"But," you protest (why must you always protest?), "she's one of our most accomplished writers. She writes ridiculously academic reviews in NYROB. She's the Vegas favorite to win the National Book Award every year. How could she possibly be like the sensationalistic Law & Order?" Because beneath the fancy prose, the deft storytelling, the academic laurels, she's a true crime junkie who watches Nancy Grace to get book ideas.
Tonight at the Lincoln Center Barnes & Noble, Oates talked about her new book, My Sister, My Love. The book is the story of Skyler Rampike, whose family becomes a tabloid target when his six-year-old sister is murdered under sketchy household circumstances. The sister happens to be a budding competitive ice skater manipulated and sexualized by her parents. Sound familiar? It should. Then there's Oates's past work, including a fake autobiography about Marilyn Monroe's rise, fall, and death. And even my favorite Oates work, the creepy "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" is based on a real murder. So yeah. Ripped from the headlines(tm)!But let's forgive her, because she does it so darn well. Anyway, the talk was entertaining. Oates was chatty, and I like chatty writers. They don't make you feel guilty for forcing them to get up there and plug their own book. And the event space was amazing: big and closed off from the rest of the store. I'll definitely be attending more events there. It beats the three-stories-and-still-too-small space in the Union Square B&N. Good times!
4 comments:
If you do that we're also going to have to start calling them Union Triangle, Madison/Worth Triangle, Herald/Greeley Triangle, Times Triangle, Columbus Triangle, and Verdi/Sherman Triangle. Also, "remember me to Herald Triangle" doesn't rhyme with anything.
Do you think there actually are Vegas odds on National Book Award winners? We should do our own handicapping next year. Better yet, you should have an office pool at work (since you work with the publishing types).
Anyway, thanks for the link to the short story. I can always use more work distractions.
Hey, Lincoln Triangle is the official name of the store. You've got geometry issues, you take it up with Barnes & Noble.
As for the Vegas odds part, that came from The Wikipedia, and I thought it was awesome. But I did get it slightly wrong: apparently she's the odds-on favorite for the Nobel in any given year. I do think we should handicap the NBAs, though. More fun than the Nobel, and fewer international authors we've never heard of.
Did Ms. Oates discuss at all any moral issues authors face when doing the "ripped from the headlines" thing? I doubt that L&O writers wrestle with that stuff much, but I know she's been accused of exploitation in the past.
Not really...she didn't seem especially troubled by the moral aspects. She seemed more enchanted with the small details, like renaming Bill O'Reilly, and the artistic ramifications of changing "Ramsey" to "Rampike" (which is not only a tree stump but also a Canadian literary journal, which some pretentious guy in the crowd wanted us to know).
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