You Must Remember this

Front Cover
Dutton, 1987 - Fiction - 436 pages
From one of the great writers of our time comes this extraordinary novel of an ordinary American family in the 1950s. The Stevicks live in Port Oriskany, an industrial city in upstate New York--father, a romantic, though a dealer in secondhand furniture; mother, a 'homemaker, ' absorbed in her children and the Church; son, back from Korea, with dreams of political activism; oldest daughter, rushing into marriage early and starting a large family; middle daughter, in high school, glamorous, 'fast, ' hoping to become a pop singer; youngest daughter, quiet, watchful, secretive Enid Maria, her daddy's favorite. The façade the Stevicks present as a happy family confirms the respectable stereotype of what the decade wanted, or believed it wanted, a typical American family to be. But façades and stereotypes were strategies devised for living in an age notable for its sunny pieties and nightmare anxieties.

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About the author (1987)

Joyce Carol Oates was born on June 16, 1938 in Lockport, New York. She received a bachelor's degree in English from Syracuse University and a master's degree in English from the University of Wisconsin. She is the author of numerous novels and collections of short stories. Her works include We Were the Mulvaneys, Blonde, Bellefleur, You Must Remember This, Because It Is Bitter, Because It Is My Heart, Solstice, Marya : A Life, and Give Me Your Heart. She has received numerous awards including the National Book Award for Them, the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction, and the F. Scott Fitzgerald Award for Lifetime Achievement in American Literature. She was a finalist for the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction with her title Lovely, Dark, Deep. She also wrote a series of suspense novels under the pseudonym Rosamond Smith. In 2015, her novel The Accursed became listed as a bestseller on the iBooks chart. She worked as a professor of English at the University of Windsor, before becoming the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of Humanities at Princeton University. She and her late husband Raymond J. Smith operated a small press and published a literary magazine, The Ontario Review.

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