Biography: Invisible Writer

I'll admit, I'm fascinated by Joyce Carol Oates. I've read Greg Johnson's excellent biography, Invisible Writer, twice over. And yes, my obsession has much to do with her incredible productivity, but also with her passion and energy.

From my journal, March 1999, when I read Invisible Writer for the first time:

The biography has been fueling my unrest and my frustrated longings. JCO's large, half-lidded eye stares up at me from the cover all day as I try to work. The book is long (402 pages), filled with details of her writing life and her stories, maddeningly inspirational at a time when I want to fling the volume aside and make my typewriter clatter, clatter, the way she did. I feel like a nun who has mistakenly drunk a bottle of aphrodisiac. Of course, of course I want to be her. I want novels to pour out like rivers from my typing fingers. I want to be able to write a book in six weeks and then throw it away. I want to have written thousands of pages that will never see the light of day, if it means that from that apprenticeship a small book will survive, get noticed.

These are the things I envy, the things that set me panting with desire: to write and write and write, exhaustively, and to believe, to have something to say, to be able to draw on something passionate inside me. Even this little page, which I've stolen twenty minutes for at the beginning of the day, hasn't quenched my thirst, it's just set it on fire. O God. Let me write.

For a more, ahem, objective review of Johnson's book, check out this one at the New York Times.