"This memoir is a hatchet to slash through my own heavy flesh and through the flesh of anyone else who happens to get in the way....But, you see, this is not fiction. This is life. My problem is that I don’t know what I am doing. I lived all this mess but I don’t know what it is. I don’t even know what I mean by “it.” I have a story to tell, yes, and no one else could tell it but me, but if I tell it now and not next year it will come out one way, and if I could have forced my fat, heaving body to start this a year ago it would have been a different story then."














































Joyce Carol Oates