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You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed.

Or you are the only animal.

Who can think, who can reason, who can read.

Hello and welcome to Bookworm.

This is Michael Silverblatt.

This show is part of our ongoing series,

Women, Writing and the Imagination,

Conversations with nine prominent women in the Arts

at the beginning of the 21st century.

Today my guest is Joyce Carol Oates on the publication of Blonde, her newest novel,

and I think one of her most extraordinary, if not her most extraordinary,

published by Harper Collins.

It's a novel about the life of Marilyn Monroe,

and I wanted to begin by talking to you about the poetry of the novel.

This is very much another of your characters caught in the cosmos. And so her frame of reference includes Freud, Nietzsche.

There are descriptions throughout the novel of what the process of acting ontologically is.

There is even an invented, almost evil demiurge, who's written a book called The Paradox of

acting, which, if followed, would lead almost any actor to sure damnation or schizophrenia,

a loss of self. So I wanted to begin by establishing these larger

and spiritual contexts of bond. Well, I was certainly thinking about all those things and also

...