Joyce Carol Oates: The Art of Fiction (The Paris Review Interviews, Vol. 3)
Joyce Carol Oates
I laughed! I love spunk.
Interviewer: What are the advantages of being a woman writer?
Oates: Advantages! Too many to enumerate, probably. Since, being a woman, I can't be taken altogether seriously by the sort of male critics who rank writers one, two, three in the public press, I am free, I suppose, to do as I like. I haven't much sense of, or interest in, competition; I can't even grasp what Hemingway and the epigonic Mailer mean by battling it out with the other talent in the ring. A work of art has never, to my knowledge, displaced another work of art. The living are no more in competition with the dead than they are with the living . . . . Being a woman allows me a certain invisibility.
Joyce Carol Oates won the National Book Award for them (1969) and was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for Black Water (1992), What I Lived For (1994), and Blonde (2000). The interview took place in 1976, and was then published in 1978.
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