"The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates, 1973-1982" excerpts a pivotal decade in Oates's career, beginning with the year she started keeping a journal in earnest as "an experiment in consciousness." Only 34 years old, she was already well established, cementing her reputation with the National Book Award-winning novel "Them." Her initial journal-writing sprang from a sense of dislocation and homesickness during a sabbatical in London in 1972. But by Jan. 1, 1973, Oates set upon her endeavor as a personal and literary vehicle, a spontaneous, haphazard repository of feelings and "stray impressions and thoughts of the kind that sift through our heads constantly, like maple seeds giddily blown in the wind."
However, Oates's stray thoughts are not the mundane, everyday recollections in which most of us might indulge. She constantly examines the writing process and her abiding search for rhetoric and form, grappling with novels like "The Assassins," "Childwold," "Son of the Morning," and the draining but "completely absorbing" postmodern gothic novel "Bellefleur," her first bestseller and the writing of which began only after a long period of gestation and nearly a thousand pages of notes. She writes of "the queer passionate impulse that overtakes me, as I write, to tell the story . . . telling truths by means of fictions, trying to plumb some ineffable center, some essence, the more profound for being so very secret."
All the while, Oates chronicles personal and professional experiences, with her beloved husband, Raymond Smith, as well as with some of the most seminal writers of our time - Philip Roth, John Updike, Susan Sontag, Joan Didion, Anne Sexton, John Barth, Donald Barthelme. The book also reveals Oates's dedication as a teacher, her concern with balancing critical work (essays, reviews, etc.) with creative endeavors, a passion for music, especially a commitment to learning to play the piano works of Chopin.
