“Whenever you are writing, it seems like it’s the first time,” says Oates, whose forthcoming book ‘Zero-Sum’ attends to the sinister undercurrents of home life. “I have so many ideas, and I have so many notes here at my study. I just won’t live to write them all,” Joyce Carol Oates said recently. Her oeuvre spans novels, novellas, short stories, plays, poetry, nonfiction and, occasionally, viral tweets, not to mention a Substack. When it comes to her books, the 85-year-old author has often taken on the sinister and the tragic, as with 2022’s Babysitter, a novel about a serial killer in Detroit who chases children, and Blonde (2000), a fictionalized memoir of Marilyn Monroe, which last year was adapted into a film of the same name.

---

Persons: ”, Oates, ’, “, ” Joyce Carol Oates, Marilyn Monroe Locations: Detroit