If you could edit your past, what would you change?
A writer can’t subtract or excise any of his/her past because doing so would erase the work produced during that time. For instance, my young husband Raymond and I endured a hellish nine months in Beaumont, Texas when we were first married, but during that time, in a kind of exile from civilisation, I managed to complete much of my first published novel.
At The Guardian, Rosanna Greenstreet interviews Joyce Carol Oates.