Joyce Carol Oates Goes Tabloid!

You tell your story from the viewpoint of Skyler Rampike, the brother of a 6-year-old murder victim. Why this case? I wanted to write about a young person from a tabloid-target family. I had originally thought of writing about someone like the daughter of O.J. Simpson.

Why do you think the real JonBenet was such a riveting figure? The image of the beautiful, young, innocent child who had been made up to look much older by her mother–a sexualized infant–was a very perverse and alarming image to many people.

What do you think of the tabloids? I talk about Tabloid Hell in the novel … Basically, I read the New York Times, the New York Times Book Review, the New York Review of Books and the New Yorker … One doesn’t have an unlimited amount of time for reading everything.

Is it a bad thing that there was so much publicity about the real case? I think it satisfies a certain desire or hunger in the populace. It depends what you think news is.