Oates is equally unflinching in her inquiry into class
and racial conflicts,
and in her imaginative
and intrepid variations on actual circumstances
and crimes, from the limited choices of disadvantaged women in her Detroit - set National Book
Award — winning them (1969) to Marilyn Monroe's disastrous celebrity in Blonde (2000) to a tale of the opposite lives of two college
students in
Black Girl /
White Girl (2006) to the JonBenet Ramsey case
and the horrors of the tabloid press in My Sister, My Love (2008) to the festering wound of a long - ago New Jersey lynching in The Accursed (2013).