Joyce Carol Oates: I’ve always been so interested in personal history. I’m very fascinated by my parents’ and my grandparents’ generations. I seem to think that they had a resilience and an integrity that may be somewhat deficient in my own generation, and in subsequent generations as well, because America has been rather easy to live in since the Depression. So, I’ve been so interested in my parents’ generation. And probably out of that respect — a curiosity for what they lived through — grew my fascination with subject matter.