Long live Joyce Carol Oates’ Twitter account: the only pure space left on this hell site

At the centre of most things is a skeleton. So it is for the online infamy of Joyce Carol Oates. In 2021, the award-winning novelist delivered her most significant contribution to literature: a diabolical tweet ruminating on the existentialism of Halloween.

For the uninitiated, the 86-year-old, five-time Pulitzer finalist used her platform on X (formerly Twitter) to share a photo of an impressive, American-style Halloween decoration, which featured dozens of plastic skeletons clambering up the facade of a house. “You can always recognise a place in which no one is experiencing much or any grief for a lost loved one,” she wrote. “Everyone you love decomposing to bones is just a joke.”

This unique take on Halloween traditions was met with a kind of confused online glee. In an increasingly polarised political world, it’s rare to encounter such a rogue and bafflingly strong opinion like this out of nowhere. No culture wars, no popular discourse, just a thought sprung into being like Athena from Zeus’s brow. Or a spooky ghost jumping out at you in a haunted house – although we shouldn’t joke about that.

But this is more than just a one-off phenomenon. In fact, it’s just a single example of a bewildering array of classic Joyce Carol Oates tweets – a decade-long oeuvre which makes a compelling case for another addition to her trophy shelf: Twitter’s greatest poster. The poet laureate of social media. I’m not being snarky here; I genuinely love her tweets, and they are one of the only things that bring me joy in a rapidly Nazi-infested platform. As Twitter user Kaitlin Ruiz puts it: “She doesn’t need to answer to any specialization; an oracle is not beholden to coherence.”

Oates is a prolific writer in every aspect of her life. She has published 58 novels – but more importantly, she has written 170k tweets. Her targets are broad and plentiful. There are political takes: dozens of tweets a day about Harris v Trump, and Israel’s war on Gaza. She’ll be outspoken on trans rights one day, and writing about JD Vance’s tiny eyes on another – but she also isn’t afraid to venture into worlds of whimsy, such as her cat pondering the trolley problem.

The point is that she posts frequently, without the agenda to sell something, and seemingly with unabashed sincerity. In interviews, she’s dismissed the medium as “ephemeral and quickly forgotten”. But her relationship to the platform feels pure. It’s the way Twitter should be used.

Every thought comes directly from her huge creative brain directly to the internet, the online farm-to-table. “All we hear of ISIS is puritanical & punitive; is there nothing celebratory & joyous?” she questioned back in 2015. “Are there instances of women becoming obsessed with historic events?” she mused in 2023. Then there’s the time she posted a truly confronting picture of her infected foot online.

Twitter’s owner, Elon Musk, constantly refers to Twitter as a “town square”, but following Joyce Carol Oates is more like being in a never-ending dinner party with the author, where she is sitting a couple of seats down from you. Every so often, while you’re eating your delicious fish meal and chatting to your neighbour, you’ll hear a snippet from Joyce Carol Oates waft up the table. You’ll usually miss the context about why she is currently waxing lyrical on this subject, or its relevance to anyone else, or even any greater nuance to the discussion – but that shouldn’t matter. We should all be grateful that we get to be permanently at a dinner party with Joyce Carol Oates.