Perhaps nothing makes for better, more honestly unrehearsed autobiography than a person’s private, daily journal. As author Joyce Carol Oates writes early on in hers: “…the skeptic might object that the writer may be deliberately creating a journal-self…such a pose can’t sustained for very long, and certainly not for years…the person one is, is evident in every line.”
Joyce Carol Oates' Journal a Writer’s Reference
Published in 2007, a quarter-century after its last entry, The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates 1973-1982 does feel like both an unintentional autobiography of Oates’ early years as an author and a writer’s reference book.
Joyce Carol Oates is the award-winning author of 39 novels (including Blonde and We Were the Mulvaneys) nearly as many short story collections, as well as several collections of essays and even poetry. The word most often (nearly always) used to describe her is “prolific.”