One morning in April 1991, when spring was still lurking, Marguerite left home to go to work at the university. He didn’t come back. Her younger sister, Georgene (Gigi), tries to provide clues to help find the missing girl and embarks on an exciting narrative in which the secrets of the past are intertwined with an eternal search that does not end up bearing fruit. Joyce Carol Oates, author of Blonde, Ulls verds o Sexi, publishes 48 clues about the disappearance of my sister (RBA), a psychological thriller that addresses issues such as the relationship between sisters, the traumas of adolescence or violence against women . Recurring themes in the literature of the eternal candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature, who in this email interview with La Vanguardia explains the details of this new work.
His novel is about the disappearance of Marguerite. Are disappearances a particularly novelistic element because they disturb even more than murder?
Yes, certainly. Most disappearances of girls and women in the United States are related to crimes such as kidnapping, rape, and murder. However, it cannot be taken for granted that the victim was murdered if the body is not found. This is particularly stressful and overwhelming for family and friends. A considerable number of people disappear in the US every year, never to be seen again. My work resonates with the general anxiety that pervades American culture of mistrust of strangers, fear of intimacy, and fear of the world beyond the immediate.
Marguerite was raped as a teenager. The parents decided that he should not report it. Has society made progress in this area?
It is difficult to answer. Rape is commonly believed to be an often underreported crime, as women and girls are often stigmatized by public recognition of the crime. When a complaint is made, prosecutors often do not file charges, and even if there is a trial, guilty verdicts are rarely reached. For a woman, it is often a losing prospect. Especially in a small town where everyone knows each other and there is likely to be sympathy for the rapist.
Georgene, who is not pretty, has a jealousy problem towards her beautiful sister Marguerite. What traumas can a girl have because of this?
The novel has a fairy tale background: we have the beautiful sister and the ugly sister. Fate and its cruelty. Georgene is less valued because her sister is attractive and successful. Naturally he feels envy and jealousy.
You have set the plot of the novel in 1991. Would the investigation have been different if it had happened in 2024?
I needed to take the story through a period of time, so it had to be set in the late nineties. Basically, today wouldn’t be much different.
Art is very present there…
I have been interested in art and artists for some time, especially female artists like Marguerite. But also the theories of aesthetics: Marguerite’s minimalist and classical aesthetic, contrasted with the figurative, more literal and sensationalist aesthetic of the rival male artist, Elke, who ultimately betrays Marguerite by exploiting her disappearance for their own purposes. The question is: do artists have the right to use anyone and anything in their art, under the pretense that it is “art”? Is there a morality in art?
His novel draws a border between reality and imagination…
Ultimately, the novel is a kind of confession by Georgene: she is devastated by her sister’s disappearance and constructs a narrative. Either he wants to believe that Marguerite “escaped” or that, in some mysterious way, Marguerite was banished by her younger sister. Georgene cannot accept the likely fact that Marguerite was kidnapped and killed by a serial killer, such a sordid ending. In this, Georgene is like many of us: we would rather construct a false reality than tragedy.
