Cassandra Campbell's beautifully expressive performance captures the emotional depth of these loosely interlocked essays in which Joyce Carol Oates reflects primarily on her family and childhood and the significant events that influenced her worldview and development as an author. Using a conversational, almost storytelling, style, Campbell creates a welcome intimacy between the listener and Oates's carefully crafted prose. Several pieces involve long lists of food or clothing or other short memories, and Campbell's whispery, melodic voice captures the poetic quality of those sections, completely captivating the listener. The essays embrace a broad emotional spectrum—from the wonderment of obtaining a first library card to the devastation of losing a parent—and present a stark portrait of growing up in rural America in the 1950s. C.B.L. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award, 2016 Audies Finalist © AudioFile 2015, Portland, Maine

Joyce Carol Oates is an ambivalent memoirist. In The Lost Landscape: A Writer's Coming of Age, she repeatedly expresses her doubts about first-person autobiographical writing. For one thing, she's deeply wary of the confessional voice. For another, she has little faith in the reliability of memory…In spite of these anti-memoiristic rumblings, The Lost Landscape remains indisputably a memoir. Like many these days, it's not continuous, and is composed almost entirely of previously published essays…The greater part of the book is arranged chronologically. Small, tightly focused pieces alternate with substantial narratives to make a satisfying whole, giving the reader a coherent account of Oates's childhood and adolescence…For all of Oates's doubts about the primacy of the particular and the private, The Lost Landscape is full of specifically memoiristic pleasures.

07/06/2015
“I scarcely remember myself as a child. Only as an eye, an ear, a ceaselessly inquisitive center of consciousness,” Oates (A Widow’s Story) admits, and so this memoir of her early life strings together the recollections that most deeply impressed her consciousness. They reveal an intensely shy, nervous, self-admittedly secretive child, as easily moved to terror as to wonder at the formative mysteries of childhood: the loss of a beloved pet chicken and later a grandfather, the sense of living in a landscape and a family haunted by violence, the acquisition of a library card and the discovery that “adult writing was a form of wisdom and power.” The essays, many previously published elsewhere, range stylistically, but when Oates falls into her narrative strengths—an alert eye for detail, an atmosphere suffused with dread and apprehension, an enormous sympathy for her characters—the pieces become stunning, as in accounts of a childhood friend lost to suicide (“The Lost Friend”), time spent in graduate school in Madison, Wisc. (“Nighthawk”), and Oates’s autistic younger sister (“The Lost Sister”). A fascination with the quirks of fate that concatenate into a life, and a long, deeply felt love for her parents, thematically unite this varied, kaleidoscopic, and ultimately insightful map to the formation of a writer who understands “how deeply mysterious the ‘familiar’ really is.” Photos. (Sept.)

Stunning…[a] varied, kaleidoscopic, and…insightful map to the formation of a writer who understands how deeply mysterious the ‘familiar’ really is.” — Publishers Weekly

“…a tender-hearted excavation of [Oates’] hardscrabble early life…in sharing with us the lost landscape of her childhood, she has ensured it will never be forgotten.” — O magazine

“Oates perfectly captures the unique confusion of childhood, brought on by the unsatisfying explanations of adults.” — Elle

“’The Lost Landscape’…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’ case, it very much does.” — Minneapolis Star Tribune

“[An] intriguing new memoir…Oates mines literary gold.” — San Francisco Chronicle

“This captivating account of the growth of a writer’s mind puts [Oates’] new collection of essays firmly in the tradition of similar autobiographical works by writers such as Goethe, Wordsworth, and Joyce.” — Philadelphia Inquirer

“[An] intimate yet sweeping memoir…” — The New Yorker

“…affecting...the book place[s] us intimately in the mind of Oates’ vulnerable self.” — Providence Journal

“A tender-hearted excavation of [Oates’] hardscrabble early life…in sharing with us the lost landscape of her childhood, she has ensured it will never be forgotten.” — O magazine

[An] intimate yet sweeping memoir…

This captivating account of the growth of a writer’s mind puts [Oates’] new collection of essays firmly in the tradition of similar autobiographical works by writers such as Goethe, Wordsworth, and Joyce.

’The Lost Landscape’…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’ case, it very much does.

…affecting...the book place[s] us intimately in the mind of Oates’ vulnerable self.

Oates perfectly captures the unique confusion of childhood, brought on by the unsatisfying explanations of adults.

[An] intriguing new memoir…Oates mines literary gold.

A tender-hearted excavation of [Oates’] hardscrabble early life…in sharing with us the lost landscape of her childhood, she has ensured it will never be forgotten.

[An] intriguing new memoir…Oates mines literary gold.

[An] intimate yet sweeping memoir…

07/01/2015
Oates (Roger S. Berlind '52 Professor of the Humanities, Princeton Univ.), a prolific writer by any standard, recounts here how and why she became a writer. Growing up in rural western New York, she lived on her family's farm, bonded with a hen, fell in love with Alice in Wonderland, and came to understand some harsh realities at an early age. Much like Eudora Welty's One Writer's Beginnings and Mary Ward Brown's Fanning the Spark, Oates writes about her formative years with clear vision. Her use of vignette gives the book the dreamt quality that some readers will associate with her fiction. VERDICT Readers of Oates's best-selling memoir, A Widow's Story, will appreciate this new account, as will fans of her earlier fiction. [See Prepub Alert, 3/16/15.]—Pam Kingsbury, Univ. of North Alabama, Florence

Cassandra Campbell's beautifully expressive performance captures the emotional depth of these loosely interlocked essays in which Joyce Carol Oates reflects primarily on her family and childhood and the significant events that influenced her worldview and development as an author. Using a conversational, almost storytelling, style, Campbell creates a welcome intimacy between the listener and Oates's carefully crafted prose. Several pieces involve long lists of food or clothing or other short memories, and Campbell's whispery, melodic voice captures the poetic quality of those sections, completely captivating the listener. The essays embrace a broad emotional spectrum—from the wonderment of obtaining a first library card to the devastation of losing a parent—and present a stark portrait of growing up in rural America in the 1950s. C.B.L. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award, 2016 Audies Finalist © AudioFile 2015, Portland, Maine

2015-06-04
Glimpses of the iconic writer's youth. Oates (Humanities/Princeton Univ.; Lovely, Dark, Deep: Stories, 2014, etc.), the highly prolific author and winner of many prestigious literary awards, gathers 28 pieces, most revised from previous publications, into a tender, often moving evocation of the physical and emotional landscapes that have shaped her. Although she has published a volume of journals, an account of her grief after her husband's sudden death, and many personal essays, Oates portrays herself as a reluctant memoirist. She worries about "violating my own self" and "exposing my very heart," as well as writing "anything that disturbs, offends, or betrays any other person's privacy." Recalling a friend who committed suicide and another who was sexually abused, Oates felt compelled to change details, as well as to create "a quasi-fictitious character named ‘Joyce'—who is almost entirely an observer…more emotionally detached (and more naive) in the memoir than I had been in actual life." Nevertheless, she reveals some intimate details: a childhood plagued by shyness, self-doubt, and anxiety; recurrent insomnia; the mystery and burden of having an autistic sister; and feeling like an outsider at Syracuse University ("as a scholarship girl I was a spy in the house of mirth"). As a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin, she was "profoundly disillusioned" by her professors' stultifying approach to literary analysis. She fell in love and married, but her husband remains a shadowy figure, his memory too precious to share with readers. Oates identifies the roots of some works: a serial murder case inspired the much-anthologized "Where Are You Going? Where Have You Been?" and her experience living in Detroit informed several novels. The circuitous, impressionistic narrative returns often to her parents, "extraordinary people morally," whom she portrays in loving detail. Though her past seems to her fragmentary and elusive, what she remembers—or imagines—is warmly, gently told.