The Lost Landscape
A momentous memoir of childhood and adolescence from one of our finest and most beloved writers, as we’ve never seen her before.In The Lost Landscape, Joyce Carol Oates vividly recreates the early years of her life in western New York state, powerfully evoking the romance of childhood and the way it colors everything that comes after. From early memories of her relatives to remembrances of a particularly poignant friendship with a red hen, from her first friendships to her first experiences with death, The Lost Landscape is an arresting account of the ways in which Oates’s life (and her life as a writer) was shaped by early childhood and how her later work was influenced by a hard-scrabble rural upbringing.In this exceptionally candid, moving, and richly reflective recounting of her early years, Oates explores the world through the eyes of her younger self and reveals her nascent experiences of wanting to tell stories about the world and the people she meets. If Alice in Wonderland was the book that changed a young Joyce forever and inspired her to look at life as offering endless adventures, she describes just as unforgettably the harsh lessons of growing up on a farm. With searing detail and an acutely perceptive eye, Oates renders her memories and emotions with exquisite precision to truly transport the reader to a bygone place and time, the lost landscape of the writer’s past but also to the lost landscapes of our own earliest, and most essential, lives.
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Joyce at her first desk, five years old. At home in Millersport, New York. (Fred Oates)
‘As profound, as thorough and, at times, as dark as anything Oates has ever done’
Buffalo News
‘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’s case, it very much does’
Minneapolis Star Tribune
‘A window into one of our most powerful writers’ coming-of-age and the forces affecting how she sees and writes the world’
Christian Science Monitor
‘Oates perfectly captures the unique confusion of childhood, brought on by the unsatisfying explanations of adults’
Elle (US)
‘An exquisitely rendered glimpse of Oates’s childhood in rural upstate New York’
Bookpage
Fourth Estate
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London SE1 9GF
This eBook first published in Great Britain by Fourth Estate in 2015
First published in the United States by Ecco in 2015
Copyright © The Ontario Review 2015
Joyce Carol Oates asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Front cover photograph: Joyce Carol Oates in 1948, taken by her father, Fred Oates, and courtesy of the author
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780008146610
Ebook Edition © September 2015 ISBN: 9780008146603
Version: 2016-09-08
CONTENTS
DISTRICT SCHOOL #7, NIAGARA COUNTY, NEW YORK
AN UNSOLVED MYSTERY: THE LOST FRIEND
NIGHTHAWK: RECOLLECTIONS OF A LOST TIME
“WHERE ARE YOU GOING, WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN?” AND SMOOTH TALK
WEST ELEVENTH STREET, NYC, MARCH 6, 1970
MY FATHER FREDERIC OATES, NOVEMBER 1988
A LETTER TO MY MOTHER CAROLINA ON HER
SEVENTY-EIGHTH BIRTHDAY, NOVEMBER 8, 1994
EXCERPT, TELEPHONE CONVERSATION
WITH MY FATHER FREDERIC OATES, MAY 1999
The Lost Landscape is not meant to be a complete memoir of my life—not even my life as a writer. It is, for me at least, something more precious, as it is almost indefinable: an accounting of the ways in which my life (as a writer, but not solely as a writer) was shaped in early childhood, adolescence, and a little beyond. Its focus is upon the “landscape” of our earliest, and most essential lives, but it is also upon an actual rural landscape, in western New York State north of Buffalo, out of which not only much of the materials of my writing life have sprung but also the very wish to write.
Because it is essential to The Lost Landscape, “District School #7, Niagara County, New York” has been reprinted from The Faith of a Writer (2003), in a slightly different form. In a more substantially altered form, an updated “Visions of Detroit” ([Woman] Writer, 1988) has been reprinted under the title “Detroit: Lost City 1962–1968.” Other chapters have been revised significantly from memoirist pieces published in a variety of magazines, journals, and books, often in response to an editor’s invitation.
To the editors of these publications, heartfelt thanks are due:
“Mommy & Me” originally appeared, in a shorter form, in Civilization, February 1997.
“Happy Chicken” originally appeared in Conjunctions 61: A Menagerie, 2013.
“Discovering Alice” originally appeared in AARP Magazine, 2014.
“Piper Cub” originally appeared, in a substantially different form, in Rhapsody, November 2013.
“After Black Rock” originally appeared in the New Yorker, June 2013.
“Sunday Drive” originally appeared, in a substantially different form, in Traditional Home, March 1995.
“They All Just Went Away” originally appeared in a substantially different form in the New Yorker, October 1995. Reprinted in The Best American Essays 1996 and in The Best American Essays of the 20th Century. This essay incorporates “Transgressions,” originally published in the New York Times Magazine, October 1995.
