Written with the raw honesty and poignant insight that were the hallmarks of her acclaimed bestseller A Widow’s Story, an affecting and observant memoir of growing up from one of our finest and most beloved literary masters.
The Lost Landscape is Joyce Carol Oates’ vivid chronicle of her hardscrabble childhood in rural western New York State. From memories of her relatives, to those of a charming bond with a special red hen on her family farm; from her first friendships to her earliest experiences with death, The Lost Landscape is a powerful evocation of the romance of childhood, and its indelible influence on the woman and the writer she would become.
In this exceptionally candid, moving, and richly reflective account, Oates explores the world through the eyes of her younger self, an imaginative girl eager to tell stories about the world and the people she meets. While reading Alice in Wonderland changed a young Joyce forever and inspired her to view life as a series of endless adventures, growing up on a farm taught her harsh lessons about sacrifice, hard work, and loss. With searing detail and an acutely perceptive eye, Oates renders her memories and emotions with exquisite precision, transporting us to a forgotten place and time—the lost landscape of her youth, reminding us of the forgotten landscapes of our own earliest lives.
Joyce Carol Oates is a recipient of the National Medal of Humanities, the National Book Critics Circle Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award, the National Book Award, and the 2019 Jerusalem Prize, and has been several times nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. She has written some of the most enduring fiction of our time, including the national bestsellers We Were the Mulvaneys; Blonde, which was nominated for the National Book Award; and the New York Times bestseller The Falls, which won the 2005 Prix Femina. She is the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at Princeton University and has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters since 1978.
Hometown:
Princeton, New Jersey
Date of Birth:
June 16, 1938
Place of Birth:
Lockport, New York
Education:
B.A., Syracuse University, 1960; M.A., University of Wisconsin, 1961
Table of Contents
Author's Note xi
I
We Begin 3
Mommy & Me 5
Happy Chicken: 1942-1944 11
Discovering Alice: 1947 41
District School #7, Niagara County, New York 45
Piper Cub 55
After Black Rock 61
Sunday Drive 69
Fred's Signs 81
"They All Just Went Away" 85
"Where Has God Gone" 109
Headlights: The First Death 135
"The Brush" 141
An Unsolved Mystery: The Lost Friend 145
"Start Your Own Business!" 183
The Lost Sister: An Elegy 201
Nighthawk: Recollections of a Lost Time 223
II
Detroit: Lost City 1962-1968 269
Story Into Film: "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" And Smooth Talk 277
Photo Shoot: West Eleventh Street, Nyc, March 6, 1970 285
Food Mysteries 293
Facts, Visions, Mysteries: My Father Frederic Oates, November 1988 299
A Letter to My Mother Carolina on Her Seventy-Eighth Birthday, November 8, 1994 325
"When I Was a Little Girl and My Mother Didn't Want Me" 331
III
Excerpt, Telephone Conversation with My Father Frederic Oates, May 1999 339
The memoir remains a powerful literary format, as evinced by the deluge of new titles arriving in the category every month. Some are penned (or co-penned, or ghost-penned or, we imagine, drunkenly dictated Jim Morrison-style with an open bottle of Jack Daniels near at hand) by elder statespeople in their field, and brim with gossip, insight, and […]
