What I lived forbyJoyce Carol Oates

What I Lived For (1994) is Joyce Carol Oates's twenty-third novel. The novel offers a powerful and insightful portrait of an unforgettable and deeply troubled man, Corky Corcoran. Corcoran, on Memorial Day 1992, discovers why he is so driven to consume food, sex, and drink and to demand attention and respect in an attempt to escape the past. Novel explores the complex dynamics of these driving ambitions.

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Product Description
Throughout her distinguished career, Joyce Carol Oates has established a matchless reputation as a bold explorer of the American soul. In such novels as the National Book Award winning them, Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart, and Black Water, she has limned our passions, our secrets, our deepest fears. Now, with What I Lived For, she has produced her masterpiece: a searing journey into the heart of a complex, troubled, and unforgetable man—and the women who made the mistake of loving him.

At forty-two, Jerome Corcoran—"Corky" to his friends and associates—is by all appearances a successful real estate developer and broker, a city councilman wih a promising future in local politics, a genuine ladies' man, and all-around great guy. His big house, fifteen-hundred-dollar suits, and the ridiculously large tips he hands out all over town reassure him that he's put plenty of distance between himself and the family history (which includes a murdered father and raving mad mother) he'd rather forget. Corky may think that his inauspicious beginnings on Irish Hill, one of Union City's shabbier neighborhoods, are now far behind him, but over the course of Memorial Day Weekend 1992, that precious illusion, along with several others, will be completely shattered.

In the long list of Corky's women, only one looms larger for him than his own appetites and self-interest: Thalia, his rebellious, radicalized step-daughter from his failed marriage. It is she who will become the agent of his undoing as a complex drama of corruption, blackmail, and political scandal climaxes in an act of explosive violence.

Oates's dazzling plunge into the male psyche is at once a bravura technical performance and an indelible portrait of one man's road to moral ruin. From its very first page, What I Lived For announces itself as a novel epic in vision and scale. It stands as Joyce Carol Oates's most ambitious and most triumphant literary achievement.