Five, but it really is almost like a novella-length work.

Jarett Earnest: One of the amazing things about it is that kind of sprawling form where suddenly it can move into these digressions and you're not necessarily sure where it's going to go until suddenly you're back at the central subject.

Joyce Carol Oates: Well, to move away from just Joan Didion herself, I think it's a phenomenon of a certain kind of journalism and publication. The New York Review of books, maybe The New Yorker. Almost the extent of the possibilities that would make an article or essay like that possible. So it isn't just that Joan was a brilliant writer. It's also that we had to have had a brilliant publication that would publish it. I don't know if today, maybe the New York Review would publish something that long, maybe it wouldn't.

Jarett Earnest: The New Yorker might. I had that thought reading it too, which was like, where could this appear right now?

Joyce Carol Oates: Right, that's so upsetting, so distressing. I could see an editor saying to Joan, well, this is brilliant, but we're going to have to cut it back to 25 pages because we don't have any space.

Jarett Earnest: In her remembrance of Robert Silvers for the review, Joan Didion talked about writing this piece and that when she turned it in, it was very long, and that Silvers said the only way to deal with it is to make it much longer.

Joyce Carol Oates: That's wonderful. Well, when I first started reviewing for the New York Review, Barbara Epstein was my editor. Barbara was always saying that. She was the only editor I had ever encountered until that point in my life who had write in the margins more detail specifically, more like this was stunning. It was already very long if you compare it to the reviews that we see. TLS or the New York Times Book Review. It was like, you know, 25 times longer. So that was kind of wonderful. So I love to write and I guess I assumed Joan did also. So I have an editor saying, oh no, we don't want to cut it. We want a little more examples. Give examples, Barbara Epstein would say. Bob Silvers was very supportive and just seemed really like an an eager and involved reader. I wish now that I had kept some of his comments, he would always have this note, see what you can make of it. He would send books to the house. I would just be finishing one long review essay for the New York Review of Books. And another package of books would arrive at my doorstep. So there was like never a time when I didn't have an assignment. And Bob would always say, see what can you make of this. Meaning, well, if you don't like it, fine. And if you do, I'll just see what you can make of that. And he would send me, and also Barbara Epstein too, they would send very disparate books, books that I wouldn't necessarily have even read.

Jarett Earnest: But you felt because you trusted them and they were interested in what you might make of it that it was worthwhile.

Joyce Carol Oates: Oh yes, but I have a very curious kind of imagination. I mean, the curiosity would be, what can I make of it? If Bob Silver thinks of some possibility, then maybe I should explore that possibility. But the first piece that I ever wrote for the New York Review a long time ago, Bob Epstein sent me a biography or perhaps just a book on Muhammad Ali. So that was my first... I didn't have some reason to care about that. I had written a book on boxing. I was sort of the boxing person who wasn't really a sports writer. It was more like a literary writer. And I wasn't a feminist either, looking at it basically. I was a sort of a neutral observer.

Jarett Earnest: In relationship to the Didion piece, trying to locate where she is in this very complex political moment around gender and race and class.

Joyce Carol Oates: Yes, yes. Well, I think Joan is just extraordinary in that she is actually not classifiable and doesn't have a label. I wonder how she would fare today. Everything is so polarized. If you are a liberal, which Joan obviously was, today you really dare not say anything critical about liberal policies because then you'd be accused of being like, you know, a MAGA person or... Everything is just so polarized. But she was a very independent thinker. I almost totally agree with most or all of what she says. I don't really feel that one has to be 100%, you know, like pro-democratic or pro-liberal. Joan Didion is able to be critical of tabloid journalism and all different kinds of journalism, New York Times and so forth. She's sort of like a lone person out in the desert just looking objectively and critically and with a sort of dark sense of humor at all the narratives and cliches that are being spun around her. I don't know today how that would work out. She would certainly be a target for

Jarett Earnest: What struck me as so interesting about the essay at the level of form is how much it's built almost forensically out of the statements of other.

Joyce Carol Oates: Yes, yes. She's so good with that. She's always been so good. She takes these sort of cliched, hokey statements that people make and just puts quotation marks around them and there they are on the page. Very funny.

Jarett Earnest: It's almost as though you get the sense of her mind or her point of view through the orca orchestration of these.

Joyce Carol Oates: Yes.

Jarett Earnest: Rather than anything she says out clearly.

Joyce Carol Oates: Yes, yes, well she has a very sardonic point of view when she and her husband, whom I knew a little bit, not well, but I've had dinner with them a few times, a very dark, sort of cynical sense of humor.

Jarett Earnest: There's a moment in your review of this biography, The Last Love Song, where you say, The most intensely examined female life in Joan Didion's oeuvre appears to have been her own exhaustively considered interior life. Didion most brilliantly created fictional character is the writer's persona, Joan Didion.

Joyce Carol Oates: Yes, and as I said before, she could not be labeled. You really couldn't classify her. She was critical of some of the cliches, I guess you would call them, of feminism. Some of the things that she said really lingered long in my memory as being things that really were true. And she was very sort of merciless even about herself, I think. John Gregory Donne was very funny. I guess you probably had not met them. No, I didn't. Well, the two of them together were very interesting. John Gregory Dunn was very expansive and a raconteur. And he would not dominate exactly, but say at dinner, he had a lot of stories to tell. Joan was a listener, but very droll. And she could make a comment that was very incisive. But the two of them together were... A wonderful couple, and I believe they read each other's work and were critical. But they shared this kind of dark sense of humor. I think John Gregory Dunn and his brother, Dominic Dunn, they sort of come from a world where it's very kind of Irish, urban expectation that everybody is a bit corrupt, that everybody as I'm a payroll, not the mafia. Is connected somehow. Looking at the veneer of civilization and the way a city like New York City has to be run or managed, everything is sort of below the surface. Joan talks in one part of this essay on the Central Park Five of how there are very few grocery stores in Manhattan. Now, who would even think about that? I wouldn't even know that, but she says, well, it has to do with the mob. Has to do with unions. Garbage disposals don't happen in Manhattan because there's a garbage sanitation workers union. Okay, I never thought of that before and most people don't. I mean, I lived in New York City and of course there are no garbage disposals, which is weird, because there are everywhere else in the United States. John and Gregory Dunn knew where the bodies were buried as they say in politics, but it's not what you're likely to think. You have to sort of look beneath the surface.

Jarett Earnest: One thing that was so striking is the way that she's so well-known for the first-person character, the construct in the essay of Joan Diddy, in which I think that quote of yours alludes to, and in this essay, she does not appear in that way.

Joyce Carol Oates: You were right, she does uh...

Jarett Earnest: And I've been thinking a lot about why that might be, like in order to write the kind of essay that this is.

Joyce Carol Oates: That is interesting. Well, Janet Malcolm, who also was published, I think, in the New York Review and then New Yorker. Janet Malcolm would show up somewhere, like if there was a trial, she would be there. She would do the research. Joan Didion, of course, did that when she was younger. It's possible that she just, at this time in her life, she didn't feel that she was strong enough or had the stamina to be, because she used to do

Jarett Earnest: I also wonder if because it's sort of like a forensic analysis of the media and the stories that are being told, whether they're, it's not that she doesn't mind if they're the what the truth is, but she's like looking very closely at who has a stake at what story Bye.

Joyce Carol Oates: That's right, just looking at the evidence. Well, one advantage is, like Janet Malcolm or Joan Didion when she was covering the Manson girls women trial, you can make an on the spot comparison between what's being said and what you're actually seeing. You know, like how a defendant is described in the press and how the defendant actually is. Joan talks about a video of some of the confessions. I did see the documentary a few years ago that was on HBO, I think. And so I must have seen some of those videos too, but I don't remember them specifically. And Joan obviously had looked at them very carefully.

Jarett Earnest: Is a paragraph that I wanted to read from. Early on in the essay, she kind of gives you a glimmer of a thesis statement before there's much more to come. But she said, the insistent sentimentalization of experience, which is to say the encouragement of such reliance, is not new in New York. A preference for broad strokes for the distortion and flattening of character and for the reduction of events to narrative has been for well over 100 years the heart of the way the city presents itself. Lady Liberty, huddled masses, ticker tape parades, heroes, gutters, bright lights, broken hearts. Eight million stories in the naked city, eight million stories and all the same story. Each devised to obscure not only the city's actual tensions of race and class, but also more significantly, the civic and commercial arrangements that render those tensions irreconcilable. And it's like, well, there's the moment where you get that this is a story about, you were saying Central Park, it's about New York City itself. Yes, the stories that people tell them.

Joyce Carol Oates: Beyond that, though, I think that Joan Didion is saying something about human nature and that it's really not just New York City, but it's human nature. Our brains are, but she doesn't talk about this, but we have brains that are built, let's say, to look for causal relationships. And we try to decipher. Meaning out of things that may in fact be somewhat haphazard or chaotic. So you can't really fault journalists who are writing very rapidly from falling into cliches and stereotypes. So I think the sort of microscopic examination that Joan is making on this phenomenon of the Central Park Five in some ways is unfair because all around the country and everywhere in the globe. Everybody's doing the same sort of thing. We're all making up stories about our own lives too. Joan may have had a certain narrative that she presents in her memoir, The Year of Magical Thinking, and on her memoir about losing her daughter. She obviously had a story she was telling, putting into prose. Most memoirs that I have read all have these stories. I've written a memoir myself about being a widow, and I had another memoir called The Lost Landscape, but they were very different memoirs. So I was able, or I mean, it was forced upon me, let's say, to see a distinction between different kinds of memoir. One is a memoir where you're writing about people in your life and people that you know, in a sense, not necessarily related to you, but in themselves, but they intersect with your life. And if you look at them, you can create a kind of world that isn't necessarily a story about you. Because I wrote about my parents in a way that I think was actually factual, it was factually true. And I wrote a lot of other elements that I had lived through in the Lost Landscape. But then when I had written a widow story, it was particularly or entirely from my point of view. And so... That was a different kind of memoir. Some of the work that Joan Didion has done is memoirist. She writes about herself at a certain place and a certain time, like where everybody's leaving New York City when she was a young woman, and I guess in her 20s, like everybody was sort of leaving. And then she and John were leaving California decades later, coming back to New All right. And stories about her marriage that had been a troubled marriage at some point. So that's a different kind of journalism from this journalism, which is much more like real, you know, the essential journalism where you're not in the story.

Jarett Earnest: You described at one point in the review of the Diddian biography that the defining aspects of her writing had to do with a kind of high cool and with her ability to center her consciousness as the central point. And I think that that is so interesting to think about with the problems of memoirs. I love memoirs because I also think when you're reading them, the things that are not in them and the things are clearly evasions or lies are as interesting as the difficult truths.

Joyce Carol Oates: Right.

Jarett Earnest: And it's always this negotiation between them.

Joyce Carol Oates: Well, the one thing about memoir that I think I can say is probably universal. You leave out so much, but what you leave out, most people are not going into it. You left out. So when I read my memoir, if I look through my memoir again, A Widow's Story, which I wrote in 2009, I think, or 2010, quite a long time ago, I can see that I left a lot out, but I couldn't possibly put all that in. That most of us interact with so many people in our lives, I mean really like dozens of people in social orbit, but you know hundreds of people if you're in a profession like teaching, you can only put let's say one percent of the people in your life into a memoir. And if you were writing about your childhood, you're going to put like one, two, three best friends in school. In fact, you had 15, you know. You talk about the one teacher who made an impression or the one person who was terrible to you. But there were like 25 other people who had some effect upon you, but was mild, relatively mild. And yet you can't put them in because your memoir will be 5,000 pages long and very boring. So you tend to write about things that are dramatic. And I think Joan Didion was aware of that. She was often writing about the phenomenon of telling stories. We tell ourselves stories in order to survive, I think is the famous quote. And that's very true, but it's also true of people who are not even writers. It's true of everybody.

Jarett Earnest: Well, also, I find that when you, because I'm very interested in the problem of description, I write mostly about art and, you know, but even trying to describe any aspect of a moment is so complicated. You can only choose a fraction of it and then that becomes a story. I was thinking what's so interesting about the Diddian Essay is it does have to do with the stories that we have around predators, criminality, gender. And I was thinking also, I mean, you said you'd never written anything of that nonfiction of that depth or length, but the long essay that you wrote about serial killers kind of rounding up a lot of books, kind of trashy, but some quite scholarly, but others memoir about the serial killer phenomenon in the mid 90s, I think it's 94.

Joyce Carol Oates: Including trading cards. I didn't know that existed, but here I was like reviewing trading cards in the New York Review books.

Jarett Earnest: And that, but that essay is quite long and sort of dazzling in its complexity. And I want to know, how did that come about?

Joyce Carol Oates: Well, I was stunned to re-read that essay just this morning and realized I wrote my novel Babysitter a couple years ago, which is about the babysitter serial killer. And I hadn't, when I wrote Babysitting, I didn't even remember that I had written this essay. I didn't look at it, but the first page or two is about the babysitters serial killer, of course I should have looked at that. Because there were things in the essay that I should have put in the novel.

Jarett Earnest: Like what? What stood out?

Joyce Carol Oates: I didn't remember that the serial killer had actually killed some children with carbon monoxide. Yeah, there are different ways that he killed these poor children. They were between the ages of 10 and 16. I think they were all very young. But he did these terrible things to them. And when I wrote the novel, Babysitter, I obviously hadn't done the same research that I did originally. I often have that experience. I look at something that I did like 25 years ago and realize that I should have known that, or I did a lot of research then, which then I'm doing different research in the same subject.

Jarett Earnest: I wondered about that relationship between your approach to the non-fiction writing, to your criticism, and the novels, because I think shortly after that, you published the novel Zombie that's also

Joyce Carol Oates: Right, that's Jeffrey Dahmer, right?

Jarett Earnest: And so is it, do you feel that you're working through certain cultural or human phenomenon in one form in the essay and that what are the freedoms or this space that you can enter in or get to within the fiction?

Joyce Carol Oates: Well, the fiction is very different because it usually has mediated voices. So, with the zombie, it's a first-person narration, and that was fascinating to me. So I guess I wanted to probably forget what I had researched, and I probably never looked back when I was writing Zombie, because it was originally just a short story. So it has its momentum, and it's all one voice, and probably never even looked back. At the memoir by Lionel Dahmer about his son. And then because it was a short story, it was only about 20 pages long. It was in the New Yorker. And then when I re-read it in print in the new Yorker, I realized it really is only the first half of a story, and that I needed to write the second half. But I actually wouldn't have thought of that, probably, if it had been in a different magazine, or say, a literary magazine. It was something about the New-Yorker font. This sounds so ridiculous. Because in the New Yorker, you're sort of turning pages and you think, well, this, you sort of turn the page, sometimes thinking that there's more to it, you know, but actually it's ended. Whereas in a literary journal, it would be more aware of something ending, I think. And so when I had that experience as a reader rather than writer, it just seemed to be obviously you've only written half of those. I had some of the same experience running my novel blonde. Which I had intended to be sort of a postmodern, a short novel of about 190 pages. So, and to me it was going to end with this, the designation that this young star was going be given the name Marilyn Monroe. So she's Norma Jean Baker throughout the whole novella and then these men are to give her the name Marilyn Monroe is the end of the novel. But then when I got to that point... Of course, that's not where you want to end. The whole story is beginning now, you know? So then I had to totally revise my thinking because it becomes an epic. Now, before it was like a tragic melodrama of a novella, which is actually very hard to write. And then I have to restructure it as an epic, so now it's, it's very vast and now a model might be Moby Dick. So, that would be my idea of an epic where... You have all these chapters that are subsidiary, but they're actually casting a spell, as Melville does. In a way, Moby could have been written as a 200-page novel, I suppose, but it wouldn't have the gravitas that it has. There's something to be said for reading your work when it's printed, but reading it as a reader and not as a writer. And then you can see it may be deficient, it may not be long enough. You might think it's too long. Often, when something's in print in a journalistic sense, it's really not long enough because of the constraints of the.

Jarett Earnest: The form. I think, I mean, one of my interests in having these conversations has to do with the question of the essay, which is this very complicated, amorphous form. And usually the parameters of it are extremely artificial dictated by how long it's allowed to be. But I wonder how you've thought about the voice or the structure within the your nonfiction work or within your essays. And if there are things that are interesting to you within that

Joyce Carol Oates: Well, a writer is a writer, a poet's a poet, and like Emily Dickinson we may be able to live in a kind of insular world. She tried to get published and she made an effort but only a few of her poems were published and I think they were quote corrected by this person's editor with whom she had her correspondence. But we have to be in a world in which there are publications that will publish the work. So as we worry about being in a kind of post-literate culture or semi-post-literal. So let's just say we have a United States US president now who seems almost post- literate. He speaks in very short, very repetitive sentences and says things over and over and again. The vocabulary is very limited. And I'm wondering whether his appeal to his base Maybe that he is somewhat post-literate. In that if you have a more complicated syntax of somebody who speaks in paragraphs, let's say, rather than these little sort of soundbites that Trump speaks in, just saying the same things like he's very bad or this is very beautiful and this is wonderful, it's sort of incantatory, but not in a literary way. It doesn't have the syntactical complexity, let's says, of a page or prose by Henry James. Let alone Proust, where a sentence may go on and on, like a river that's moving and you turn the page and a sentence is still going on. Gabriel Garciel Marquez, his long, long, long hallucinatory sentences in this novel, The Autumn of the Patriarch. I'm not sure that novel would even be published today. To me, it's vertiginous. I just get carried away, but it is like a River. And you sort of have to just go with the rhythms, but maybe people today, most people today or younger people are just, maybe their brain waves can accommodate that and they want short soundbites. They want something that's literally, literally short that you can see on TikTok. And I noticed that the New York times will indicate that something is a four minute read. Right. Do we need to know that? What if they said 40 minutes, like nobody would read it? So anyway, to me that's a little troublesome. But who am I to say anything? I mean, I'm just one person. Our human species is evolving in some alarming way.

Jarett Earnest: Well, that's actually something I was thinking about reading the serial killer's essay, which was written 30 years ago. And if anything, the interest and cultural presence of serial killer mythology, the same people that you're writing about seems like it's as great as ever. And I wonder how you've observed that in popular culture, the continued presence of these particular serial killer stories. But also what it means about something in American life.

Joyce Carol Oates: Well, you probably read my recent review of Murderland by Carolyn Fraser. Yes. I thought that was such an interesting book. I probably read some parts of it several times, but what I liked best about it, it was actually her memoir. I was almost thinking of saying that Carolyn Fraser could take out those parts of the book that are memoirists. And whip them all together with different context and develop it more, and have a very interesting memoir that's autonomous, that's not in this book. So I'm thinking that she wrote Murderland to give herself a kind of frame for really writing about her own experience, which I found very, very interesting. Maybe she didn't feel she wanted to. Write a memoir or maybe she will write it sometime in the future. Maybe she's too young to write a memoir. But the frame of the pollution of the water and so forth, the smelting companies and lead and so for the connection with the Guggenheims, that's a sort of like the muckraking feature of the book. As I think I said in the review, there are several elements. What is this muckraking in a very good, healthy American tradition of exposing? Corruption. And then the other was just the iconography of the serial killers, which she goes over again, which I thought was really excessive. And we all know about Ted Bundy. I don't really want to read about him again. He's been written about so many times. But then her own memoir, which was like a minor part, that was the least part of the book, least pages, I think, which I found to be the most interesting.

Jarett Earnest: You say, rarely has a true crime chronicler entered so ardently into the imagined consciousness of her subject, who in his quote, sunlight daylight guise, can pass himself off as purely normal indeed the preppy handsome Republican party staffer. And that was what struck me almost between the lines as so provocative within your piece, which is the question is what does it mean for this writer to identify so closely. Want to get into that consciousness. And I think that when you describe how intensely she enumerates the details, that it is something is going on that's quite fascinating to try and understand.

Joyce Carol Oates: Right, especially because Ted Bundy is somebody that we know a lot about, it would be maybe a different kind of thing to write about somebody we didn't know about. As you say that, it sort of occurs to me that I did the same thing in Zombie, but I wouldn't have been thinking about that because that's fiction, you know. But with Zombie, I wanted to create a character who was actually not Jeffrey Dahmer. There are a lot of different things about him. So I usually take some idea from real life. I sort of take the idea or the actions of a person, but I don't write about the actual people. So too with Fox, you know, Mr. Fox, Francis Fox is based on a real, a real person. Only in what he did and his behavior, not him, not the personalities of different, very different personality. So I think that the interest for me is to write about a tragic event in which people are participating but they're not necessarily based on the real people. So what interested me in writing about the zombie is that he's very, he's not analytical and he's sort of a visual, He sees things fantasy. So I did these line drawings. The line drawings of the character Zombie in the novel are very much a part of his personality and part of the book. So when I look through them they're part of a narrative and I always felt in looking at it I wish I could do something like that again but I haven't been able to do that again. Sometimes I look back on things that I've done, and though it was difficult to write blonde, it was very difficult emotionally and even physically. I sort of wish I could do that again. Not to be pretentious, but Melville wrote Moby Dick when he was in his early 30s. He was just a young man, but he wasn't going to go back to sea again. He had had those experiences as a young man in his 20s that was so profound and just so vivid, and so he's sitting at his desk in Massachusetts or rural wherever he is. Now he's a family man, he's got a wife, he has a father-in-law, he got burdens, he has debt. He's writing Moby Dick out of the passionate memory that he has of being on a ship like the Pequod and other things that he did. And he's remembering his shipmates and his roommates and people like Kwee Kwag, you know. It's so passionate and so real, but he's living in this place now. He's landlocked forever. And the novel is so beautiful, but it's so filled with passion so that we look back upon things that we've done in our lives as writers and so wish we could do that again. But having done it, you're expelled from it.

Jarett Earnest: Right, you're outside.

Joyce Carol Oates: And I wrote a novel based on John Bonet-Ramsay, my sister, my love, and I look at that and I say, oh, I wish I could do something like that again, but.

Jarett Earnest: I'm so happy you brought that up, because related to this Didion essay and the serial killer's essay, both of which are not necessarily within the genre of true crime. But I think the popularity of the dominance of true crimes right now certainly are interesting to think them through. And your essay on John Benet-Ramsey, it's still so relevant. I mean, people are still talking about this.

Joyce Carol Oates: Yeah, well, it has never really been solved, and many of the true crime documentaries, which I've seen some of them, they are so frustrating because the police investigations are usually so botched. The John Benet Ramsey case was sort of ruined immediately within the first, you know, 48 hours. Within the first five hours, everybody was trampling through the house. Also, the things went on, the police didn't. What they were doing. So there's almost no way to get around a botched investigation. And also they wouldn't have known about DNA and other things at that time. So watching true crime documentaries now is, and I'm not saying it's a waste of time, it's very frustrating. They're not really works of art. They are sort of entertainment, like Dateline. Sometimes Dateline is obviously reporting on a trial that didn't go right, a prosecution or jurors who made a wrong decision, but they don't say that. It's sort of like, well, now it's over, so that's the end of it. Like Joan Didion would say, no, no. That's just the beginning. Let's look at this because obviously there's something of injustice here. But no, it's finished and then it moves, sort of glibly move on.

Jarett Earnest: Your piece on John Benet-Ramsey from 1999 is just maybe two years after what happened. And there's this wonderful way that you characterize it in which you say, except that a child is dead and the lives of numerous other people badly shaken or ruined, the John Benete-Ramssey case is a comedy of errors. David Lynch or Quentin Tarantino could not have devised a scenario so surreal and bleakly comic, the most inept crime of the century. Investigated by the most inept police department of the century.

Joyce Carol Oates: Yeah, wow. I mean, yes, they were. But you never, as I said, you'd never really get around that because essential clues are evidence, it's just...

Jarett Earnest: I wonder, I mean, one aspect is true crime as entertainment is the most, there's a voracious appetite. Evidently. And you touch on that in your most recent piece on Murderland. And I'm interested in the distinction between the true crime content as entertainment and the ability to transform aspects of these stories which live in people's consciousness into a complicated artwork and what it is that the novel as a fictional imagining offers us to rethink stories that we think we already know.

Joyce Carol Oates: Right, that's definitely what draws me to these situations. The John MeneRamsey case is obviously so exemplary in terms of the sexualizing and exploitation of young girls. She was so young and she was made up to look like a glamor girl. I was just so pathetic to see her picture, Her photographs and her mother was so I mean you can't, as they say on Twitter, you can make this up, you know, but this cannibalizing and exploitation of children, that part of it is what would interest me like the sociological phenomenon rather than the literal actual person. But I get in trouble a lot on Twitter because people will attack me for seeming to be defending or saying something about some person when I'm talking about an idea. I'm pretty much sympathetic with philosophers. And the whole idea of philosophy is that you consider different ideas. It doesn't mean that you believe in all of them, you know. People say, well, what do you believe? Well, I believe in a discourse and different opinions. So that's, sometimes I feel sort of lonely or isolated. The same would be true with Joan Didion. People would say, well, are you a for or against abortion? Joan would probably say it's a very complex issue and looks look at this and this and this. I mean it's actually a complex sociological issue. Whereas when everything is politicized you have to be on one side or the other. So some people take refuge I think in being somewhat obscure, writing poetry or even you know visual art too that can be seen to be saying number of things simultaneous.

Jarett Earnest: My understanding or how I'm interpreting what you've said about your fiction or your belief in fiction seems like the goal is that art is a space where we can have these kinds of thoughts like without worrying about transgressions because that's the space in which we can reflect on them.

Joyce Carol Oates: Yes, yes. I sort of feel like Thomas Mann said only the exhaustive is truly interesting. You have a novel like The Magic Mountain, which are many ideas that at the time were really evolving and they're all kind of in suspension, you know. That's what the novel of ideas can do. It can be a drama of ideas, but doesn't mean that the author has to come down and vote for certain mayor of New York City, you know, it could be more like we're thinking about ideas because it's human who have ideas. And I think that side of, the intellectual side of life is somewhat slighted because there's a focus on the sensational and the immediate. And I don't, I'm not on TikTok, so I'm seeing the things that millions and millions of people are But I gather they're just very visual and very short and, you know, constant. That young people are looking at two-minute videos of some influencer or something. It has no intellectual content at all, I would guess.

Jarett Earnest: My position is especially because we're seeing so much censorship around art books right now. Right now. And we're going to be seeing a lot more of it. I'm afraid so. And so on the one hand, I feel that within an artwork, there is should be ideally the freedom to explore any aspect of human experience. And that, you know, that's not hurting any, you know like that's exists within an art work and the freedom of the artist to do that.

Joyce Carol Oates: Yeah, absolutely. Why would anybody really get upset? Don't look at it if it's upsetting to you. Look at something else. Look at some wallpaper by Monet or someone.

Jarett Earnest: But I guess what I then ask myself is I think, you know, if I want to feel really good about what we do, I think that it is like reading a novel or an artwork or looking at a painting, that there's something about the kind of attention or the kind reflection that it solicits that seems inherently good, like, or the ability to reflect or think itself might predispose one to do good. However, I think if we can concede that there's aspects of exposure to artworks that could elevate us, doesn't it seem like a little too easy to then not say, well, if there's something that's morally really insidious, that our exposure to them within an artwork could also predispose something quite negative. And I think in particular in your, there's something very slippery in Fox around the images, you know, his relationship to certain artworks that deal with young women and then sliding into this predatory behavior. Not that it's presented as causal, but that's the way that these arguments are usually framed.

Joyce Carol Oates: Oh, it's not causal at all. I mean, obviously people were predisposition for some sort of activity or gravitating toward these things. I mean if Balthus had never existed, sexual predators would still exist. I mean the same people. Mrs. Francis Fox would still be doing what he's doing. It's just, I mean it's literally not causal at all, there's nothing like that. I just recently reviewed a new memoir by Sally Mann for TLS. I was looking again at her work, of course, the family portraits and so forth, and other work of hers that she's done. And she took so much abuse and so much criticism. Still. Still, I didn't even know that she was threatened more than once with litigation, that there were certain states that might have brought charges of pornography against her literally. She would have been lost. Dragged in the court, that didn't happen. It could happen today because the right wing is really weaponizing the law a lot now. It's starting, it's very frightening. Anyway, that doesn't happen to her. But the new memoir is sort of like, she's in her 70s now, she's looking back over her life. And one of her children who was in those, children's porters, you know, he committed suicide. I think you might know that when he was in his 30s. Now, he didn't commit suicide because his mother took his pictures by any means at all. But when you look at them, you now, retrospectively, you sort of look, if you're looking for causality, which is, which one shouldn't, but you sort see this boy is very brooding. He's looking down. He seems to be a little melancholy or whatever. She takes photographs that are so beautiful of her children and other people. She's a brilliant portraitist. And she takes many photographs of different kinds of things, dilapidated old buildings of the south, you know, and landscapes and old trees and walls that are falling apart. It isn't just her own family or her children, but she takes all these photographs. They're so, so beautiful. They're rather like Julia Cameron, the 19th century lingering on images of frail, maybe fragile, female children's faces and giving them a kind of mythic context, you know? So it's like Sally Mann could only be accused of pornography by somebody who's actually not even looking at the photographs, you now? Using them as an excuse. There were novels of mine that were banned, maybe they still are. And I remember one was Foxfire. Now there's actually no sexual scene at all in Foxfire, but somebody must have gone through it and underlined some words that seem upsetting. It's like somebody in Florida, let's say, some mother, moms for liberty, whatever they call themselves, went through a whole novel just looking for words. You know, like, oh, I found 14 bad words. So let's ban this book. You're not even looking at the book, you know, it's just somehow the work of art is used as a political artifact like a weapon. So I'm sure as a writer, as a critic of art, you're looking at a work of Art and you're Not looking at some sort of political statement.

Jarett Earnest: Or talking transparently about a person or an action in the world, it's already something else. I remember reading Sally Mann's first memoir, which is quite harrowing. And there's a scene where she asks the FBI agent about the work and saying, is this my fault, essentially? She shouldn't have done that. And he said to her Uh, no. People who want, who have this frame of mind, they can get off looking at a doorknob.

Joyce Carol Oates: Or, or, or looking at a real child just going down the street and looking at a child walking with his mother. I mean, yeah, but I don't think she, she has this personality. She's really, she seems like a really nice, kind, decent person with a low, a little bit of hesitation about herself. Like my impression in writing this review is that she doesn't even seem to know she's a major American photographer. She seems not to know that. You want to say to her, excuse me, Sally, man, you don't have to be defending yourself against these nitwits, you know. It's like Melville wouldn't have had to defend himself against some person who was saying dumb things about his novel. So that was a little distressing or revealing to read her memoir.

Jarett Earnest: But I think it relates to something about the longevity of the John Benet-Ramsey story, which is the most reviled stories that we have in this culture have to do with the bad mother. And I think the fear in that story is like, oh no, have I been a bad mother?

Joyce Carol Oates: Well that's right. That's right and nobody says really have I been a bad father. Yeah, I don't think so. You never hear that at all. You're quite right about that. But that's because she is a nice person. Now when you look at someone like Patricia Highsmith, she's not defending herself. She sort of likes these people like Ripley, you know? She enjoys writing and you sort of have to like that. And there are a number of women who are like that, so you know, I'm not gonna answer to these ridiculous expectations.

Jarett Earnest: In thinking about the distinction between true crime as an entertainment phenomenon and the way it could work as subject matter within an artwork, it seems like it really hinges on the way that you engage ambiguity within the storytelling as a space to think and feel around differently than we are able to in the news. And I just wanna know more about how you think about that in the novels.

Joyce Carol Oates: I usually write novels that are sort of ambiguous. I wanted babysitter to seem as if in some way it could be told from the point of view of a dead woman. She's lying in a morgue, she's going to be dissected or there's going be an autopsy. I mean, that's a way of reading the novel. It's not necessarily the most obvious way. There's another way of it that she's not dead and she's triumphant. Then I wrote a novel called Breathe. Which can be read as a novel of a woman who works through some elements of grief and then she leaves, gets on an airplane and comes back to the East. Or you can read it that the woman is suffering, she's in a hospital, she's terrible infection and she's actually dying, she is sort of in a fever. I just sort of, I want the work of art to have a kind of alternative existence. And I know this sounds a little bit strange or silly. I feel that the life that I'm living and have led is a less plausible life than the life that I am not living. That I don't know how all these things happened to me or I did all these thing when people ask me about all the books I've written. In a way, I'm kind of puzzled because I don't feel that I could do that. I have a hard time with one morning writing. I rewrite over and over again. The third chapter of Fox I rewrote so many times, I would be embarrassed. Like Neville Cobb, I think threw away his drafts because he didn't want people to see how. It takes me so long to do anything. I actually sincerely don't know how I wrote all those books. So there's a world in which my life as Joyce Carol Oates is not a plausible life at all. And if everything had to be done over again and I started out again, I would never be able to do it again. It was sort of a weird, completely indefinable experience. A much more plausible life for me would have been I was teaching high school. In upstate New York, and I never really moved away from Lockport or where my parents were living. And I'm still there, you know, like my brother's there. Everybody else in my family is still there. Like, why am I here? I mean, how did I ever get ready for the New York Review of Books? I mean one day Barbara Epstein contacted me and said, we have this book for you. Like, that didn't have to happen. There's so much in my life that's utterly implausible. I was definitely going to just stay around where I graduated from Syracuse University and go to Syracus or Cornell, but somehow I said yes to an invitation from Wisconsin. I can't believe I did that. And when I think about it, I probably wouldn't do that now. I literally didn't know where Wisconsin was. I thought it was where Minnesota is. And I looked it up on the map and it's so cold. Everybody I knew in my family said, why are you going there? I mean, I don't know. But it's like I threw the dice. And it really turned up well. I met this wonderful man and fell in love and got married after three months. That could easily not have happened. Like almost everything along my life was implausible. But when I think of it now, there were like two or three things that I did were out of character. My best friend was out. Syracuse and my other close friend was at Cornell, it would have been logical just to stay there. I don't know why I went to Wisconsin, but I'm so glad that I did. And other things in my life have happened that way too.

Jarett Earnest: Doesn't it seem like that's part of the great fearsome power of narrative or stories to make certain things seem more plausible than others?

Joyce Carol Oates: Right, but my own life is plausible. And when I go into a classroom, I identify with the students. I don't identify with myself. I don't find myself at all interesting. I mean, a professional person who's been a professor for a long time and written a lot of books, just has no interest to me at all. Like, apart from talking about how implausible my life seems to me, I'm just actually not interested.

Jarett Earnest: Well, you know what I love about this story is all summer long I have been reading Henry James. It's been a Henry James summer.

Joyce Carol Oates: Wow, any reason for this?

Jarett Earnest: Well, in some ways it feels like the anti-AI language, like trying to get your brain to go in these courses of language that are so antithetical to our moment. Also, it has to do with thinking about ambiguity narratively, I think. But one of the things that struck me recently was the story that he wrote called The Private Life. It's almost like this little talisman or fairy tale about the nature of the artist. And there's a group of friends and they're all at the chalet, and one of them is a very famous writer, but they are all struck by how boring he is in person.

Joyce Carol Oates: Because the real person's up and he's in the study, he's writing.

Jarett Earnest: Yeah, yeah. They go into and they see a glimpse of this shadowy figure and they think, well, that's the double. Like that's the guy who's doing the writing. And the thing about that story, which is so acute, which is exactly what you're saying, which somebody's there in a room alone making this work. Right. And it's some in some mysterious way different than whoever this person out is in the world that we know, who is much more boring than whatever is going on that we can't access.

Joyce Carol Oates: Sometimes the people in the world are more interesting than the writer, but it's actually unfathomable. Take the example of Charles Darwin, extremely neurotic person, so neurotic. And when he went on the ship, he made so many mistakes, he was so inept that he comes back to England and he takes so long to write The Origin of Species, like He has to be coached out of him. Everything that he does, it can't be happening that he turns out to be one of the great thinkers of the 19th century. Charles Darwin, it's like, this is the person who would trip on the stairs or something like that. How did that happen? He's brilliant and his books are brilliant, but yet he himself was this neurotic and very narrow-minded person. He married a woman deliberately because she was not so smart, you know? Yeah, how does that happen, and probably with Freud and with Beethoven, this obsessive craziness and I don't know. So what's your favorite Henry James?

Jarett Earnest: Wow, you know, I a long time ago had read mostly late Henry James because I was interested in that extreme style, but I've started over from the beginning. So I just finished Portrait of a Lady.

Joyce Carol Oates: Oh, well, that's wonderful. My favorite is the turn of the screw.

Jarett Earnest: Tell me about it, what do you love about it? It's like, let's also talk about form.

Joyce Carol Oates: Well, perfect to me, it's a perfect form. It's short. Here's my metaphor, writing a novella. I've only done about five times. I'd love it to write a novellas like next month. So it's like, you have a landing strip. It's like in the woods. It's just long. Your little plane is coming in. You've got to land it on this strip. Otherwise you have to go out and try again. And that is so hard to do. However, if you have a long landing strip, like you can write 500 pages, it's much easier. So to me, he did it. And it ends, his little heart beating was still. Like, he doesn't go back to the frame, he doesn' go back the beginning.

Jarett Earnest: Well, it was like what you were saying about reading blonde or like thinking that, okay, this was going to be a shorter book, but actually the form needs to expand.

Joyce Carol Oates: It did, because it was all about popular culture.

Jarett Earnest: Well, I hope that you one day get to write another novella.

Joyce Carol Oates: Yeah, well, I don't know. It's one of these...

Jarett Earnest: I think it's that the subject has to be contained in a certain sense.

Joyce Carol Oates: Well, when I wrote Black Water, it's a ballad. So each chapter is like a ballade with incremental repetition, as they say in music. So the last line of each chapter is repeated, and the black water filled her lungs, comma, and she died. So that's repeated again and again, because when people are drowning, they don't drown all at once. So that form was perfect. And when I look at that, I think, oh. I want to do that again and then I think I can't, I can do it because I did it once. So I'm looking around for a form.

Jarett Earnest: Well, thank you for sharing your improbable life. I have a feeling that everybody's life is improbably, actually, but.

Joyce Carol Oates: Well, but my life is very improbable because I wrote, I wrote like over a hundred books.

Jarett Earnest: I know, I was trying to pride myself on not mentioning your productivity.

Joyce Carol Oates: Writing and saw what I did in one day. You would never think that I could do that and I can't explain it. I guess it's, I just, I stay with it, you know, like all day long. As I said, the third chapter of Fox, I remember I wrote that so many times. A lot of what I do is pacing. That's something that I think Henry James didn't care much about. Obviously in the later works, they were dictated, but I, I spent a lot of time. Seeing how long a paragraph is and then a short paragraph and then I actually spent a lot of time almost visually doing things that no reader would notice except subliminally. For Fox I had to have a propulsive structure, though I had a whole lot of material, it had to keep moving right along.

Jarett Earnest: You can read Joan Didion's 1991 essay, New York, Sentimental Journeys, as well as many more by her and those by Joyce Carol Oates, with a subscription to the New York Review of Books, which, in addition to 20 new issues a year, grants full access to our complete archives since 1963, searchable on our website. Subscribe for a discount at nybooks.com slash plsub. That's N-Y-B-O-O K-S. Private Life is hosted and produced by me, Jared Ernest, along with associate producer, Luna Hayes-Dean. The audio is edited and produced, by Tyler Hill. The music is by Matthew O'Coin, and it is a production of the New York Review.