 Good evening and welcome to the British Library. I'm B Roelat of the cultural events team and I'm very excited to introduce a transatlantic Conversation with a certain gleam of wickedness. We have the legendary Joyce Carol Oates And she's in conversation with Kirsty Logan. Kirsty is joining us from beautiful Glasgow Her latest book is a horror collection Things we say in the dark and this follows on from lots of award-winning other books including the gloaming the Gracekeepers a portable shelter and the rental heart and other fairy tales Finally Kirsty is on record as saying basically my life is all books all the time Quite right to and you can of course buy tonight's books here on the platform as well as submit your questions and Feedback we love to hear from you Meanwhile, I'm handing you over to tonight's chair, Kirsty Hello, and welcome to this British Library event I'm Kirsty Logan, and it is my great pleasure to welcome Joyce Carol Oates this evening Joyce Carol Oates has won many many prizes including the National Book Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship She's the author of over 70 books including novels short stories poetry plays and nonfiction and Most recently she has published a collection of novellas called Cardiff by the Sea which will be discussing this evening The way the event is going to work this evening is we will discuss each of the four novellas Individually and then there'll be time at the end for audience questions, and you can ask your questions just below the live feed So please do join me in welcoming the wonderful Joyce Carol Oates Thank you. I'm very happy to be here. I'm very very happy to be speaking to you So Joyce, I believe you're going to introduce us to the first novella in the book with a reading Yes, I said a few words about the the book there are several novellas and That they all deal with young women in one case the girl is about 12 years old But mostly they're a young woman in the 20s Who are confronted by something totally unexpected that has to do with Working out their own destiny the first novella is called Cardiff by the Sea And when I was rereading it just this morning I was so struck by how so much of it seems relevant to the pandemic and the Isolation and quarantine that some of us have been living through I mean, I personally have been living all alone in my house four miles outside Princeton and in a wooded area and there's a creek in the lake and I'm all alone, you know and through the winter with the wind howling It sort of sounds like a gothic situation When I wrote the novella, I would think I was actually in Berkeley in California wherever sunny But our lives are so unpredictable. We wind up in places Later that are relevant to what we have written so it's as if the world catches up with us so as I said the first of The novellas is called Cardiff by the Sea and the situation is this young woman who does live alone She's an art historian and her her telephone rings She's all alone. She is not married. She's an adapted shot she was an adapted child and she Wonders if she should answer the phone. She sees the caller ID does not recognize it and she's sort of Contemplating does she want to answer the phone or not? So I'll just read this these passages phone rings unexpectedly Not her cell phone which Claire would probably have answered without a second thought but the other phone the landline which rarely rings Just seconds in which to decide should she lift the receiver Seeing that the caller ID is not one she recognizes and calculating. It's likely just to be a robot call Yet this rain last April morning out of curiosity or loneliness or heedlessness She lifts the receiver. Yes Hello What are the shocks of Clara's life for it seems that a stranger has called her Introducing himself as an attorney with a law firm in Cardiff, Maine Informing her that she's the beneficiary of an individual of whom. She has never heard Maude Donegal of Cardiff, Maine your grandmother Excuse me who? Maude Donegal your father's mother she passed away at the age of 87 Well, she's not sure what she's hearing thinking it must be a prank her first instinct is to laugh But I don't have a grandmother that name. I don't I don't know anyone with that name Did you say Douglas Donegal a Pause and the voice at the other end of the line continues disembodied and matter of fact as a voice in a dream But Donegal is your birth name Didn't you know? So that's the beginning of this novella a Young woman who feels that she does know herself. She knows her adopted parents and she's quite content with living in Minneapolis, Minnesota Guess his phone call and she learns that her Her birth the grandmother has just died and left her bequest. So that's the beginning of an adventure It is and it's such a classic Beginning to a story, you know, this mysterious phone call comes out of nowhere how's the person going to react and I would love to talk about expectations and subverting expectations because you know, you mentioned the Gothic and It does hit so many of the Gothic tropes, you know, we have the family mystery. We have this spooky old house We have the young woman who's out of her depth and she's trying to uncover this mystery Also, I won't go too much into details, but I love the part where she's not really sure if she's being poisoned or not So you don't really know what's real and what's not real, but at the same time Claire the protagonist She's very active, you know, we might think of the Gothic heroine as being Perhaps a bit helpless or a kind of fainting flower and she's not like that at all. She's very Active. So how did how did you approach that telling this classic tale but still keeping it fresh and original? We know we used words like like Gothic adjectives like Gothic is a kind of shorthand but I'm not sure if it's always helpful because The last year for many of us many of us have been alone and when you're in solitude you do much more intensive thinking I believe than when we're out in the world because the environment this room in which I am right now The environment is so much more finite and stable Ordinarily we're out in our our neurological apparatus is taking in all sorts of new sites. We're driving our car I would take the train in New York City. I've been teaching at NYU all the the actions of our being in the world Came to a halt for for many of us in the United States in quarantine And it's so unnatural that I think other parts of our imagination start coming alive So I'm not so sure if Gothic is even the word. It's more like a realistic Apprehension like to be realistically and reasonably afraid of the virus is Something that would keep a person alive, you know, it's a survival instinct. It's not really a gothic instinct to To feel that one one's life is in peril. It's almost just a realistic Apprehension of the world now, so I thought that was very interesting to revisit something I've been maybe a year ago or more maybe about two years ago and See how now what might have been considered a surreal experience Now it feels much more realistic when the telephone rings in a quiet empty house and you're making your way toward the telephone and By the way, I rarely get telephone calls from friends and mostly solicitations All my friends write to me by email or text message. So when the phone rings in this house, I Usually have to walk a distance to get it and I'm thinking should I pick that up? Who would that be and that's the Kind of existentially dramatic beginning of this novella I'd love to pick up on what you're saying about this this idea of an existential drama And also, of course, you know, you mentioned the pandemic and how it's affecting us all and I can't tell you how much I Identify with what you were saying. I felt lately. Um, very hungry, but it's almost like my eyes are hungry. I Get so starved of new Things to look at, you know, um, yeah, I just feel like I have hungry Vision in some way, but I wondered how you thought You know, not that you can see the future, but how you think perhaps this time might affect writers Do you think there will be a great forgetting and we will we all just want to never think or write about it again? Or do you think writers will talk about it in their work? Well, Kirstie that is such a good question. It's really an excellent question. I think very provocative and proven now from what I know After the 1918 flu Epidemic there was something like a great forgetting and There were there were very few writers who wrote about it. Catherine Anne Porter has a novella called pale horse pal rider and That has much to do with it with the influenza epidemic But Catherine Anne Porter is a wonderful writer who now I think is little known Even in the United States, but she lived through the pandemic of that time And she almost died and she wrote a beautiful novella about it But almost nobody else wrote about it. And I think a few years later people just were You know, they were not talking about it. The roaring 20s came along in America and everybody was You know dancing and celebrating and spending money and and sort of maybe reacting against all that death Maybe that will Maybe that will happen again or maybe we are in the brink of a world in which there will be one virus replacing another and that will be kind of Systematic and overlapping perils that we have to deal with as a consequence of global warming As I understand it, maybe microorganisms don't They don't get frozen as much when when the soil doesn't freeze to a certain depth They don't die off or they're not, you know, they're not frozen in the winter. So there's more teeming life viruses and other sorts of Perils for for homo sapiens Which was not the case before so we may be moving into a new era. I think we're all like explorers Some of us are I think a imaginatively stirred To write maybe a little more surreal work But other people some other people feel stymied In silence they feel depressed or they they don't know where who their readers are anymore Now because I live in the united states, I've also come through four years of exceedingly toxic political climate with with a good deal of all Of division and anxiety So Many americans actually are like battered spouses, you know and hit sort of hit on the head um In a political and cultural sense And that's been four years of the trump administration now. That's over with so I think we'll kind of been a A honeymoon period now. We were sort of giddy with relief But the long-term effects of that maybe will come back Absolutely, and if you don't mind me asking How have have you found this current situation whether it's politically or or to do with the pandemic has it affected Your work, you know, it's often said that you're incredibly prolific So the work that you've been producing lately. Do you feel it's changed? Well, like most novelists I've been I've worked on something for a long time So I was working on a novel at the time of the pandemic and I just continued with that It may be suffused with a sense of peril and a sort of exaggerated caution I'm not sure But we also live through the same sort of thing by we I mean writers in the new york city vicinity after 9 11 So though the immediate after effect of 9 11 for people in the vicinity of new york city, which is where I am was um numb numbness and shock and inability to work Our students were in a state of Catatonia, I mean People actually didn't know what to say to one another it seemed so Stunning I was not in new york city, but of course I know many people who were and I'm only an hour away from new york city So that was overwhelming also Whereas the virus and the pandemic have been Much more or a phenomenon of duration It started for me in march on march 11th 2020 That was the beginning of the lockdown in princeton in new jersey We were told to go to our houses and stay in our houses That there was this contagion we could spread it to one another and there was immediately such a sense of A wonderment and anxiety So those early days the early weeks of 2020 lockdown We're very different from the way we are now Because I took notes on it and I wrote about it actually for the tls. I wrote a little piece for the tls And so that those early weeks are we're different We were all much more insomniac And anxious sort of physically anxious many people could not sit still We'll get up and walk around and then sit down again and go into another room Or look out the window You know or write emails to our friends and we stopped seeing anybody we stopped teaching I I didn't my class just stopped and then I was teaching by zoom So that was I think psychologically very fraught And I don't have anything in In the novella specifically about that But each of my characters finds herself in in these existential situations where it's like the walls are closing in And so it's almost as if I was anticipating something like that when I was writing these In the last last novella in the collection called the surviving child a woman is actually in A house that she sort of thinks is haunted I mean the reader thinks she's probably psychologically vulnerable and imagining things And that's how we are many of us got to feel that way about our own houses Well in that case, yeah, let's mix it up a little bit. Um, let's move on to talking about the surviving child Which as you say is the last we will speak of course about all all the developers in the book But yeah, let's speak about the surviving child actually that was my favorite Of the novellas. I think they're all wonderful, but that was certainly my favorite. So Joyce, would you be able to just introduce that to us and perhaps read? Yes, thank you of the surviving child This the surviving child is One of my very favorite stories of my own also And I wouldn't I would not want to say that it is based on soviet play out that really it is not based on the biographical or the historical soviet play out but What what excited me and sort of thrilled and and terrified me as a theme I remember years ago hearing that the the Mistress of Ted Hughes had Committed suicide in the way that soviet play out And literally in the same way and she had also taken her her child or maybe a maybe an infant with her so The uh First soviet play out committed suicide, but she did not take any children with her She was quite solicitous that her children were protected She was living in london during a cold spell and she put turned on the gas oven Which I think at that time in English society was a way that women are sometimes committed suicide because it was so easy and domestic And so sylvia path did that Ted Hughes had had left her and was living with a woman Whose last name is we sell us asia We sell I may not be pronouncing the name correctly He felt tremendous guilt For having abandoned his wife and he was with this other woman, but the other woman Also felt tremendous guilt because sylvia path had committed suicide and then she herself did commit suicide a couple of years later And I thought about that as we all did. I think it's a sort of feminist mythology or something like a fairy tale This curse like the curse on the second wife or a curse on Ted Hughes And so my my novella as I say it's not really about her It's about a young woman who marries a man Who had been married to a poet who had committed suicide? And she had committed suicide in this house in the garage of the house With her little girl a little daughter and a little boy had been with them, but he escapes So this this woman poet Did murder her child and tried to murder another one But the little boy escaped from the garage with a carbon monoxide is sort of filling up and killing The mother and the daughter he escapes and so he said he is a surviving child And he is a child who is very beautiful a beautiful wounded little boy And the second wife of the man who had married the poet the second wife really Feels a love and sympathy for him. She wants to be his stepmother She wants to win up his trust And the novella is really about the second wife Who comes into this world this house a beautiful house In on the seashore In in the United States a bit of sort of a beautiful old house But there's an attic room where the woman poet had written her work And then the garage where she committed suicide. So the woman's living in a house that in a sense is haunted I think if any of us moved into her house where somebody had committed suicide We would feel haunted In some way I mean, maybe not literally in a ghostly way, but in a psychological way So, I mean, I'll just read the little paragraph here the surviving child he's called not to his face, of course the younger Other younger child died with the mother three years before Murder suicide it had been More precisely philipicide suicide The first glimpse she has of the surviving child is shocking to her a beautiful face pale and lightning freckled darkly luminous eyes a prematurely adult manner solemn sorrowful wary and watchful As sharp as a sliver of glass piercing her heart comes the thought I will love him. I will save him. I am the one So the novella is really about her mission to save the boy And as I was reading it, it does sound a little bit like the The idea of the governess and and james is the turn of the screw, you know, I'm going to save these children But I hadn't thought of it at the time I wrote this Absolutely. Yeah, there's the plaque illusion the Henry james illusion and then of course The rebecca illusion as well because she's the The second wife and she's very much overshadowed by by the first wife And what struck me about this one was I think all the novellas are hauntings in a way They're they're all about Women and girls who are haunted somehow and I but I feel this is the most Haunted house story, you know, the protagonist as you said is haunted by by many things by the first wife by this child Who is this sort of beautiful wraith who he sort of never is quite where you think he is and you look around and he's in a different place And but she's also very much haunted by the house and I wanted about your thoughts about haunted houses Whether you think they're a particularly female or even feminist type of haunting Well, again, this is an extremely interesting question. The house is some sort of a trope. I think just generally speaking For maybe the the psyche or it could be the female body And when we're when we're dream many of us dream about houses, I think I mean, I don't know about you but I often dream I'm going to some house Which is somehow familiar like my childhood house, but Unfamiliar like it isn't really my childhood house I seem to be going Through some rooms or in some along some corridor or something It's emblematic of our search For our own inner being I think And the idea of the being a castle As in the old traditional Gothic That may have something to do with there being an exalted ruling class like fate We we don't have that same sort of inherited Omnist feeling in america is much more egalitarian society so We could have the gothic experience With with a different kind of architecture For many people I mean, I'm just guessing but for say steven King for instance The haunted house would just be somebody's childhood house. It could be suburban It could be an ordinary house And when I think of the haunted house Of my life, it was my the old farmhouse where I lived With my parents and brother and my grandparents. We lived in a Um extended family it's called today, but that but many people live with their grandparents or I mean, it wasn't a time when I was first when I was born It was more of a time when I think families lived together Multi generations rather than just a nuclear family So I might think of that old farmhouse And if I fall asleep and have a Disturbing dream, I'm probably back in my old room And this is decades ago You know, but it is but it's not a gothic house that we'd be frightening if you looked at it You know in a photograph it just looks like a fairly ordinary house. It was built in 1888 I always remember that that was on the The foundation of the house 1888 always Stayed with me as such a long ago Time that just seemed like it could be medieval Yes, it's funny. That isn't how everybody has house dreams I always have ones where I find an extra room in my house. I don't really know what that means I do too. I have that all the time And I found out in conversation somebody else has the same dream There's some part of the house that you haven't even known was there And I I have this kind of repetitive dream where It's the it's the same sort of situation and I know where that Room is like it's a it's in a basement. I think I'm going to go and check out that That room but but there's never any resolution like I never find out Anything And then I'll just have the dream again Maybe yeah, I'm sure there's some kind of deep symbolic meaning of what What the room represents or means but I'm very aware that I don't want to miss either the other two novellas Because I would love to hear more about them. So do you want to choose? I'm happy I can choose which one for you to introduce to us or you can tell me you like And let's go for the second one. Let's go from meow down and you can then introduce and help me out down Well, which is great when you were talking about Peril and being trapped. I think that leads us perfectly Well, this is fancy name for a very special cat And I'm so sorry that my special cat Who is the model for this This gothic kitty in that she's not in the room. I do have another cat on the floor here. I have two cats But the meow dow is a feral cat It was in the story A family breaks up A father leaves His wife He will become involved and remarried with a much younger woman But the but the girl who is third she's 12 She doesn't know why her father has left home And she has two younger brothers and None of them understands. I don't think anyone ever understands why a father leaves the family And so the little girl is very Very hurt She's very wounded She thinks of it as like a a bat flying at her face as the image When when her Excuse me. Here's my kitty So we're talking about you kitty. This is Zanchi And we're talking about this very big feral cat Who is in the night he she's in the story And I hate I'm sorry to say that she turns into a vicious murderer I was going to say you confessing something about your cat's secret life now Moving away too much of the story But the young girl whose father has left her Becomes very vulnerable to boys at school. There's just she's getting to be 12 years old or 13 and She's self-conscious about her body and she is a shy girl And the boys are just very rude And then her mother starts going out with a with a man who also seems Kind of kind of threatening to her So this is all I think some it's a very realistic experience for girls about 12 or 13 Almost overnight they attract the unwanted attention of older men You'd say the walking alone along the sidewalk and You suddenly see people looking at you who didn't look at you like a year before And it's just very unnerving At the same time there's a feral colony of feral cats Like right next door to where this girl lives I live in a wooded area and there were feral cats around here And I used to feed some feral cats on my porch just two just two of them So I'm very sympathetic with animals that are homeless And I give I mean I participate and you know sort of taking care of them some some Rescue shelters in the area. So it's a subject that I that I care about personally And in the novella the the feral colony Is uh Is devastated Somebody calls animal control and they just get rid of them and probably all the cats are just Euthanized except one There's a kitten And she's a very fluffy beautiful Cat who grows very quickly becomes a big cat And and this is like the spirit Altar eagle of the girl This cat she she can coddle and sleep and you know and love and embrace this cat She has lost her father and she's she's anxious about The future in her own life So the cat becomes like a spirit consort And I I don't want to give away too much of the novella But I think it does have a happy end A positive resolved ending a good a good ending I I try to end my All my writing on a plausible note that is positive I mean, I can't guarantee a happy ending because that's not That's not realistic But I can try to work out a way that There's a certain integrity remaining and somebody has come through an experience So the girl is probably 13 years old by the end of the novella And she has asserted herself rather than being a victim She's she's uh, she sort of lashed out against her adversaries Because of the cat the cat gives her strength This cat has sort of run away. So I'm sorry I'm glad that we got to see the cat anyway What I found really fascinating about the the use of of the cat in this story Is the cat is domestic but also a predator and again without giving too much away Also in this novella and actually in the others the the one that we Think perhaps is the victim or the one who's going to be victimized actually ends up having a surprising Strength and I wondered if that was a subject that you had consciously decided to explore in the book Yes, that's a theme that's very that's very uh important to me The the empowerment of girls and women I think partly we can take that empowerment As as a sort of exemplary way of responding That rather than seeing ourselves as victims We see ourselves as people to whom something has happened that's unjust And we want justice And I don't think the word victim Needs even to be in the vocabulary Once you think of yourself as a victim Then that seems like being like an invalid, you know, and people feel sorry for you or It doesn't seem healthy to me. I would rather think of some injustice And you simply want justice and that's very logical That's sensible that that's legal in a way. There's a kind of moral legality If you have been harmed you want justice. So the girls and the women In my writing very often are struggling I wrote a novel called my life as a rat recently And that did come out also in In the in the uk And and this is a girl who has to extricate herself from her own family Because they are very stifling and they and there's some problem with the family She has to detach herself from her family But it's at great emotional cost But she does She's probably about 21 Or 20 at the end of the novel. She's managed to to make that break I think that the the great Torment it's really emotionally a torment for many women and girls Is to assert themselves as individuals If somebody who loves them Wants them to be different In other words, you may have to make a break with someone who doesn't accept you Even though you love them so much. It could be your own family Like you you love them so much But it will break you To conform to their idea of you And I I find that a very heart-rending subject Hmm, absolutely. Yeah, I love this idea of yeah, not not a victim but something Someone who something's happened to you and seeking Justice and I I think those ideas Um bring us really nicely onto the the last novella in the book this sense of Family and not quite being who other people want you to be So the last novella is phantom wise 1972. So would you be able to introduce that to us, please Joyce? Yes, well phantom wise Makes illusions to Alice in Wonderland And some of you probably you might remember this poem by by Lewis Carroll, he talks about Alice of course Alice in Wonderland Alice Was a real girl and Lewis Carroll Was was writing about her. He was obviously Infatuated with her as an emblem of innocence Alice Lydell. She's we we can also sort of Envision what she looks like because her picture is very very uh, very well known and my my young woman's name alis al y c e and she is An undergraduate student. She has left home also And she becomes involved with one of her professors And then she later she's rejected by him And then she becomes involved in a very Daughterly way with an older professor. He's he's old enough to be her grandfather She doesn't love him and there's it's not a sexual relationship. It's more like Father daughter or like Lewis Carroll with alis Lydell and this Novella begins with um, it's really a flash forward When we read it, we're not sure if it's flashback Or present tense, but it's actually fast forward And it's about this long. It's very short italicized Out of the steep snowy ravine Clutching at rocks her hands bloodied And all the while snow falling temperature dropping to zero degrees Fahrenheit How still the soft falling snow or mid racks the yearning the temptation to lie down and sleep He'd wanted her to die He wanted to kill her with his hands, but she has escaped him. He will not follow her She vows. He will not find her ever again So this is the young woman and she's being followed by somebody I won't say who it is, but it is it's one of the people whom I just mentioned But somebody who wants to kill her But she seems to be escaping from him sort of going through the snow Yeah, I was hoping you weren't going to give away the ending there because my heart was in my mouth the whole time that I was reading those Final pages. Yeah, it was um incredibly tense and Unbeautifully written. Um, yeah, we're going to chat a little bit about phantomize 1972 and just a reminder to Everyone that if you have questions for joists, you can put them in the box just below the live feed And they'll come through and I will put those questions to joists as well so first of all, I would love to um to dig into this a little bit because um as we were saying All the stories are hauntings in some way, but what I absolutely loved in this one is that um I don't think it's a spoiler to say because it's revealed right early on that um Alice the protagonist is pregnant and she's unexpectedly pregnant She doesn't particularly want to be pregnant And I'm just going to quote from from this novella Haunting to her now the dark menstrual blood that refused to appear like a shadow that when you glance up startled has vanished Has not been there at all And I just absolutely loved that. I've never seen that before, you know haunted by Your own period or the lack of period that you want to come. I just thought that was so Fascinating and it made me wonder. Do you think Are we all haunted by something? Is every person in this world haunted by something? well in this particular case, it's It's 1972 So in united states abortions were really not Very um passable. They were illegal Now, of course, women and girls did have abortions Before 1972 but in the in the later 1970s there were abortion clinics. It was much more a possibility You know, it would still be traumatic And it was nothing that was treated lightly So at the time of this like 1972 it almost feels like a death sentence, you know If you did actually have an abortion It might be like a slaughter. It could be, you know, the doctor wouldn't even be a real doctor. Who knows Some parts of the united states are reverting back to that the state of Missouri just Just I mean, I think yesterday Passed laws that are banned abortion in the whole state Now that doesn't mean that women and girls are not going to get abortions. They will But they won't be legal and they won't be very dangerous. So they have to leave So this I deliberately set the novella at that time when To be pregnant as an undergraduate And it was sort of an accidental thing that happened. She Really was almost like a rape victim We would call it date rape, which I think is such an ugly term. I hate to use it, but She was forced to endure a sexual experience that she didn't really She didn't really want but she didn't want to Cause any any trouble either. I mean, she liked the man. She she did like him She might have felt she was falling in love with him But what happened was to her almost like an accident You know, it wasn't exactly a violent rape, but it was not really consensual Anyway, she is pregnant. So that's such a physical and existentially real situation And but she's an undergraduate. It's 1972 and Part of the story is When we do find someone who loves us That person would love us if we were pregnant. I mean If you find someone who loves you that person will love you No matter what situation like if you become ill with some illness or break your leg or Whatever, you're still loved. And so there is that possibility of an of a Almost like a selfless love that we can aspire to and hope for In contrast to this more brutal Narrow minded almost sadistic love Or sexual desire that this other man felt for her I hope that hasn't sounded confusing But it's like there are two men two two possibilities Of love with a man one is this brutal sort of self-serving love of one man, but then the other man It's more like a genuine A genuine love of her and respect for her So he would be very happy If she had a baby and but the other one wants an abortion Absolutely, yeah I was wondering as well In terms of of haunting or even maybe feeling Prayed on or followed by something. I'm even thinking about feral cats following somebody around. Do you think writers in particular feel Haunted or do you think writers feel there are certain subjects Just because I I saw a lot of um overlaps and it was almost like the novellas were in conversation and Also overlaps with your other books and it was like all your books are in conversation with one another and I wondered if there are certain Things that you're haunted by or things that follow you around maybe like feral cats Well, all of us work out of our memory and whether we're writers or our creative artists of any kind Or just normal human beings we think a lot about the past If there's something unresolved and mysterious in our past we tend to think a lot about it So writers and poets Especially a certain kind of lyric poet Will write about the past Sometimes it's commemorative like Much of irish poetry is commemorative about ireland sort of looking back at 19th century and early 20th century ireland in a nostalgic and romantic way Much of american literature is looking back at an an earlier time before in so much industry People think that america took a sharp turn In a tragic direction around about 1963 when john kennedy was assassinating I think looking at looking at a long distance We see an act so so traumatic culturally when President who is beloved and sort of young and handsome. He was assassinated sort of in plain view It's like a fantastically Horrific act of Something unnatural Like a ritual like a tragic ritual in in plain air It was thought that sort of america Had a nervous breakdown And the 1960s are fraught with assassinations I've written about some of these situations. Of course the assassination of martin luther king is melcom x Robert kennedy And other there are many assassination attempts that didn't actually take take place But everything just sort of fell apart in a way in the 1960s 1970s brought the end of the vietnam war But very belatedly it was just when going on and on and the generations became very Very angry at one another and dissociated And those divisions between like pro vietnam war people and anti They're still with us today in like the pro trump people and anti trump people The divisions in america between what we call red states and blue states and people who believe in Freedom of choice for women of abortion And those who are against abortion and outlaw it Those divisions in the united states really came started to become very clear in the 1960s And extremely clear in the last five six years in this country We're hoping that there might be some A little more unity now. So a lot of my writing takes place during during that time There's the division between a one way of life and another way of life I tend to write about young women and girls who are more Of an of an educated or literary Class not necessarily wealthy But just people who care about books People who love who love poetry or love music or art people who are more traditional in that sense And they may have some relationship with traditional religion But they're not they're not evangelicals. It's more like a more of a spiritual religion My own feeling is that religion can be very Positive for people if it doesn't if it's not punitive I think the unfortunate element of religion is that it's so much of it is punitive wanting to punish And this doesn't seem to me inevitable that religion has to have that punishing side to it. But that That really happens historically Absolutely, it's interesting that you mentioned about, you know, the red or the blue states or the pro or anti various things and it has always seemed to me as as an outsider Looking at the u.s. There's a lot of very binary Thinking, you know, you have to be this or that and there's really not much in the middle and I've often wondered Whether that comes from it being essentially a two-party political system or whether the two-party political system comes from America being A sort of binary thinking place. I don't know what the answer is there, but what do you think? Well, historically, there were there were more political parties in the beginning In a very in a very beginning, you know in the 19th and the 1770s in a very beginning there was the pro english Loyalist americans and then those who became the rebels I mean, eventually they became They became the the citizens of the united states, you know But in the very beginning you had people who Maybe within one family were pro king george Or anti the king or pro england and or anti england So it was a matter of it was taking sides, but I think sometimes within one family And many ordinary people didn't have a great deal of thought about it, you know, they think You know farmers or peasants living out in the country. I don't think they cared as much as the the leaders of the colonies of people like thomas jefferson and of course, george washington and tom pain and other leaders were were intellectuals and thomas jefferson's Wrote the declaration of independence and and a number of men signed it, but he mainly wrote it and it's it's such It's like a legal document. He's setting forth these terms of why it is necessary To break away from england because of the tyranny And there had been many concessions made to england the colonists were naturally uh, they were naturally Patriotic for england they themselves were born in england, you know So it becomes a matter of having been Mistreated and jefferson gives all these reasons. I think they're like, I don't know how many there could be 50 You know 50 reasons that he gives and then the boston massacre british soldiers firing on unarmed colonists sort of pushes us over that So once you get beyond that, I think There's much more multiplicity of political factions in the united states. We're in the beginning that we're just two sides Then later on it's it's more confusing in the north. You had the evolutionist movement During the civil war, but but but that was not unified. There were many people in the north Who didn't care whether there were slaves? They weren't fighting. They didn't they didn't really care There were riots in the north At the time of the civil war a men who did not want to fight they didn't care If the south seceded they had no interest. They really didn't care And and so the abolitionist movement we tend to think was very powerful, but it wasn't really it was a gathered momentum with the civil war and Has a kind of romantic Tone to it. I think now but at the time neighbors were divided against one another So it's kind of a long answer to your question about binary So I think that what the united states is and that same thing is true of england and other countries But we are so vast the continent so wide that it's more of a problem. We are a nation of regions There's a new england and there's this north northwestern. There's a southwestern. There's a south There's a midwest there's the mid south And all all these parts of the united states are pretty different the especially in the past new england was quite distinctive And all these regions are not not unified really same as true in canada where you have The provinces are sort of stretched east to west along the border They are much more Relationship with the united states south of the border than they do with with one another And then we are also a nation where urban development Very density of population in places like chicago and san francisco and Los angeles and new york city and Atlanta and dalas and houston the cities are Where the universities are? Cambridge mass and boston you have universities and colleges in a Diverse population of asian americans indian americans Every kind of every kind of ethnic identity in these population density areas But then you have rural rural america Which is sparsely populated states like north and south dakota Almost nobody lives there except in the cities And so you have a rural constituency that that doesn't really feel comfortable with diversity Some of these people far out in the country They have never met a jew They've never met a chinese person. They've never met an indian american or pakistani They've never met any of these people But they they think that they hate them because they've been watching fox news. No So politically it's a matter of conservative people living remotely from the urban areas where You will find extremely developed technology Young people studying computer science who are just who are brilliant Some of them are my students studying molecular biology and computer science and their writers Those are such brilliant young people But they have very little really to do with with elderly people living in northern montana who are Very suspicious of anything that's not American and there is kind of white supremacy And that's the binary there is between the old idea of a white christian nation and a completely new Youth oriented educated diverse population America so that that's what we have now The trump people were or are the white supremacists Who have a lot of strength really and then the the biden people are just this big group of All kinds of people including many many women women of color. Oh, you know That's the binary between those two Absolutely. I feel like we've opened up this huge kind of worms and I would love to just talk to you about this all day But I'm very aware we've got some excellent audience questions So I'm going to come to them and get through as many as I can Um, I thought this was a great question to start with because I noticed that Netflix is going to be airing at an adaptation of your book Blonde quite soon and amy neal asks What are your thoughts on the cinematic adaptations of your work? I can talk about any number of my my um works that we're adapting But Blonde hasn't has not come out yet. I'm not sure when it's coming out sometime in 2021 I think Andrew Dominic who's a very gifted and sort of idiosyncratic and special director Wrote the screenplay he adapted it from my novel Blonde And he wanted to make a movie That Is by a man of course since he's a man, but he wanted to make it a woman's movie from the perspective Of a woman who happens to be Marilyn Monroe And That sounded so interesting to me I've seen it And I found it very very Very disturbing It's it's quite brilliant It's not exactly It's not really the Marilyn Monroe that people Think they know and my novel wasn't really about her either But when I I told Andrew who sent it to me so I could see it. I saw the rough cut And as I told him, you know, I couldn't actually see it all the way through I found it so upsetting I had to stop watching it And kind of come back a couple hours later and then watch it again That I watched it all all the way through in the continuum And I said, you know, Andrew it almost seems to have the feel And the music confirms that of a horror Horror film He said yes, I That's what I was trying for and other words the experience of being a woman in Marilyn Monroe's world In the 1950s Was like a horror film And I found it almost too disturbing So how that will Be greeted by people. I'm not sure Marilyn Monroe was a very complex figure and when I wrote my novel Blonde, I did a lot of research Into her acting. I saw all her movies that I could In chronological order and I could really see her growing as an actor. She's extremely underrated And misunderstood But I do think that many people Just think she's like the young woman in gentlemen prefer blondes Or some like it hot. They just think that she's this ditzy blonde very beautiful, but childlike Now the real Marilyn Monroe Was not like that at all And if anyone was a victim if we use the word victim, I'm afraid she actually What was a victim? And she never I don't think she really um I don't think she escaped there. I think she tried to But ultimately she she she seems to have succumbed to that so it has it has a tragic ending, but it's very well done I think this concept of uh a fictionalized version of Marilyn Monroe that plays like a horror Sounds like an absolute dream. I'm very very excited to to see it Actually, that leads us on very nicely to this question, which is from Jonathan Matheson. It's a two-part question Um, the first part is do you think that the horror suspense short story novella or novel is a particularly american genre? I think of edgar allen po flannery o'connor yourself and steve and kin Um, and I like also the second part of this question, which is you use brackets a great deal. What is your reason? Well, there are really two two Issues there. I'll talk about the brackets. Well, I use parenthetical thinking A good deal because I find that is so psychologically true Like I I may be thinking a thought or even talking in a kind of straightforward way, but I but I have a little bit of a Like a side thought or mitigating a qualifying thought about it, you know, and so putting that in Is a way of of signaling to the reader this little ellipses Like it's a beautiful a beautiful bright Day you could say a beautiful bright ominous day, you know, like it is this beautiful and bright but Something about it is ominous. So you put the ominous in parenthesis because it's not exactly Explicit it's more like something you're thinking, but you don't want to tell You don't want to tell anybody So sometimes I do that and I I found that Is a way of of making the The style a little more True to the flow of our thinking Because we do sometimes say one thing but we really mean another And sometimes we're not noticing something but really we are noticing it, you know, it's sort of pretending not Not to notice it And then the other question no, I would say really Probably the opposite edgar on pole was greatly influenced by the german gothesis and and writers of the early 19th century And we know that the the english ghost stories and The irish ghost stories Are are very famous. I mean That seems to be obvious, you know, steven king is someone who Who would have maybe learned a lot from from 19th century writers and from From h.p. Lovecraft who who also looked back in other words the the americans were really looking back to another another Either to europe or or england for their own influence Washington Irving he wrote rip and winkel I think he was I think he almost appropriated or even He stole the whole story of rip and winkel from some german legend And some of edgar on pole's stories. I think are pretty much appropriated also So it's just kind of it's interesting because it may seem that pole is a is a wild original But he actually isn't in a tradition And so i remember do you know that quote The originality is all about the obscurity of your sources. I wonder if that's true Yeah, that may be true. I think sometimes We're we're really surprised to learn that somebody just appropriated a whole lot of material From somewhere else because we didn't we didn't know it, you know, we just I'm not going to say any names, but there have been some Quite famous novels in the united states that really had a lot of critical claim But they really appropriated a lot of material From somebody else and just sort of put it in there And that's like the best part of the novel that that's happened a number of it's odd It's it's strange Well, I could talk to you all night joys, but unbelievably we are out of time But I just wanted to end on this It's actually a comment rather than a question, which I know people usually dread But I think this is a particularly good one to end on and it comes from natalie baker and I'll read it in full Natalie says only to say that where are you going? Where have you been helped me find my voice as a writer? I've mostly read joys as earlier works And we'll always return to we were the more vanies to feel inspired again and again and again I will always hold a big place in my heart from Marianne. It's been a great pleasure hearing joys I'm seeing her cat And thank you for hosting such a great event. It's made my lockdown and I have to say it's made mine as well So thank you very much um, all that's left for me to say Is please do click books Which is just at the top of the page there to buy the excellent card of by the sea and as you can see I have the uk cover here, which has a very beautiful photo on it Um, you could also get my book things we say in the dark if you want to Um, so thank you so much to the british library. Thank you to b-roll it for organizing the event and most of all Thank you so much joys carol oates. It's been a pleasure Thank you, and we didn't talk about your book and I have read I've read the stories and I I thought they were really really unnerving and uncanny Oh, thank you Really but it but elegant. Yes. Thank you. I'm gonna slush you now. Thank you very much We didn't talk about it. We ran out of time Bye. Bye