The Lost Landscape

The Lost Landscape
Joyce Carol Oates

A momentous memoir of childhood and adolescence from one of our finest and most beloved writers, as we’ve never seen her before.In The Lost Landscape, Joyce Carol Oates vividly recreates the early years of her life in western New York state, powerfully evoking the romance of childhood and the way it colors everything that comes after. From early memories of her relatives to remembrances of a particularly poignant friendship with a red hen, from her first friendships to her first experiences with death, The Lost Landscape is an arresting account of the ways in which Oates’s life (and her life as a writer) was shaped by early childhood and how her later work was influenced by a hard-scrabble rural upbringing.In this exceptionally candid, moving, and richly reflective recounting of her early years, Oates explores the world through the eyes of her younger self and reveals her nascent experiences of wanting to tell stories about the world and the people she meets. If Alice in Wonderland was the book that changed a young Joyce forever and inspired her to look at life as offering endless adventures, she describes just as unforgettably the harsh lessons of growing up on a farm. With searing detail and an acutely perceptive eye, Oates renders her memories and emotions with exquisite precision to truly transport the reader to a bygone place and time, the lost landscape of the writer’s past but also to the lost landscapes of our own earliest, and most essential, lives.

Joyce at her first desk, five years old. At home in Millersport, New York. (Fred Oates)

Praise for The Lost Landscape: (#ulink_d7ebdd7c-546c-540d-b733-3e90bca32738)

‘As profound, as thorough and, at times, as dark as anything Oates has ever done’

Buffalo News

‘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’s case, it very much does’

Minneapolis Star Tribune

‘A window into one of our most powerful writers’ coming-of-age and the forces affecting how she sees and writes the world’

Christian Science Monitor

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

Elle (US)

‘An exquisitely rendered glimpse of Oates’s childhood in rural upstate New York’

Bookpage

Copyright (#ulink_99a4552f-55d8-5972-b458-874166a0e634)

Fourth Estate

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.4thestate.co.uk (http://www.4thestate.co.uk)

This eBook first published in Great Britain by Fourth Estate in 2015

First published in the United States by Ecco in 2015

Copyright © The Ontario Review 2015

Joyce Carol Oates asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Front cover photograph: Joyce Carol Oates in 1948, taken by her father, Fred Oates, and courtesy of the author

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008146610

Ebook Edition © September 2015 ISBN: 9780008146603

Version: 2016-09-08

DEDICATION (#ulink_6d8d57b3-ea14-50fa-aea4-c752007eae1b)

To my brother Fred Oates

And in memory of those who have gone away

CONTENTS

COVER (#u0cc4c50f-1206-50bd-b230-17ba73b07487)

TITLE PAGE (#u9e5ab97b-b91e-5e3d-92e5-fa7a75b537c6)

PRAISE (#u31a8d0a2-777e-50e7-9846-3d018645e106)

COPYRIGHT (#u25ea2d28-7c20-57be-8e41-cac9a3393fd2)

DEDICATION (#uc6e31339-2d81-56ca-b297-9e7cffeaf8d7)

AUTHOR’S NOTE (#ulink_77e5813b-d4f4-5d95-9bf9-6fa3f52dd557)

I

WE BEGIN … (#ulink_a41e6255-605b-581f-9d4f-44a92ef93c17)

MOMMY & ME (#ulink_a2bc5d01-2512-5b2e-a518-8569e716baa0)

HAPPY CHICKEN: 1942–1944 (#ulink_4eb8a91b-67c7-50ae-b695-10ba19fa2d85)

DISCOVERING ALICE: 1947 (#ulink_88230c16-970f-5777-9b76-007fa90c6e0c)

DISTRICT SCHOOL #7, NIAGARA COUNTY, NEW YORK (#ulink_ec82062b-d4ac-5e80-8f32-ce0769283e78)

PIPER CUB (#ulink_81981e17-b782-51cb-800c-efff79d7b144)

AFTER BLACK ROCK (#ulink_f25d1c7c-e54d-577c-baae-af3c4d0d7dce)

SUNDAY DRIVE (#ulink_d22fc4d2-1539-5b40-a780-208672c7b728)

FRED’S SIGNS (#ulink_33e517b3-445c-5fe1-887f-a7360f19f9ba)