Joyce Carol Oates on True Crime, Her Improbable Life, and Joan Didion
Episode Three of Private Life
In the third episode of Private Life, Joyce Carol Oates joins Jarrett Earnest for an expansive conversation on everything from Joan Didion to serial killers.
Listen on Apple Podcasts below and on all other platforms here.
They discuss “New York: Sentimental Journeys,” Didion’s essay from the Review’s March 7, 1991, issue about the Central Park Five, the rush to judgment in a sensational murder case, media mythmaking, and sentimentalized narratives about crime. The conversation also touches on the state of long-form criticism, true crime’s grip on pop culture, and the elusive art of the novella, and Oates reflects on her writing (including three essays about murderers that she wrote for the Review: “‘I Had No Other Thrill or Happiness,’” “The Mystery of JonBenét Ramsey,” and “Death in the Air”) and the improbability of her life.
Joyce Carol Oates’s many novels, essays, short stories, poems, and works of criticism have addressed subjects ranging from boxing to Marilyn Monroe, often exploring the dark underbelly of American life. She is a Visiting Distinguished Professor at Rutgers–New Brunswick and her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and Harper’s, among many other publications. She has been a contributor to The New York Review of Books since 1992, when she wrote “The Cruelest Sport,” about boxing, Muhammad Ali, and masculinity. Her most recent novel, Fox, about a predatory English teacher at a New Jersey boarding school, came out last year.
Read the essays discussed in this episode:
Private Life is a podcast from The New York Review, hosted by contributor Jarrett Earnest. Each episode offers intimate, in-depth conversations with distinguished voices from across the literary landscape—about their lives, their work, and the ideas that shape both. Along the way, they revisit pieces from the Review’s robust sixty-year archive (regularly releasing newly recorded audio versions of these classic texts) to situate arguments within contemporary culture. The show also includes discussions of titles from our book publishing arm, New York Review Books.
Legends writing about legends - can’t wait to read this one
Reading the essay “I had no other thrill or happiness”, what stayed with me is how Oates turns the lens back on us.
The essay is not only about killers, but about fascination, and why horror becomes something people consume.
It is about the strange space where horror becomes story, product, and obsession.