It’s always been a dream of mine to interview my favourite author Joyce Carol Oates. I’m not sure why I’ve never thought to propose doing this over the phone or online before but over the past few months of the pandemic I’ve seen Oates participate in a number of interviews over video calls. I conducted my first online interview several weeks ago with author Nino Haratischvilli and her translators. So I thought this is a great opportunity to finally speak to Oates in person and discuss her work at length from the comfort of our homes. I emailed Oates asking if she’d be interested in being interviewed by me and she very quickly responded “Of course!” Our initial scheduled time to speak had to be postponed because a bad storm in New Jersey caused the power lines to go down and she was without constant electricity for a while. But luckily we got to talk during the publication week of her new novel.

Oates was so generous in speaking to me for so long. Our talk went on for over an hour and a half. Naturally, I had a huge amount of questions for her but tried to limit myself and listen as much as possible. She has so many interesting things to say on a wide variety of topics. We discussed her lifelong love of reading, book recommendations, philosophy, the form of the novel, genre, experimental writing, the new film adaptation of her novel “Blonde”, literary friendships with figures like Edmund White and Susan Sontag and her new excellent novel “Night. Sleep. Death. The Stars.” She also showed me her childhood copy of “Alice in Wonderland” and introduced me to her two cats.

I decided to break the interview into three parts as we alternately focused on her reading life, her writing life and her new novel. Unfortunately, the internet connection caused her screen to freeze briefly at some points but I tried to edit the footage together to make her answers as smooth as possible. Nevertheless, our talk was a tremendous joy and I’ll treasure this discussion forever. I hope you enjoy!