What is your central question?
Your vexing riddle or driving secret? The koan of your life?
Joyce Carol Oates has a secret.
It is “the vexing riddle,” the “koan of my life,” she wrote in her journal in 1978. Oates wondered if “it is a secret embedded deep within everyone’s life, but particularly within the life of the creative artist.” The secret has persisted all the decades since—and it’s the focus of Rachel Aviv’s beguiling N…