What Writers Can Learn From Joyce Carol Oates

A Writer’s Book Review

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There are books you read for fun
and there are books you read to learn;
There are books to relax yourself
and there are books to wind you up.

Sometimes, though, you live a book.

And living entails everything —
boredom, bloodshed, bleak—
but it’s not a full life
until it’s miserable, too.

You don’t just read We Were The Mulvaneys. You live it.

Joyce Carol Oates is a prolific author with many awards to her credit including the National Award and the O. Henry Award.

I used to think that a good book is one that makes you feel good things like excited or nostalgic, or be a tear jerker or a cliff hanger. But a good book is one that also makes you feel bad. It bores you, irritates you, it wants you to skip the pages full of depression, conflict, and brokenness. And when a book does that, when a book is too close to our perceived realities, it’s a literary masterpiece.

There are some other examples. Orhan Pamuk’s The Museum of Innocence drowns you in the desolation of Kemal’s one-sided love. Rowling’s The Casual Vacancy drags…