I love Joyce Carol Oates! However, (2)

I love Joyce Carol Oates' writings. However, I feel that her short stories are less great than her novels. Surely, they do  share some of the great elements of her novels (e.g. mystery, psychological depth, absurdity), yet they lack the value of Oates' novels.
What I did like about this collection of short stories, DIS MEM BER and Other Stories of Mystery and Suspense, is not the psychological insight or the way she constructs the path towards the climax in each of the seven short stories (since these are far more great in her novel Daddy Love), but the feminist traces placed inside this book of mystery and suspense:

"[...] it was a time when breast, uterine, and cervical cancer were referred to as mother's shame and all medical problems related to women's reproductive organs were designated with vague distastefulness as female problems."

 "It was like my father to be rude sometimes. But it was not like my father to be rude to another man, especially a man who was wearing a suit, a white shirt and a necktie and eyeglasses."

"In marriage, one plus one is more than the sum of two. But sometimes in a marriage, one plus one is less than the sum of two."

Some other bits that I liked are the following:

"In a family, one day is not so different from any other. Especially when you are very young - a 'child'. The important thing in life is routine. You can depend upon routine. There is comfort in routine. There is even comfort in the boredom of routine, for where there is boredom there cannot be fear."

"Lula cried, Daddy why? Daddy said, Because I am Daddy, who decides how things end."

* I received an advanced reading e-book copy from the publisher via NetGalley.