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 Silverblad, and today my guest is Joyce Carol Oates, the author most recently

of Man Crazy, published by Dutton.

I tend to talk to Joyce every two years or so, and in that interim, I like to gather the

books that have come out during that time and talk about all of them,

so we'll be also making excursions into We Were the Mulvaney's and the Book of Short Stories,

where you always love me, all of them published by Dutton.

I wanted to begin with Man Crazy and to talk to you.

This has the quality of a book about the torture of the innocent and seems to have affiliations

with saints' lives, seems to be the kind of narration or confessions, religious conversion confessions. And I wondered,

is this a kind of book in your imagination? I had thought along those lines back on,

in fact, I shouldn't have been surprised that you said that, but I'm sitting here amazed.

Yes, I had thought of the kind of evisceration of the self that one experiences in certain mystic states.

And, of course, in this particular instance, the young woman has experiences of extreme masochism, and she really becomes

obliterated in herself, and then she's born again, in a sense. She's drawn back to life by this

rhapsodic vision and memory of her mother, who sort of calls her back to life. It's the father figure or the

principle of the masculine that has almost destroyed her, but it's the mother figure who calls

her back to life. To me, writing the novel was an experiment in language. I thought perhaps I was working with the very poetry of female masochism.

...