Joyce Carol Oates revisits her childhood

Perhaps the most striking thing about The Lost Landscape, the new collection of autobiographical essays by Joyce Carol Oates, is the 77-year-old author’s discomfort with the notion of memoir. Having published dozens of novels, as well as plays, essays, stories, and poems — and being a professor at Princeton University for nearly 40 years — Oates now explores the experiences that shaped her as a writer.

As she notes in the first line, her book is not intended as a memoir of her life, or even of her life as a writer, yet The Lost Landscape offers plenty of insights into her early passions, traumas, and adventures growing up in western New York.

In the book’s afterword, a disclaimer of sorts, she bluntly assesses the shortcomings of writing memoir and advises readers to be wary and skeptical of the material. (“I have to concede that I scarcely remember myself as a child,” she writes in an early chapter. “Only as an eye, an ear, a ceaselessly inquisitive center of consciousness.”)

A memoir attempts to “cast a coherent emotional aura over the minutiae of life,” and turn the author into the heroine of her own story, but “our lives are not stories,” Oates writes, “and to tell them as narratives is to distort them.”

She was born in Lockport, N.Y., on June 16, 1938 (which happens to be Bloomsday). She was close to her parents, Frederic and Carolina, and especially to her maternal grandmother. Her brother, Fred Jr., was born five years later, and a severely autistic sister, Lynn, was born in 1956.

In one of the book’s most poignant chapters, “The Lost Sister,” Oates writes about Lynn, who was kept at home until the age of 15, when she physically attacked their “gentle, soft-spoken, and self-effacing” mother and was deemed too dangerous to remain living with her parents. She was sent to a therapeutic facility near Buffalo, which was both a relief and a defeat for the family, as the author recalls. She has thought of Lynn often over the years, but Lynn cannot speak and would not recognize her. She has not seen her sister since 1971.

Oates adored her parents and felt close to them, yet she was a shy, anxious, lonely child. She used to wander around for miles in the fields and woods near her family’s farm. Despite the bucolic surroundings, she knew of violence and grief early on: local children who were beaten and sexually abused by an alcoholic father (he later set fire to the house); a close high school friend who committed suicide.

It will surprise no one that Oates, an astonishingly prolific writer, read compulsively as a child. Books sustained her. She reveals that “the singular book” that changed her life, and inspired her to become a writer, was Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass — an oversized, beautiful edition that her beloved grandmother gave her in 1947, when Oates turned 9. (She also gave Oates her first typewriter.)

The author recalls loving the one-room schoolhouse she attended (where her mother had once been a student, and which she regarded as a sanctuary); and her approach to reading: “Avidly, ardently! As if my life depended on it.”

She was also writing and illustrating her own “books," and would see her first short story published in Mademoiselle in 1959. As a student at Syracuse University, which she attended on scholarship, she cranked out stories, novels, poems, and plays in spiral notebooks. The university library, she writes, “was a treasure trove to a word-besotted undergraduate like myself.” She got a part-time job there, earning 70 cents an hour.

As a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, Oates earned a master’s degree but was rejected for the Ph.D. program. Many years later, at the age of 61, she had the rather surreal experience of being invited back to the university — as a distinguished, award-winning writer — to receive an honorary doctorate of humane letters.

Although she had “failed” as a would-be Ph.D. student, and suffered from anxiety, insomnia, and tachycardia, she also met the great love of her life, Ray Smith, at Madison. (He died unexpectedly in 2008, and she wrote of their long marriage in 2011’s A Widow’s Story.)

The final section of The Lost Landscape, featuring tributes to her parents, seems cobbled together and slightly tacked on. (Though revised, most of the pieces in the book were previously published in magazines.)

Yet this is a wonderful and deeply personal book, filled with perceptive observations and details. Despite the author’s wariness toward autobiographical writing, she happens to be very good at it.

The Lost Landscape: A Writer's Coming of Age

By Joyce Carol Oates

Ecco, 368 pp.

3 stars out of four