JOYCE CAROL OATES’S RATE of production has been staggering. More than 1,000 short stories, some 50 novels, a dozen-plus books of essays, plays, and poetry since 1963. Last year six new titles landed in bookstores. This year there will be another three.

Clearly, making things up has never been a problem. But with her latest work, things have changed. Now it’s personal. A decade ago, she began cribbing from the life of someone real, someone dear to her heart: her grandmother.

I went to see her at her airy modernist home, tucked around a leafy courtyard outside Princeton, New Jersey. But before she explained the genesis of her latest novel, we had to agree what part of her massive creative output we were there to discuss. “Which book are you here to talk about?” she demanded, cloudy with puzzlement.

That cleared up, we were on to The Gravedigger’s Daughter. “My grandmother had experiences very similar to those of Rebecca with her father,” she said, referring to the heroine of the novel, which tells of a woman who escapes when her father kills the rest of their family.

“In actual life my great-grandfather was a gravedigger. Though he didn’t kill his wife,” she says, deadpan. “He injured her and she was hospitalised. But he did threaten his daughter, and he did commit suicide with a shotgun. That’s all true.” In the book, Rebecca winds up in the arms of an alcoholic husband, then careens out when he becomes abusive, turning herself into “Hazel Jones”. She goes on the road with her son, improvising along the way.

Oates saw the novel through numerous revisions. “The opening chapter alone was revised 15 times,” she says. “When I come to the end of the novel, I rewrite the ending and the beginning together. To me, that is what writing is.”

The novel was finished several years ago, but was bumped several times off schedule by novels that her American publisher believed were more “controversial”, such as Missing Mom. In the meantime, it cooled in a closet where Oates keeps a stack of fireproof drawers, incubating fiction already written and protecting documents. “Supposedly, if the whole house burns down, our wills won’t,” she says with a wry look.

She has written many tales of transformation, notably in her 2001 Pulitzer Prize finalist, Blonde,an imagining of the life of Marilyn Monroe.

“Norma Jean Baker sort of makes herself into Marilyn Monroe,” she says, her voice high and quiet, not unlike that of the former sex symbol, “sort of like Rebecca, who becomes Hazel Jones. And many women become Hazel Jones to some extent – they don’t always stay Hazel Jones. But it’s kind of an American ideal.”

She was fascinated that her grandmother had done a similar thing long before the era of extreme makeovers. And since her transformation was also long before psychotherapy had entered the mainstream, her grandmother didn’t talk about it.

“The image I have of her is unfailing,” Oates continues. “I mean, she never was the girl whose father had almost killed her and blew his head off with a shotgun. She was never that girl. She was never the woman whose husband had abused her and then left her. She never would have wanted to play those cards.”

In other words, Oates’s grandmother didn’t play the victim, a role she believes Americans overplay today to their detriment. Writing about her grandmother’s time, she grew to appreciate the hardships and starkness her ancestors, men and women, would have felt.

“If people came to America in 1890 and settled in the countryside, they were like pioneers,” she says. “They were living in very primitive circumstances – of course, there was no plumbing and no electricity. So you can imagine what they were living in – a stone cottage in a cemetery."

Like Rebecca’s father and mother, Oates’s great-grandparents went to the United States – only in the 1890s, not 1936, as in the book – and changed their name (from Morgenstern to Morningstar).

“I guess it was pretty common,” she says. “They put aside their Jewish background completely, out of what trauma or devastation or terror or experiences in Europe I can only imagine. We never knew anything about this, and I didn’t know my grandmother and her parents had been Jewish. That was never talked about.”

As we sit in her living room, surrounded by the work of her Princeton colleagues Edmund White and Toni Morrison, as well as Faulkner, Melville and Hawthorne this history hangs in a loaded near silence. She has an almost Quaker way of speaking, pausing at length, then starting again.

She continues, saying that her grandmother met a man named Oates. “He left her with a small child who was my father.”

There is something surreal in hearing her discuss these matters, not because of the personal revelations, but because her most famous novels – such as Them and Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart, as well as her trenchant essays – have become cultural shorthand for feminine consciousness. In other words, she has helped to create a world that would be totally unrecognisable to her own grandmother, let alone the heroine based on her.

“There’s a good deal in the novel about playing with cards,” she says.“Playing with the cards that you are dealt; you have a limited number of cards, which you have to deal very carefully, and people who choose to present themselves as victims, I think, are probably making a mistake.”

She gives an example from The Gravedigger’s Daughter, where Rebecca meets an appealing new man. “Does she feel for him what she feels for Niles [her first husband]?” “No, she’s never going to be able to feel that again. But he’s such a wonderful man, should she tell him what her background is?”

By the look in her eye, it would appear that Oates believes that this is a compromise a woman has to make.

THE GRAVEDIGGER’S DAUGHTER by Joyce Carol Oates

Fourth Estate, £18.99; 582pp

Buy the book here at the offer price of £17.09 (free p&p)

THE PICK OF JOYCE CAROL OATES

THEM (1969) Powerful, crazed National Book Award-winning novel that culminates in the 1967 Detroit riots. Book 3 of The Wonderland Quartet, which began with The Garden of Earthly Delights.

ON BOXING (1987) Classic, short book on the bruising sport. “In the brightly lit ring, man is in extremis,” Oates writes, “performing an atavistic rite . . . Boxing has become America’s tragic theatre”.

BLACK WATER (1992) Grim reimagining of the “Chappaquiddick incident” – the car accident which derailed Ted Kennedy’s presidential career and took the life of Mary Jo Kopechne.

HIGH LONESOME: SELECTED STORIES (2006) A taste of her greatest short fiction, with 11 new works. An insight into what The New York Times called her “intense and violent world of struggle”.

Joyce Carol Oates is at the Edinburgh International Book Festival tomorrow at 11.30am. Call 0845 373 5888 www.edbookfest.co.uk

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