Lover | Joyce Carol Oates | Granta Magazine

Lover

Joyce Carol Oates

‘You won't know me, won't see my face. Unless you see my face. And then it will be too late.’

You won’t know me, won’t see my face. Unless you see my face. And then it will be too late.

Fiction
The Online Edition
4th July 1997
Fiction
The Online Edition
4th July 1997

Joyce Carol Oates

Joyce Carol Oates is a recipient of the National Book Award and the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction. She is also the recipient of the 2005 Prix Femina for The Falls. She is the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at Princeton University, and she has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters since 1978.

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‘They were two sisters of youthful middle age with three breasts between them and a history that might be summed up as much left unsaid. Maggie, the elder, who'd had a mastectomy eighteen months before, rarely alluded to the fact in her younger sister's company and spoke with an air of startled reproach if Esther brought up the subject of her health; as if Maggie's breast cancer were a symptom of a moral weakness, a deficiency of character, about which Esther had no right to know.’

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‘The livingness of the rifle and the bullet and the death spasm and his own bright quickening blood: never would he forget.’

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‘They learned that some people are born luckier than others and that things in this world do not always go as you plan.’

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‘I went through a period of several years when everything I touched turned to failure.’

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‘You could not get a decent cup of coffee anywhere in the British Isles.’

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‘That was my first death. When the priest tossed the first three shovelfuls of clay on to the coffin, the clattering sound seemed to ring all over the hillside graveyard and my father's face moved sideways as if he had been struck.’

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