What led you to choose this unusual point of view, “a posthumous narration” by Norma Jeane herself?
Oates: This is a difficult question to answer. The voice, point of view, ironic perspective, mythic distance: this curious distancing effect is my approximation of how an individual might feel dreaming back over his or her own life at the very conclusion of that life, on the brink of extinction even as, as in a fairy tale, the individual life enters an abstract, communal “posterity.” Norma Jeane dies, and “Marilyn Monroe,” the role, the concoction, the artifice, would seem to endure. At over 700 printed pages, this is your longest novel. But your original manuscript was even longer 1,400 pages. Why did you cut the novel so substantially? Oates: At 1,400 pages, the novel had to be cut, and some sections, surgically removed from the manuscript, will be published independently. They are all part of Norma Jeane’s living, organic life. To me, the language of Norma Jeane is somehow “real.” Still, a novel of such a length is a problem. Rights have been sold, according to my agent, to “nearly
