I Am No One You Know contains nineteen startling stories that bear witness to the remarkably varied lives of Americans of our time. In Fire, a troubled young wife discovers a rare, radiant happiness in an adulterous relationship. In Curly Red, a girl makes a decision to reveal a family secret, and changes her life irrevocably. In The Girl with the Blackened Eye, selected for The Best American Mystery Stories 2001, a girl pushed to an even greater extreme of courage and desperation manages to survive her abduction by a serial killer. And in Three Girls, two adventuresome NYU undergraduates seal their secret love by following, and protecting, Marilyn Monroe in disguise at Strand Used Books on a snowy evening in 1956.
These vividly rendered portraits of women, men, and children testify to Oates's compassion for the mysterious and luminous resources of the human spirit
