The Gracious and Glamorous Pity of Joyce Carol Oates
I’m lucky. I live in New York City along with 8,804,189 other people (not counting tourists and business travelers) so there’s a good chance I might come across my heroes.
(L-R me posing with people I deeply admire: Michael Cunningham, Patrick Stewart, George Takei & Christina Chiu, Kelly Link, Jennifer Egan, Patty Dann & Min Jin Lee)
Full disclosure: because I run a literary nonprofit, book people tend to vaguely know me in passing. Many of these acquaintances are fairly famous. None have asked me to dinner.
They recognize me though. They make that eyebrows-raised, big-grin “I don’t quite recall why I know you, but am fairly certain you’re okay” greeting. We chat. I tell them what I love about them, and/or remind them of the last time we met. They laugh and blush and are basically perfect. I wander off smiling having left a not-too-terrible impression. That’s the way it usually goes.
So it was a shock to find myself speechless and useless the other day.
I approached the Brooklyn Book Festival with trepidation. Our nonprofit didn’t have a booth this year and so I felt a little unhoused. The sight of the tents in the distance gave me the warm feeling of joy+anxiety+guilt that one feels at a reunion when one hasn’t won an award in the intervening years and is just there to socialize.
I always need something to do while attending the Festival. Frequently I am seeking to meet leaders of the literary community to introduce to our nonprofit, sometimes I’m looking up authors that have read for our Literary Salon series, and sometimes I’m just planning to meet a friend who is manning a booth. On this particular day, I had not yet come up with a plan. I had emerged from the subway, the sky was vivid blue, the tents were shark teeth and I was aimlessly drifting into the maw.
I decided to look at the booths as marketing tools, asking myself what drew me to linger? I thought this would be helpful data for our nonprofit. I noticed that booths could be too cluttered or too spare — there was a happy medium that seemed to draw people. Gimmicks had a 50/50 chance of working; ditto candy. Small flyers caught my attention. Here was one that listed authors that were due to sign books at the booth. Did I know any of them? The first name: Joyce Carol Oates.
Wow.
Joyce Carol Oates was going to sign books? Outside? In public? This seemed like something only new authors would do, meanwhile, this legendary writer has published fifty-eight novels (not counting individual pieces included in anthologies, collections and chapbooks)! It was a hot day, after all, and the people who frequent the Brooklyn Bookfair are usually there seeking bargains, not to order thirty copies of a new hardcover for a school or bookstore. Yet Joyce Carol Oates would be signing. Wow.
I thought back to the one other time I had met her before — it was while I was a graduate student at Columbia and people were fighting over their place on the waitlist. It was the first time I had ever felt intimidated by a writer. All I knew of her was that she did not tolerate fools, wrote every single day on a strict schedule, and had been publishing since before I could read.
We waited for her in an overstuffed room that was at max capacity, a hundred post-grad bodies heating the air. The event started late as I recall, and there was snark and catty talk to go with the nervous sweat. She finally breezed in, surprisingly tiny for one whose literature had so powerfully tentacled into so many genres and yet stayed firmly literary. She looked deceptively ordinary. There was no assumed artist persona about her, no feathers or oversized rings or flamboyant caftans to distract from her sharp gaze. Nothing to notice as she settled onto a chair at the front of the room. Nothing but a deeply grounded, ordinary woman (looking back, I’m wondering if she drank from the same well as Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg.)
Her aura, though, that was huge. The power of her intellect, coupled with something that felt like expectation, reached to the back row and through the stragglers crowding the doorway, and we instinctively knew she would have no patience with people who asked self-aggrandizing questions, or questions that proved they hadn’t been closely listening to the interview. I didn’t know what to say to her — I had scored a seat in the front row — so I just sat there, absorbing.
And she would be appearing at the book fair. I could ask her….
My eyes slipped down from the flyer duct-taped to the tent pole and noticed how uncrowded it was at this Mystery Writers Association table that promised such a celebrity and while I toyed with the idea of squinting to make out the fine print to jot down the time she would be signing and weighing that really it would probably be easier just to ask, and there were people sitting…ohmigod. High forehead, center-parted hair, small dark glasses, brick red lips: Joyce Carol Oates was sitting behind the table right in front of me. This whole time. Joyce. Carol. Oates. She looked the same as she had twenty years ago. Maybe slightly grayer, but also more fierce. She looked amused to have been discovered, and I blurted out the first thing that came to mind, a thing I would take back a thousand times if I could. I said, without filter, “Where is the long line? There should be thousands of people crowding this desk!”
I meant it. I don’t think there are many (any?) writers who are more prolific than Joyce Carol Oates. The woman has published 58 novels, a number of plays and novellas, and many volumes of short stories, poetry, and non-fiction. Even if she had only one reader for each of the pieces she has published in her life, there ought to have been a mob. She has been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize many times over, and has won multiple other awards including the O. Henry, Hugo, and National Book Award. And here she was.
What happens when you come face to face with someone whom you deeply admire from afar? How do you thank someone for inspiring you when they don’t know (or care) that you exist?
If you’re me, you babble nonsense. You try to tell them how much you respect them and instead it comes out sounding like an apology on behalf of humanity for not respecting them enough. A few sentences in, you suddenly realize that you not only have cornered Joyce Carol Oates, but also her publisher Otto Penzler (he, the founder of the jewel-like Mysterious Bookshop). The two of them sit there, trapped by a tablecloth, internally giggling or possibly pitying this hopeless middle-aged writer who clearly has nothing to peddle, nothing to ask, who just wants to sit and admire them as they live their lives, as if they are some kind of rare birds to be studied with habits and patterns to discover and learn from.
A few minutes in, when I realized that my monologue was getting preposterous, I tried to find a way to wind down. “I don’t know what to do or say,” I said, flailing my hands, “I just want to — I don’t know — stay here a minute longer. Oh!” it came to me in a flash of insight. “You are here to sell books! I can buy your book! I will do that. I will buy a book!”
I picked up her newest tome, a collection of short stories published by The Mysterious Press. The legendary author shook her head in amusement as she carefully, legibly signed her name.
“Do you want me to personalize it?” she asked. And I said “Sure, why not.”
So now I own a shiny new hardcover copy of Night, Neon by Joyce Carol Oates, made out “To M. M.”
I hope she forgets me. I hope she remembers me. I hope someday some stranger stammers over meeting me when I have a novel to sign. I hope I am as gracious and as able to hide my very natural and appropriate pity and treat her as respectfully as JCO treated me.
I hope that happens soon.
