I call writer Joyce Carol Oates on the day of the solar eclipse, an hour before it’s projected to reach totality. She will not be watching it: “No, I have too much work to do. I am working all day actually, so...” she trails off and instead we talk briefly about the weather.

Oates’ collection of work is genre-traversing, from anthology to sci-fi, romance, horror, thriller, dystopia, and noir, and includes more than 40 short story collections, nearly 70 novels, and several plays, screenplays, and children’s books. This Spring she will release Butcher with Knopf Publishing, debuting a few weeks before her 86th birthday.

For nearly 40 years now, revered writers and journalists from foundational newspapers and magazines have been trying to find a different way to ask: Just how do you do it? She yields no satisfactory answer to a secret weapon. “Well, mostly I start writing pretty early if I can, around 7 AM...” And then cites what any well-meaning figure in the arts might advise, “I like to go walking every afternoon... a little walking and thinking... walking or daydreaming is very important to my day.”

Butcher takes place on the East Coast in the mid-19th century, centered around Calvinist physician Dr. Silas Weir, who is exiled for malpractice and finds his way to Trenton, New Jersey, to be the primary doctor—and eventual director—at the New Jersey Asylum for Female Lunatics. Oates tells me that Weir’s character is based on three men of the same time period: Dr. Silas Mitchell (Father of Neurology), Dr. J Marion Sims (Father of Gynecology), and Dr. Henry Cotton, the actual psychiatrist of Trenton’s Mental Hospital, all of whose historical documents and journals Oates has studied over “years and years,” and whose medical advancements and discoveries were mostly built upon the disenfranchised lives and bodies of Black women and Irish indentured servants.

Butcher unfolds through the perspectives of several different characters throughout the course of Dr. Weir’s life, and eventually, we meet Brigit, both an indentured servant and object of Weir’s fascination. “I did a good deal of research into the 19th-century medical ‘fathers,’” says Oates. “When you examine them carefully, women are often very badly treated by these patriarchs. The novel really came together from years of bumping against these names... and so I just thought I’d focus on how a woman who seems like a victim makes her way through that patriarchal world... in which a woman does triumph.”

The novel is terrifying, Oates’ storytelling so effective that at times I found myself averting my eyes from the words on the page, as if I were there, actually witnessing the described brutality. Even more chilling is that the depicted horror is based on real medical archives, compiled from various journals. “A lot is based on history,” Oates continues, “but then the characters, you know, they’re speaking with one another. All that, of course, is imagined on an interior level. I think the real Henry Cotton was not as interesting as my character.” She tells me the book is dedicated to those forgotten in the shadows of those remembered in glory, reciting her novel’s inscription perfectly back to me: “For the unnamed as well as the named, the muted as well as those whose voices were heard, the forgotten as well as those enshrined in history.”

Oates is one of those literary titans who was there for what seems to be each impactful moment in literary history of recent memory, her work transcending era. Eve Babitz compares Oates’ intelligence to Shakespeare’s in Eve’s Hollywood. Truman Capote jabbed her in a public drunken tirade. Joan Didion is on record saying, “You always had the sense that Joyce was going to go home and write a book. You also very much had the feeling that you were her material, at that moment. Because everything is her material.” The writer was one of the first to review James Baldwin’s If Beale Street Could Talk in 1974, and so on. Her own credibility is enshrined in history, and in her position as a professor teaching American literature at Princeton University and New York University, she sees modern literature and its future animated by diverse writers.

“I think fiction is very lively right now,” she shares. “There are so many different kinds of voices. Identity literature in terms of sexual and gender identity, that’s very lively right now. My students at NYU are from all over [the world], and they write very openly and candidly about things that didn’t get written about in the past—let’s say bulimia, the consequences of eating disorders, they will write very openly on those things. The students will write about sexual experiences and perspectives that I’m sure people were not really doing easily, you know, decades ago.” She continues, “I’m a juror for a couple of competitions, and some of the strongest work we get is from American immigrants writing about their grandparents or parents who come here, sometimes really poor, and then their generation went to college. My students at Princeton are like this too. So that’s a whole seething, boiling cauldron of liveliness of all these different Americans telling stories.”

Oates’ contributions to literature are as vast and timeless as they are mystifying. Her writings, predominant in themes of terror and violence, have influenced many women writers who today reap the benefits of a younger audience who are excited to hear grotesque perspectives from the feminine voice. Stories like Butcher not only expand the world of imagination and fictional comprehension, but serve as a testimony to what those of our past have suffered and sacrificed so we may not have to. “I think any carefully researched novel is like time travel,” Oates considers on the learning lessons inherent to fiction. “You go back into another era. And then when you go back into your own life, you compare, and you can see how different things were and sort of feel it, rather than just an intellectual apprehension of it, which you get by reading non-fiction. But if you’re really reading, say, Jane Eyre, or Jane Austen, you have the emotions. I think that we learn so much from fiction that we can’t in any other way.” 

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Photographed by Emily Soto at Print & Contact

Written by Franchesca Baratta