Joyce Carol Oates Goes Tabloid!

By Andrea Sachs

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.