The house is located near Princeton, half an hour from the prestigious university, one of the oldest in the United States, itself an hour by train from Manhattan. The American novelist Joyce Carol Oates, who taught literature there between 1978 and 2014, continues to give seminars on writing there.
The taxi driver consults his map: “Your address says Princeton, but it’s not quite Princeton. It’s not even really marked on the map. I don’t know where it is, I almost never go there. » He adds : “As it is said, in this area, you could come across wild beasts on the way. »
The taxi will never come across any animal. If this is not a specimen of a strange bestiary: a gigantic metal rooster, cousin of the animals cut in hedges by Johnny Depp in Edward Scissorhands, of Tim Burton. In the garden of the house, the driver spots another rooster. “Are there many like that? », he asks, taken aback, like his passenger, by the gallinaceous sheet metal and screws. This question, it will be necessary to pose it to the mistress of the places, whose sudden presence surprises the driver.
A slender woman appears like a mirage. Joyce Carol Oates came to open the door even before her visitor rang the doorbell, alerted by the sound of the engine still running. She wears a purple T-shirt, Bermuda shorts in the same tone and discreet makeup, which would almost make you forget her 84 years. Impossible for the driver to imagine that, in this house of any architecture, far from the colonial style of the residences of the neighborhood, resides one of the most prestigious American authors, who sold millions of books. A woman who has had a taste for fame for so long that she constantly plays it.
Inspired by her second husband
From this house, she took the pulse, on more than a hundred books, of the darkness of her country: politicians, boxers, psychopaths, raped girls, bereaved women, rich, poor, intellectuals, movie stars make up the frame of an American drama of which she never ceases to weave the web.
That day, his sandals still bear traces of dirt. If her mornings are devoted to work – she often writes in one go – the afternoons are devoted to her daily walk in the woods. This walk helps him to free himself from the overflow of his mind, to let his ideas settle, find an order and, in fact, all their raison d’être. It is therefore important for him to deal with them without delay and to take up the thread of the pen. And Joyce Carol Oates knows how to make her visitor feel that he is disturbing his concentration.
You have 86.15% of this article left to read. The following is for subscribers only.