I don't like Joyce Carol Oates' work.

I have tried very hard to like it. I feel that I should like it because she is a wonderfully acclaimed writer and her writing is not serial fiction. There is a plot, there is characterization. There is a point. So I read what she has written, more and more of it, trying to find something to like.

I do like one story she wrote--"Life After High School"--very much. I liked it because it was not typical of her. It was thoughtful; it was controlled. It was disturbing, but most of her work is disturbing, which I do not mind on principle. What I mind is what she usually does: the story begins, and you can tell that something transgressive or even demented is going to happen, and it does, but in a way so sudden, overpowering, and overdone that you are not quite sure what happened even when the story is done thrashing you about. The details she chooses to accentuate are graphic, twisted, and ultimately not needed within the context of the larger hellish event she is describing.

She is over the top. Her writing bothers me, but not in a way that makes me think--rather, in a way that makes me never want to think about what she has written ever again, but because it was so strange and beyond the reaches of normal human expression, my mind latches onto it and I think about it for years.

The first book of hers I ever read was actually a short story collection called Small Avalanches. I remember one detail from the entire collection: a teenage girl, naked from the waist down, lying on the floor and peeing. She is unable to control her bladder because there is an old woman (whom she has just met for the first time) standing above her and whipping her across the ass.

I would like to remember the point of the story. I would like to remember what commentary it had to offer on human experience, being a woman, pain, what have you. I would like to at least remember why she and old woman met. All of these are things that I think a good writer should memorably convey to a reader. But all I can remember is the piss.