The Lost Landscape: A Writer's Coming of Age

by Joyce Carol Oates

Overview

Written with the raw honesty and poignant insight that were the hallmarks of her acclaimed bestseller A Widow’s Story, an affecting and observant memoir of growing up from one of our finest and most beloved literary masters.

The Lost Landscape is Joyce Carol Oates’ vivid chronicle of her hardscrabble childhood in rural western New York State. From memories of her relatives, to those of a charming bond with a special red hen on her family farm; from her first friendships to her earliest experiences with death, The Lost Landscape is a powerful evocation of the romance of childhood, and its indelible influence on the woman and the writer she would become.

In this exceptionally candid, moving, and richly reflective account, Oates explores the world through the eyes of her younger self, an imaginative girl eager to tell stories about the world and the people she meets. While reading Alice in Wonderland changed a young Joyce forever and inspired her to view life as a series of endless adventures, growing up on a farm taught her harsh lessons about sacrifice, hard work, and loss. With searing detail and an acutely perceptive eye, Oates renders her memories and emotions with exquisite precision, transporting us to a forgotten place and time—the lost landscape of her youth, reminding us of the forgotten landscapes of our own earliest lives. 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780062408679
Publisher:	HarperCollins Publishers
Publication date:	09/08/2015
Pages:	368
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

Joyce Carol Oates is a recipient of the National Medal of Humanities, the National Book Critics Circle Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award, the National Book Award, and the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction, and has been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. She has written some of the most enduring fiction of our time, including We Were the Mulvaneys; Blonde, which was nominated for the National Book Award; and the New York Times bestseller The Accursed. She is the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at Princeton University and has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters since 1978.

Hometown:

Princeton, New Jersey

Date of Birth:

June 16, 1938

Place of Birth:

Lockport, New York

Education:

B.A., Syracuse University, 1960; M.A., University of Wisconsin, 1961

Editorial Reviews

Joyce Carol Oates is an ambivalent memoirist. In The Lost Landscape: A Writer's Coming of Age, she repeatedly expresses her doubts about first-person autobiographical writing. For one thing, she's deeply wary of the confessional voice. For another, she has little faith in the reliability of memory…In spite of these anti-memoiristic rumblings, The Lost Landscape remains indisputably a memoir. Like many these days, it's not continuous, and is composed almost entirely of previously published essays…The greater part of the book is arranged chronologically. Small, tightly focused pieces alternate with substantial narratives to make a satisfying whole, giving the reader a coherent account of Oates's childhood and adolescence…For all of Oates's doubts about the primacy of the particular and the private, The Lost Landscape is full of specifically memoiristic pleasures.

The New York Times Book Review - Emily Fox Gordon

07/06/2015
“I scarcely remember myself as a child. Only as an eye, an ear, a ceaselessly inquisitive center of consciousness,” Oates (A Widow’s Story) admits, and so this memoir of her early life strings together the recollections that most deeply impressed her consciousness. They reveal an intensely shy, nervous, self-admittedly secretive child, as easily moved to terror as to wonder at the formative mysteries of childhood: the loss of a beloved pet chicken and later a grandfather, the sense of living in a landscape and a family haunted by violence, the acquisition of a library card and the discovery that “adult writing was a form of wisdom and power.” The essays, many previously published elsewhere, range stylistically, but when Oates falls into her narrative strengths—an alert eye for detail, an atmosphere suffused with dread and apprehension, an enormous sympathy for her characters—the pieces become stunning, as in accounts of a childhood friend lost to suicide (“The Lost Friend”), time spent in graduate school in Madison, Wisc. (“Nighthawk”), and Oates’s autistic younger sister (“The Lost Sister”). A fascination with the quirks of fate that concatenate into a life, and a long, deeply felt love for her parents, thematically unite this varied, kaleidoscopic, and ultimately insightful map to the formation of a writer who understands “how deeply mysterious the ‘familiar’ really is.” Photos. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly

A tender-hearted excavation of [Oates’] hardscrabble early life…in sharing with us the lost landscape of her childhood, she has ensured it will never be forgotten.

O magazine

Oates perfectly captures the unique confusion of childhood, brought on by the unsatisfying explanations of adults.

Elle

’The Lost Landscape’…offers a window into a highly original mind. While it is never a given that a writer’s personal story can illuminate her work, in Oates’ case, it very much does.

Minneapolis Star Tribune

[An] intriguing new memoir…Oates mines literary gold.

San Francisco Chronicle

This captivating account of the growth of a writer’s mind puts [Oates’] new collection of essays firmly in the tradition of similar autobiographical works by writers such as Goethe, Wordsworth, and Joyce.

Philadelphia Inquirer

[An] intimate yet sweeping memoir…

The New Yorker

…affecting...the book place[s] us intimately in the mind of Oates’ vulnerable self.

Providence Journal

07/01/2015
Oates (Roger S. Berlind '52 Professor of the Humanities, Princeton Univ.), a prolific writer by any standard, recounts here how and why she became a writer. Growing up in rural western New York, she lived on her family's farm, bonded with a hen, fell in love with Alice in Wonderland, and came to understand some harsh realities at an early age. Much like Eudora Welty's One Writer's Beginnings and Mary Ward Brown's Fanning the Spark, Oates writes about her formative years with clear vision. Her use of vignette gives the book the dreamt quality that some readers will associate with her fiction. VERDICT Readers of Oates's best-selling memoir, A Widow's Story, will appreciate this new account, as will fans of her earlier fiction. [See Prepub Alert, 3/16/15.]—Pam Kingsbury, Univ. of North Alabama, Florence

Library Journal

2015-06-04
Glimpses of the iconic writer's youth. Oates (Humanities/Princeton Univ.; Lovely, Dark, Deep: Stories, 2014, etc.), the highly prolific author and winner of many prestigious literary awards, gathers 28 pieces, most revised from previous publications, into a tender, often moving evocation of the physical and emotional landscapes that have shaped her. Although she has published a volume of journals, an account of her grief after her husband's sudden death, and many personal essays, Oates portrays herself as a reluctant memoirist. She worries about "violating my own self" and "exposing my very heart," as well as writing "anything that disturbs, offends, or betrays any other person's privacy." Recalling a friend who committed suicide and another who was sexually abused, Oates felt compelled to change details, as well as to create "a quasi-fictitious character named ‘Joyce'—who is almost entirely an observer…more emotionally detached (and more naive) in the memoir than I had been in actual life." Nevertheless, she reveals some intimate details: a childhood plagued by shyness, self-doubt, and anxiety; recurrent insomnia; the mystery and burden of having an autistic sister; and feeling like an outsider at Syracuse University ("as a scholarship girl I was a spy in the house of mirth"). As a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin, she was "profoundly disillusioned" by her professors' stultifying approach to literary analysis. She fell in love and married, but her husband remains a shadowy figure, his memory too precious to share with readers. Oates identifies the roots of some works: a serial murder case inspired the much-anthologized "Where Are You Going? Where Have You Been?" and her experience living in Detroit informed several novels. The circuitous, impressionistic narrative returns often to her parents, "extraordinary people morally," whom she portrays in loving detail. Though her past seems to her fragmentary and elusive, what she remembers—or imagines—is warmly, gently told.

Kirkus Reviews