Tyrell has fashioned himself into a professor of American history, after all. He is much altered from the shy tongue-tied high school boy terrorized by the white-devil math teacher. He has brilliantly triumphed over that devil, and has moved on. Shrewd, crafty, if it is revenge Tyrell Jones requires, this is the perfect revenge: knowledge. Not emotion, not the waywardness of desire, or the ecstatic joy of violence, but rather knowledge, and the power of knowledge.

Now, you must move on. Your old, wounded life, the perverse pride in your scarred face, you must surrender.

You have lost the thread of what you’ve been saying. This hurried conversation in your car, by the Thruway entrance at dusk, as a succession of headlights glides over you like rippling water, is domestic, pragmatic. Yes, before midnight. If all goes well. And yes, Chinese food will be perfect. You are weak with gratitude. You are close to tears. Tyrell, protective by instinct, is quick to assure you that it’s wonderful news you are returning home sooner than you’d planned—“Brindle has been pining for you.”

Acknowledgments

In its earliest form, My Life as a Rat appeared as a short story titled “Curly Red” in Harper’s Magazine (2003), which was reprinted in the collection I Am No One You Know (Ecco, 2004). Other sections have appeared, in slightly different forms, in Narrative, Boulevard, and F(r)iction.

About the Author

JOYCE CAROL OATES is a recipient of the National Humanities Medal, the National Book Critics Circle Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award, the National Book Award, and the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story. She is also the recipient of the 2018 Los Angeles Times Mystery/Thriller Award for A Book of American Martyrs and the 2019 recipient of the Jerusalem Prize for the Freedom of the Individual in Society. She has written some of the most enduring fiction of our time, including the national bestsellers We Were the Mulvaneys; Blonde, which was nominated for the National Book Award; and the New York Times bestseller The Falls, which won the 2005 Prix Femina. She is the Roger S. Berlind ’52 Professor in the Humanities Emeritus at Princeton University and has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters since 1978.

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Also by Joyce Carol Oates

Novels By Joyce Carol Oates

With Shuddering Fall (1964)

A Garden of Earthly Delights (1967)

Expensive People (1968)

them (1969)

Wonderland (1971)

Do with Me What You Will (1973)

The Assassins (1975)

Childwold (1976)

Son of the Morning (1978)

Unholy Loves (1979)

Bellefleur (1980)

Angel of Light (1981)

A Bloodsmoor Romance (1982)

Mysteries of Winterthurn (1984)

Solstice (1985)

Marya: A Life (1986)

You Must Remember This (1987)

American Appetites (1989)

Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart (1990)

Black Water (1992)

Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang (1993)

What I Lived For (1994)

Zombie (1995)

We Were the Mulvaneys (1996)

Man Crazy (1997)

My Heart Laid Bare (1998)

Broke Heart Blues (1999)

Blonde (2000)

Middle Age: A Romance (2001)

I’ll Take You There (2002)

The Tattooed Girl (2003)

The Falls (2004)

Missing Mom (2005)