La Muselivre

Joyce Carol Oates vient de publier un nouveau roman aux USA. Elle est surtout connue en France, comme le disait le magazine TOPO (j'ai grincé si fort des dents que vous avez dû m'entendre où que vous ayez été !), pour Blonde, l'un de ses derniers livres (comprenez par là qu'il a été suivi d'au moins cinq à six bouquins depuis !) J'ai toujours beaucoup de mal à admettre combien le public (français ou autre) est rapide à oublier un auteur qui a pourtant connu le succès : comment tout le monde peut-il avoir oublié Bellefleur, Confession d'un gang de filles, Zombie (American Psycho, très très longtemps avant l'heure) ou encore Nous étions les Mulvaney ? Ca me dépasse, d'autant plus que JCO (elle a son abbréviation comme J. Lo, chouette, non ?...) n'est pas un vulgaire petit écrivain de pacotille, c'est quand même l'un des plus grand auteurs américains vivant (son second roman, Earthly Delight, vient de rentrer, aux USA, au rang de classique -- littéralement rentré dans une collections de livres considérés comme des classiques). Heureusement pour nous, JCO est aussi l'écrivain le plus prolifique des USA : 

Since her debut in 1963, Oates has written more than 40 novels, 26 story collections, eight poetry compilations, five drama collections, nine books of essays, a children's book, and an opera libretto (which works out to an average of more than two works per year).

A l'occasion de la sortie de ce dernier livre, elle est donc interviewée :

You must get tired of people asking you about how prolific you are.
It’s not a question that means much right now because I am just sort of stumped with something I’m working on. I have all these notes in front of me—I often begin a novel or short story in so many different ways. I could have nine, 10 different openings, which is what I have in front of my right now. I’m not able to see what I’m doing yet. A lot of it’s experimental and there’s so much revising. So by the time an actual book comes out I have written and rewritten so many pages. It was the structure of “Rape: A Love Story” that was challenging to me. I didn’t want to tell it in ordinary chapters that might be 10, 15 or 20 pages long. I wanted to have very short chapters that moved swiftly.
Do you every worry about running out of things to say?
Oh, I will never run out of things to say. I have pages and folders of notes. My problem is the structure, how to put it together. You meet someone on an airplane, he can tell you stories and stories. That’s not the point—we’re all brimming with stories. The difficulty is how to present the material. When you begin with one sentence, then you have another sentence and you have a first paragraph, then you’re beginning that way and you’re not beginning any other way. So you’ve excluded a lot of other things. I can write a whole chapter and I discover that that wasn’t the best choice and I go back and write another.
[..]Do you ever worry about the sheer volume of your work diluting the impact of any individual book?
I think that’s inevitable. If one publishes a couple books year, I don’t think one can avoid that. But I’m not trying to create an image of myself or have a career that’s necessarily sculpted or guided. I’m more interested in individual projects. So if I have an idea, I want to execute that idea the best I can. When it becomes published, like “Rape: A Love Story,” it passes over into what we call production.