A Joyce Carol Oates Patchwork
“I saw the newspaper headline and felt such a sense of loss,” Oates tells TIME. Then a 25-year-old newlywed, she had moved to Michigan that year with her husband, Raymond J. Smith, to teach at the University of Detroit. “How could such a beautiful, successful and famous young woman kill herself?”
The headline on the front page of the Detroit Free Press read: “Marilyn Monroe is Dead of Pill Overdose.” Among those shocked by the report was the author Joyce Carol Oates, who years later would write the Monroe-inspired novel Blonde, and who has come to be one of the most prolific writers in America. “I saw the newspaper headline and felt such a sense of loss,” Oates tells TIME. Then a 25-year-old newlywed, she had moved to Michigan that year with her husband, Raymond J. Smith, to teach at the University of Detroit. “How could such a beautiful, successful and famous young woman kill herself?” she asked, recalling her emotions of that August in 1962.
I'm a Reference Librarian at the University of San Francisco's Gleeson Library, and I run the Joyce Carol Oates web site, Celestial Timepiece.
Celestial Timepiece 