Joyce Carol Oates

After the Wreck, I Picked Myself Up, Spread My Wings, and Flew Away

Joyce Carol Oates (pseudonyms Rosamond Smith and Lauren Kelly) was born on a farm in Lockport, New York, in 1938, the oldest of three children. Her parents had both grown up impoverished, but her own childhood was, she stresses, unremarkable. As a teenager, she was given a typewriter and a copy of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. She wrote her first novel a year later. After winning a scholarship to Syracuse University and then a major fiction contest, Oates married a fellow grad student, Raymond Smith, and they settled in Detroit, where they worked as teachers.

From After the Wreck, I Picked Myself Up, Spread My Wings, and Flew Away:

“‘Jenna, hey. You are one hell of a girl.’ I guess. I wanted to think so. Dragging my feet, which felt like lead. But I was on my feet, the nurses were amazed.”

Oates’s own life was marked by the violence that has become a characteristic of her fiction. She was especially shattered to learn that the father of her paternal grandmother, a gravedigger, had committed suicide with a shotgun, an event that inspired her novel The Gravedigger’s Daughter.

Oates’s many published works range from historical novels to poetry to a lengthy study of boxing. She’s says there’s no mystery to her productivity. An early riser, she often finishes a novel, then starts a new project while revising the old one.

Oates teaches at Princeton and lives nearby in a house she shared with Smith until he died, unexpectedly, in 2008. Her 2001 memoir, A Widow’s Story, describes her intense grieving. However, she was remarried in 2009, to Charles Gross, a fellow professor.

ALSO RECOMMENDED:

Small Avalanches and Other Stories. Twelve intense stories that explore the dark, enigmatic psyche of the teenage years in this sometimes unnerving, sometimes uplifting collection.

Zombie Cola

In After the Wreck, Jenna and her friend Trina drink Zombie Colas, diet cola with vodka.

2 oz. vodka

Diet cola

1 lemon wheel

Pour vodka into a tall glass with ice. Top with diet cola. Garnish with a lemon wheel. Serves 1.