“It’s there, it’s always there,” she wrote in 1978. The journal, which she began in 1973, eventually swelled to more than four thousand typed, single-spaced pages. “I don’t know the answer to the simplest of questions,” she wrote.

“Does the individual exist?” She felt that she knew little about herself-for instance, whether she was honest or a hypocrite.

When Joyce Carol Oates was thirty-four, she started a journal.