Invisible writer

Invisible Writer is the first full-length, authorized biography of Joyce Carol Oates, written by the author and literary critic Greg Johnson. It sets out to untangle the mysteries and myths that have gathered around her career, and to show the private person behind a very public literary reputation.

Johnson had privileged access to Oates's private letters and journals. He also draws on hundreds of long interviews with her family, friends and colleagues, and with Oates herself. From this material he builds a portrait of a writer whose guarded private world proves as absorbing as her published work.

The book follows her from a childhood in poverty in the desolate heart of upstate New York. She is a girl shadowed by emotional terrors, who is drawn early into an intensely private life of the intellect and imagination. Her relationship with her autistic sister, Lynn, who cannot speak and whom Oates sees as her mirror image, runs through these years.

Johnson links the chaos, violence and dark turns of her own life to the fates of her fictional characters, and to her fascination with what she calls the phantasmagoria of personality. The later chapters cover her rapid early success, her clashes with a hostile and sexist literary establishment, and a near breakdown under overwhelming media attention. It is a literary biography built on archival and interview research.