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Oprah's Book Club
Author Joyce Carol's Oates' Secrets of We Were the Mulvaneys  We were the Mulvaneys, remember us?— from We Were the Mulvaneys "I've written over 25 novels, but We Were the Mulvaneys is closest to my heart. I was born on a small farm. In my memory I can go back to that time and see the field and creek Ù the barn. I can shut my eyes, and I'm back there. It is fiction, but I put a lot of personal things in it." - Joyce Carol Oates No one would be able to name what had happened, not even Marianne Mulvaney to whom it did happen. "I set it in the 1970's because it just seemed like the perfect decade. It was before a lot of consciousness about date rape or acquaintance rape. Now we have those terms in the culture. But in the 1970's, that didn't exist." We Mulvaneys would have died for one another, but we had secrets from one another just the same. We still do. "I wanted to tell the truth about secrets in families. What pain they cause, what suffering, and yet the inevitability that the secret will be exposed, and it will work itself out. There will be a time that the motive for secrecy has passed." In a family, what isn't spoken is what you listen for. But the noise of a family is to drown it out. "The secret of the Mulvaneys, which I didn't know at the time I was writing it, is forgiveness. It's a richening, deepening experience." Go back |
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