Author Joyce Carol Oates says she is always thinking about writing, even when she goes running.
"Running is much easier than life," she said.
Oates, a National Book Award winner, gave a book reading at the Penn Bookstore yesterday evening.
Oates presented her two new books, After the Wreck, I Picked Myself Up, Spread My Wings, and Flew Away and Black Girl/White Girl, to a fairly large audience made up of students, aspiring writers and admirers.
Oates peppered her reading with advice for her audience as she candidly and passionately discussed her writing.
When asked how she fits her writing into her daily life, Oates said she looks at her life and writing the other way around.
"I fit my daily life into my writing," she said. "I love writing."
Oates said that, often, writers who are too successful too early have difficulty producing more work of the same caliber.
Early success "can be a curse," Oates said.
Although both her new books are being published together, Black Girl/White Girl had been written earlier. According to Oates, though, that book was held up by her editor for its possibly controversial content.
The book is set in 1974, "a time of transition," according to Oates, "in which everything crashed."
Oates drew a parallel between the Vietnam War and the Iraq War, saying both were "painful and in many ways tragic."
"People don't seem to have learned from obvious lessons of history," she said.
Oates, who is a creative-writing professor at Princeton, said she finds her students to be in "a wonderful, idealistic phase of life."
Oates' words of advice to Penn students were to "live life inquisitively" and to "listen to others."
Sarah Yeung, a College freshman, said she found Oates' books to be "very addictive."
She compared Oates' style to a waterfall in its ability to overwhelm the reader.
Banafsheh Mehrbakhsh, a first-year dental student, said she thought that the book reading had been "perfect."
"I was highly impressed," she said. "It was very insightful . [and] just cool."
