Joyce Carol Oates published Blonde, a fictional biography of Marilyn Monroe, in 2000. It was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award. In 2001, CBS broadcast a mini-series based closely on Oates’s novel. The major difference between the mini-series and the novel was the notion that Joyce Carol Oates explores in detail that Marilyn Monroe was assassinated was left out of the TV version of Blonde.
Joyce Carol Oates started out writing a novella about Marilyn Monroe, but Oates realized around page 175 there was a lot more story to tell. Blonde is a quirky book. Oates deals with most of Marilyn Monroe’s love affairs. She refers to Marilyn’s husbands by using initials. If you read this 700 page tome, you’ll learn what a tortured life Marilyn Monroe led. Some blondes don’t have more fun. Do you have a favorite work–short story or novel–by Joyce Carol Oates? GRADE: B+
Probably her short story-Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been. She has always written well about teenage girls.
Steve, you are right on the money with Joyce Carol Oates and teenage girls. The only other writer who writes that well about teenage angst is Megan Abbott.
I’ve always liked Oates’s non-fiction work (particularly her memoirs about growing up in upstate New York and about her first few months of widowhood) far more than her fiction. I’ve tried, with limited success, to get into her fiction, but I always feel I’m slogging through it. Her essays and reviews, however, I could read all day.
Deb, like you I enjoy Joyce Carol Oates’s essays and memoirs. She grew up just a few miles from where I currently live. I liked her early novels better than her later ones.
WHERE ARE YOU GOING, WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN, a short story made into the movie SMOOTH TALK is brilliant. Also love THEM and DO WITH ME WHAT YOU WILL. Phil loved BLONDE. Her more recent books I find tedious.
Megan was just on a panel with JCO in Melbourne, a brilliant woman.
I remember reading Them 40 or 50 years ago. Took place in Grosse Pointe if I remember right. She taught in Detroit for awhile.
Steve, JCO taught in Detroit and went to school in Madison, Wisconsin. She seems to have the knack at capturing the sense of a place she’s lived in.
Patti, I found JCO’s recent novels tedious, too. But her early work is brilliant.
I had no interest in this book, though I too like her non-fiction, especially her book about her husband’s death and her widowhood. I think she thought she could deal with it intellectually, but as all grieving widows do, she had to come to emotional terms with the loss – and how to go on, She was another woman who didn’t drive, as I recall.
Jeff, I saw Joyce Carol Oates a few years ago when she came to SUNY at Buffalo as part of their Speakers series. You’re right about JCO not driving. And, back in my 20s, I dated a woman who looked a lot like Joyce Carol Oates.
“Fictional biography”. No, one of the other, but not both. Either it’s a biography, as true to the facts as possible, or it’s fiction about the person. You don’t get to have both.
Rick, I think Truman Capote wrote a fictional biography , IN COLD BLOOD.
As a matter of fact, I just read it. Though considered non-fiction (as where it’s shelved in the library), he says up front there is a lot of “fictionalized” content. Yet it’s also not a biography, it’s a true crime book.
I had no interest in her fiction, but she did write one mystery I tried to read. It was one of the worst books I’ve ever read and couldn’t finish it. The title escapes me, I think maybe almost a post traumatic stress symptom
Maggie, Joyce Carol Oates has written several crime novels under her name and under pseudonyms. I had the same reaction you did when I tried one decades ago.
Just saw MM in NIAGARA. No 2 ways about it, I’m in love.
Dan, love Marilyn Monroe in NIAGARA. I was four years old when Marilyn was in Niagara Falls (my home town) filming that movie.