The reverse Frey effect
Joyce Carol Oates has recently come under fire from a New Jersey college for being “insensitive,” as the New York Times reports.
Oates’ short story, “Landfill,” ran in the Oct. 9 issue of The New Yorker and “resembles the true story of John A. Fiocco Jr., a 19-year-old freshman at the College of New Jersey whose body was found in a landfill in April.” A spokesman for the college said that members of the college’s community are still grieving, and “reading this fictionalized version of the Fiocco tragedy can be painful for them.”
Oates doesn’t deny that she had read about Fiocco before writing “Landfill.” She’s drawn on real life inspiration for her fiction before, as she tells the Times, but in this case she says, “If I had to do it all over again, I certainly would have changed some details.”
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Read the New York Times story here
