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 I Lock My Door Upon Myself
by Joyce Carol Oates
New York: Ecco Press, 1990
98 pages
Dust Jacket Blurb
People lived differently then, did things for life, they made gestures that lasted for life . . .
Whose story is I Lock My Door Upon Myself? The fiction chronicles the life of Edith Margaret Freilicht, born 1890 and called "Calla" by her mother who died birthing her. Elusive, willful, eccentric, Calla is an enigma to the town of Shaheen, Eden County, New York, to her family, her husband, her children; a flame-haired beauty who views her surroundings and circumstances as a sleepwalker moving through a dream landscape. A woman whose life comes to be defined by her association with a black itinerant water diviner, Tyrell Thompson. The fiction is told by Calla's granddaughter, in part to reach an understanding, a recognition: Because we are linked by blood, and blood is memory without language.
One of the magical things about Joyce Carol Oates's talent is her enduring ability to reinvent not only the psychological space she inhabits when writing, but herself as well, as part of her own fiction. She is one of the most talented and versatile writers of our time. This brilliant and mysterious work is the first in a series of fictions in imaginative collaboration with works of art planned by The Ecco Press.
Excerpt
 She shut her door, she locked her door upon herself early in the winter of 1913 as soon as she'd sufficiently recovered from the trauma done to her body, able to walk with difficulty yet with stubborn persistence using a cane and her thin shoulders hunched, head bowed to protect her watery squinty eyes from the sun glaring fierce as a razor on the dullest of surfaces, and ever after that as the seasons reeled past, the years, the decades, Canada geese flyng north above the highest peak of the highest roof of the house, Canada geese flying south issuing their hoarse melancholy cries, and the invisible loons on the river, and the warning calls of red-winged blackbirds in the marshes, moons too flying by, twin moons reflected calmly in her wide calm staring eyes as she thought No hunger is ever satisfied if it is a true hunger.
Other Editions
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Reviews
- Kirkus Reviews, September 1, 1990, p1196
- Library Journal, October 15, 1990, p105
- Atlantic, November 1990, p173
- New York Times Book Review, November 11, 1990, p68
- Boston Globe, November 25, 1990, A17
- Washington Times, November 26, 1990, F2
- New York Times, December 11, 1990, C19
- Atlanta Journal Constitution, December 16, 1990, N3
- Detroit News & Free Press, December 16, 1990, G7
- San Francisco Chronicle Book Review, December 23, 1990, p10
- USA Today, January 3, 1991, D6
- New Yorker, January 7, 1991, p76
- Los Angeles Times Book Review, January 13, 1991, p6
- Washington Post Book World, January 27, 1991, p11
- St. Louis Post-Dispatch, February 3, 1991, C5
- Belles Lettres, Summer 1991, p12
- Georgia Review, Summer 1991, p363
- World Literature Today, Autumn 1991, p709
- Michigan Quarterly Review, Summer 1992, p40+
- Spectator, June 7, 1992, p29
- Times Literary Supplement, July 17, 1992, p20
- Observer, August 9, 1992, p51
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Page address:
http://jco.usfca.edu/works/novels/ilock.html
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