You Won’t Believe the Mind-Blowing Secret of Immortality Unveiled by Joyce Carol Oates!

“I have,” says Joyce Carol Oates, “a lot of ideas.” That is putting it mildly. It’s hard to think of another writer with an imagination as rich and protean as the 85-year-old, who is surely on some list of America’s greatest living writers. Oates, whose latest work is the haunting collection of short stories “zero sum”, she has published 62 novels, 47 short story collections, 16 non-fiction collections, 9 poetry collections, plays, and children’s and young adult books, as well as a torrent of tweets (the latter of which occasionally land her in trouble). The sheer amount of her output, as impressive as it is, is almost beside the point. The real achievement of her is that the quality of that work is so consistently high. You can be sure that if you throw a dart into Oates’s catalog, you’ll find writing that is emotionally intense, full of sharp sentences and pictorial descriptions, rich with thematic boldness and serious moral and philosophical calculations (and, occasionally, a morbid sense of humor). She can also be sure that more are on the way. “I have a stack of notes for my next novel and another novel, and I have a lot of short stories,” Oates says excitedly. “The one I’m doing now, the reader will be surprised.”

Only in that notion of tolerance: How do you see the change that has occurred in what is tolerated from writers? A writer like you, or a friend of yours like Philip Roth, could be quite provocative in a way that seems rare today. Everything is evolutionary, and now we have a different consciousness. Our society is obviously much more diverse than it was when Philip began writing. He was a young Jew, but he was not a conventional Jew in the sense of being religious. He was secular. So he was writing from that perspective, and he was attacked by older Jewish critics because he seemed like he was making fun of American Jews at a time, after World War II, when that seemed off-putting. But he takes on a different sensibility as he gets older. He widens. Philip always maintained, to some degree, a brash adolescent voice, and it was best when he was being funny and teasing, but he didn’t seem to have the humanity or ability of, say, Bernard Malamud. I’m not sure why I brought up that topic, but Philip also opposed feminism because he felt that it challenged the authority of the white man. His writing was extremely sexist. If you read it from his position, you might still enjoy it. And John Updike’s occasional sexism didn’t bother me at all, because they are very good writers. People who are younger now, from a different generation than Philip, mine, and John Updike, see the world differently. They see things in a much more egalitarian way. Like, why not have a lesbian write from her point of view? Why must she always be the white man? Why would the white writer want to write about a black subject? It’s not that you can’t do it, but why would you? want When is that your world and you know that world? A white writer, we have so much we can do. We don’t have to go into someone else’s yard and rummage around.

I read an old article you wrote for The New York Times Book Review about the appeal of anonymity for writers and how their work can be affected or cornered by the public’s perception of who they are outside of work. Did something change where you don’t care about that now? Don’t you care if people might think of you differently because you occasionally put up a howler on Twitter? I don’t think about it too much. It may be because I live alone and people of my generation used to have five conversations a day. All of that is gone. For some people, Twitter occupies that time of day when you’re in your zen consciousness where everything is finite. It is not permanent, it is like a flame that flickers and goes out. Also, by quoting something I said years ago, you’re making a common mistake that people are fixed. That is also a philosophical question: What is essential in your being and what is contingent and accidental? Someone tells you: “You should be on Twitter because if you post where you are going to give your readings, people can see where you are going.” They set it up for you and you start tweeting. You’re just going down a dark path. Much of life is accidental.

So you use your own feelings as a way to get into the story? Yeah.

Is it the same process for a story like the new book “Mr. Stickum”, where you are inhabiting a dark and murderous perspective. Presumably that’s something you have no experience with? Well, it’s a collective perspective of girls who are in high school and have a certain privilege, so they think they’re helping girls or women who are made to be sex slaves. But that was a funny story. I have a whole category of funny stories. They tend to be very macabre and somewhat exaggerated. I’m working on a novel now, and it’s a really fun novel. I’m looking forward to writing it. I hope it doesn’t get cancelled. We are in an era that I would not have foreseen, where a novel could be canceled because of its premise. My God. Some of our great and outrageous writers like Nabokov would never get published today.

Often the people I interview will say, “That’s not something I think about” or “I haven’t really thought about that.” Exactly.

Could his race happen today? God, I don’t know. I really am an experimental writer, and I downplayed it because experimental writing doesn’t sell. But when I look at a Cormac McCarthy novel like “Child of God,” that’s a novel that I love. I thought, Wow, this is so funny and weird and wonderful, and I don’t think there’s almost any readership for it. I’m not that interested in conventional writing. Some of my novels appear to be conventional writing, but if you look closely, you’ll see that it’s kind of meta, like a simulation of something rather than the real thing. I have to write that way, I think, to even have an editor.

Is it a bait and switch? I think Cormac McCarthy is exactly like that. But it’s like you’re doing something unique in the corner of the field. Here Monet is painting the haystacks and here Van Gogh is painting something different. Then you walk and there’s Hieronymus Bosch and he’s got this weird landscape, and then you walk further and there’s R. Crumb and then there’s Picasso. These people are looking at the world but their visions are very different. I think we are all like that, those of us who have been writing for a while. Here’s Emily Dickinson, here’s Faulkner, here’s Cormac McCarthy, and I feel like I’m in that territory. Each of us is doing some weird little thing.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity from two conversations.

David Marchese is a staff writer for the magazine and writes the Talk column. He recently interviewed Emma Chamberlain on leaving YouTube, Walter Mosley on a dumber America and Cal Newport on a new way of working.