The Lost Landscape

July 6, 2015
“I scarcely remember myself as a child. Only as an eye, an ear, a ceaselessly inquisitive center of consciousness,” Oates (A Widow’s Story) admits, and so this memoir of her early life strings together the recollections that most deeply impressed her consciousness. They reveal an intensely shy, nervous, self-admittedly secretive child, as easily moved to terror as to wonder at the formative mysteries of childhood: the loss of a beloved pet chicken and later a grandfather, the sense of living in a landscape and a family haunted by violence, the acquisition of a library card and the discovery that “adult writing was a form of wisdom and power.” The essays, many previously published elsewhere, range stylistically, but when Oates falls into her narrative strengths—an alert eye for detail, an atmosphere suffused with dread and apprehension, an enormous sympathy for her characters—the pieces become stunning, as in accounts of a childhood friend lost to suicide (“The Lost Friend”), time spent in graduate school in Madison, Wisc. (“Nighthawk”), and Oates’s autistic younger sister (“The Lost Sister”). A fascination with the quirks of fate that concatenate into a life, and a long, deeply felt love for her parents, thematically unite this varied, kaleidoscopic, and ultimately insightful map to the formation of a writer who understands “how deeply mysterious the ‘familiar’ really is.” Photos.

July 1, 2015

Oates (Roger S. Berlind '52 Professor of the Humanities, Princeton Univ.), a prolific writer by any standard, recounts here how and why she became a writer. Growing up in rural western New York, she lived on her family's farm, bonded with a hen, fell in love with Alice in Wonderland, and came to understand some harsh realities at an early age. Much like Eudora Welty's One Writer's Beginnings and Mary Ward Brown's Fanning the Spark, Oates writes about her formative years with clear vision. Her use of vignette gives the book the dreamt quality that some readers will associate with her fiction. VERDICT Readers of Oates's best-selling memoir, A Widow's Story, will appreciate this new account, as will fans of her earlier fiction. [See Prepub Alert, 3/16/15.]--Pam Kingsbury, Univ. of North Alabama, Florence

Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

April 1, 2015

The author of multiple books and winner of multiple awards, including several lifetime achievement awards, Oates returns to the memoir for the first time since 2011's A Widow's Story to chronicle a tough and toughening childhood in rural western New York State. She recalls friends and family, a favorite red hen, and her passion for storytelling and Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, showing us the roots of her writing while clarifying the lessons in hard work, loss, and sacrifice taught by the farming life.

Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

June 15, 2015
Glimpses of the iconic writer's youth. Oates (Humanities/Princeton Univ.; Lovely, Dark, Deep: Stories, 2014, etc.), the highly prolific author and winner of many prestigious literary awards, gathers 28 pieces, most revised from previous publications, into a tender, often moving evocation of the physical and emotional landscapes that have shaped her. Although she has published a volume of journals, an account of her grief after her husband's sudden death, and many personal essays, Oates portrays herself as a reluctant memoirist. She worries about "violating my own self" and "exposing my very heart," as well as writing "anything that disturbs, offends, or betrays any other person's privacy." Recalling a friend who committed suicide and another who was sexually abused, Oates felt compelled to change details, as well as to create "a quasi-fictitious character named 'Joyce'-who is almost entirely an observer...more emotionally detached (and more naive) in the memoir than I had been in actual life." Nevertheless, she reveals some intimate details: a childhood plagued by shyness, self-doubt, and anxiety; recurrent insomnia; the mystery and burden of having an autistic sister; and feeling like an outsider at Syracuse University ("as a scholarship girl I was a spy in the house of mirth"). As a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin, she was "profoundly disillusioned" by her professors' stultifying approach to literary analysis. She fell in love and married, but her husband remains a shadowy figure, his memory too precious to share with readers. Oates identifies the roots of some works: a serial murder case inspired the much-anthologized "Where Are You Going? Where Have You Been?" and her experience living in Detroit informed several novels. The circuitous, impressionistic narrative returns often to her parents, "extraordinary people morally," whom she portrays in loving detail. Though her past seems to her fragmentary and elusive, what she remembers-or imagines-is warmly, gently told.

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Starred review from August 1, 2015
In her new memoir following in the wake of the best-selling A Widow's Story (2011), Oates reflects with piquant wit, startling frankness, and mesmerizing specificity on the aspects of her life that made her a writer. Such as the fact that her favorite playmate when she was a little girl on a small, faltering farm in western New York State was Happy Chicken, who mysteriously disappeared on the very day her beloved town grandmother brought her to the public library for her first library card. Deep down Oates knew her pet hen's cruel fate. It's just that she tried not to dwell on the grim realities of her world, which included the traumatic secrets of her poor, struggling Hungarian and Irish immigrant relatives and the meanness and brutality of the older boys in her one-room schoolhouse. Oates found refuge in books, and, as a chronic insomniac, she prowled, alone and at risk in the night, the land that so deeply influences her work. Amid redolent descriptions of Sunday drives, laundry on the line, playing the piano, and tricky friendships, Oates pays tribute to her parents and tells the wrenching story of her sister, born, on the writer's eighteenth birthday, afflicted with such severe autism that she has no language. Generous in her personal disclosures in this graceful and bracing chronicle, Oates also considers the writer's calling and the necessity and resonance of sympathy. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Given the popularity of Oates' previous memoir, this spellbinding coming-of-age narrative, backed by an author tour and an extensive media campaign, will be a veritable readers' magnet.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)