At Home in the World: A Memoir [Paperback]

Joyce Maynard (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 29, 1999

When it was first published in 1998, At Home in the World set off a furor in the literary world and beyond. Joyce Maynard's memoir broke a silence concerning her relationship--at age eighteen--with the famously reclusive author J.D. Salinger, then age fifty-three, who had read a story she wrote for The New York Times in her freshman year of college and sent her a letter that changed her life.

With what some have viewed as shocking honesty, Maynard explores her coming of age in an alcoholic family, her mother's dream to mold her into a writer, her self-imposed exile from the world of her peers when she left Yale to live with Salinger, and her struggle to reclaim her self of sense in the crushing aftermath of his dismissal of her not long after her nineteenth birthday. A quarter of a century later--having become a writer, survived the end of her marriage and the deaths of her parents, and with an eighteen-year-old daughter of her own--Maynard pays a visit to the man who broke her heart. The story she tells--of the girl she was and the woman she became--is at once devastating, inspiring, and triumphant.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Joyce Maynard's memoir At Home in the World is an attempt to make peace with herself. At times, however, it's hard not to see it as an act of war--on her parents and, most notably, on J.D. Salinger. Maynard's account of her year-long relationship with the reclusive writer is the centerpiece of the book and the publicity pivot on which it turns. And how not? She first encountered Salinger when he wrote her a fan letter following her world-weary but not necessarily wordly wise New York Times Magazine cover piece, "An Eighteen Year Old Looks Back on Life." He was then 53 and, as Maynard paraphrases, wanted her "to know that I could be a real writer, if I would just look out for myself, as no other person is likely to." By the time she was 19, she was living with the increasingly controlling Salinger and doing her best to adhere to his regimens, from homeopathy at any price to a mostly macrobiotic diet heavy on frozen peas. (Lamb burgers, formed into patties and then frozen--before being cooked at a dysentery-friendly 150 degrees--also figure heavily.)

What's worse, he does his best to turn the hugely driven young woman into a mistrusting, publicity-shy prig, not to mention helping her perfect her already anorexic bent. Maynard is such a skilled writer that it's hard not to take her side as the relationship falters. In fact, even when it's going well, it's not easy to sympathize with a man whose idea of an endearment is, "I couldn't have made up a character of a girl I'd love better than you." But Maynard is as hard on her younger self as she is on the great man. Though she had published intimate essays since her early teens, and long been feted for her "honesty," it has taken the overachiever many years to realize that she had carefully left out her most personal burdens--her father's alcoholism, her mother's nighttime "snuggling" and overwhelming intrusions, the distance between her and her older sister.

Still, At Home in the World is more than a clearing-house for past parental and amorous wrongs. It's a cautionary tale about using language and the pretense of truth to obscure key realities. One of the many curiosities in this discomfiting book? Salinger dreamt that he and Maynard had a child together: "I saw her face clearly. Her name was Bint." The World War II veteran then looks up the word. "What do you know," he says. "It's archaic British, for little girl." Maynard never, even now, has questioned his definition. In fact, it's slang, used especially in World War II, for prostitute. When Salinger forced the 19-year-old to clear her things out of his New Hampshire house, she was still unaware of the word's force. "On the window of Jerry's bedroom, where the glass is dusty, I write, with my finger, the name of the child we had talked about: BINT." --Kerry Fried --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

Maynard, novelist (Baby Love; To Die For) essayist, columnist and Web-page chatteuse, was a freshman at Yale in April 1972 when the New York Times Magazine published her cover article, "An Eighteen Year Old Looks Back on Life." Of the hundreds of letters she received, one from the reclusive J.D. Salinger, then 53, praising her talent and warning her against the dangers of early success, struck a particular chord. Maynard quickly wrote back and, following a summer of letters, phone calls and visits to Cornish, N.H., she dropped out of Yale and moved in with him. Maynard's observant, straight-faced presentation of what are nonetheless often hilarious events chez Salinger has to be one of the shrewdest deflations of a literary reputation on record. What's plain and most damaging is the nature of Jerry's interest in Joyce, who looked about 11 and who arrived for her first visit in a dress almost identical to one she wore in first grade. Maynard poignantly describes her alienation and isolation, which Salinger reinforced before cruelly discarding her. Unable for legal reasons to quote Salinger's letters, Maynard nevertheless makes the reader see why his words so captivated her: "I fell in love with his voice on the page," she says. Once she moved in, however, Jerry began to sound like an aging Holden Caulfield, abrasive and contemptuous. Maynard takes too long setting up her family history pre-Salinger and far too long recounting her life since, inadvertently revealing why Salinger and others seem to have wearied of her. But her painstaking honesty about herself lends credence to her portrayal of Salinger as something worse than a cranky eccentric. This will be a hard story to ignore. First serial to Vanity Fair.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 384 pages
• Publisher: Picador; 1st edition (October 29, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312202296
• ISBN-13: 978-0312202293
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.1 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 0.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (158 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #360,733 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

I've been a writer all my life. Over those years, I've worked as a newspaper reporter, columnist, radio commentator (I was Liberal-of-the-Day on CBS radio at the age of 19, on a show called Spectrum) . For eight years, I published a syndicated column about my life called "Domestic Affairs", but when my life got increasingly complicated (I got divorced) and my children grew to the age where it was no longer a good idea to write about them, I ended the column and turned to writing fiction. One of my novels, To Die For, was made into a terrific movie, directed by Gus van Sant , in which I can be seen in the role of Nicole Kidman's lawyer.

My memoir, At Home in the World, published in 1998, engendered a fair amount of controversy at the time of its publication --still does, in some quarters.

In recent years, I've published a true crime story--Internal Combustion, and two more novels--The Usual Rules and a young adult novel, The Cloud Chamber, as well as a number of essays that can be found in various collections. (Read over the titles--aging, divorce, anorexia, miscarriage, disastrous midlife dating--and you may get a picture of my life, I suppose, though a number of the more cheerful aspects --more enjoyable to live through, but less good as material--would be missing.

My latest book is the novel, Labor Day--just published in July 2009. I'll be on the road for a while, sharing that one with readers. You can learn more about the novel, and my tour schedule (also my writing workshops on Lake Atitlan, in Guatemala) on my website, www.joycemaynard.com

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

46 of 48 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars An excellent, sometimes profound memoir. . . December 2, 1999

By Marian Leighton

Format:Paperback

Though not someone who has followed all of Joyce Maynard's career, I still found myself immersed almost from her opening paragraphs. There is a lot here, some disturbing, some thought-provoking, and always fascinating. I was surprised, as I was one who, almost on principle, felt J. D. Salinger's privacy, if it's so important to him, should above all not be violated. However, I realized as I went along, that this is really missing the point and is also implicitly saying that Salinger, as Great Writer, is more important than others in his life. But this IS Joyce Maynard's life, not J. D. Salinger's, though he does figure in her life for 10 months and she learned a great deal about herself from analyzing that relationship's hold upon her.

I do not see that she has exploited her relationship with him; I don't even see that she has particularly said horribly negative things about him, for that matter. I also feel that all the focus on this book as being about Maynard's sense of "victimization" by a "dysfunctional family" and an older man, J. D. Salinger, are simply way off the mark and totally missing the main points of her story. She does not portray herself as a victim and her self-analyses and self-criticism ring true as evidence of her having made some hardwon peace with her past and having reached a maturity that has often not seemed characteristic of her work in the past.

I also think there is a great deal more humor and a great deal more irony than people have generally been writing about in reviewing this book. The theme of authenticity vs. inauthenticity, for example, is an important one, whether one is critical of Maynard's narcissism or not. J. D. Salinger's own naricissism is fairly transparent in her story & obviously one of the reasons, coming from the family that she did, that he had such a hold over her. Ultimately, of course, his concern with authenticity and genuineness and purity are indeed compromised by the many things within himself that he doesn't wish to look at.

Actually, I thought she was quite kind about the relationship, as if she had taken responsibility for the part she played in getting involved with him in the first place.

A couple of interesting lines that keep coming back to me are "What purpose did I serve in your life" and her observation that she was . . . "one who had made the mistake of trying to live out fictions best left on the page," a common mistake of imaginative young people & we'd all be doing well to have accepted our past with the grace and wisdom she seems to have arrived at.

35 of 38 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars Unveiling the Secrets February 22, 2005

By Erika Mitchell TOP 500 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format:Audio Cassette

This book tells the story of a young girl who was preyed upon, seduced and then abandoned by an older man. Of some interest is that the older man, in this case happened to be well-known, the author J.D. Salinger, although that's not the focus of the story. Maynard was a precocious writer. Both of her parents were English teachers, and Maynard as a young girl sat in on many a writing lesson that her mother used to give at home for her college and high-school students. Thanks to this early training, as well as her innate talent, Maynard had published articles in Seventeen Magazine and The New York Times while still a teenager. After the Times article, which included a picture of her, came out, she received hundreds of letters in response. One of those letters was from J.D. Salinger, who warned her that there would be those who would complement her writing and then once they had gotten her trust would exploit her. She wrote back to Mr. Salinger, and they were soon engaged in frequent correspondence. One thing led to another, and within the year, Maynard had dropped out of college and moved in with Salinger, some 35 years her senior. Unfortunately, although Maynard was deeply attached to Salinger, the feelings weren't exactly mutual, and within another year, Salinger, without explanation demanded that she leave. Maynard was to spend the next 25 years trying to understand what had happened to her. When her own daughter turned 18, the same age she had been when Salinger first approached her, she felt she had to share her story at last, so that others might learn from it.

In the book, Maynard describes some of the personal turmoils that left her vulnerable to such an experience. She relates some of the advice that Salinger shared with her about her writing. She lets us see the good side as well as the bad side of the man, but this book is primarily about her-looking back to see where she came from and make sense of where she has arrived. Overall, the story is engaging and compelling.

35 of 40 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars An Insight into a Woman's Life March 3, 2000

By Dr. P. Farrar

Format:Paperback

I picked up this book for $5 on the strength of having recently seen "To Die For" on video. I did not know who Joyce Mynard was, nor Jerry Salinger (exccept as the author of "Catcher in the Rye"). At then end of this book I felt that I knew them both. Maynard's story is not an expose of Salinger, but a narrative of how a woman can be seduced by one man's charismatic power, and sublimate her own talent in order to have that man's approval for her own existence. Maynard's story is a modern version of the Svengali archetype. However it is also a story of women's strength and survival, in spite of her wanting to return to the hoped-for fairy-tale of what might have been. Even when confronted with the evidence of Salinger's predilection for young women, and his betrayal of her, Maynard still teeters on the disbelief that we are individually special to one such man. Women everywhere harbour the image of the ideal relationship, whether it is with a Salinger or a Steve (Maynard's ex-husband). In the end, we realise, as Maynard has shown, the only person on whom a woman can rely is herself. "At Home in the World" is a microscopic examination of a woman's most important relationships - with her mother, her sister and her daughter. Maynard's honesty in telling her story is the strength of this book.

I felt a similar resonance on reading the work of the English writer, Anne Oakley, in her book "The Men's Room". Oakley, too, writes from the heart of her personal experience. Although Maynard refers to Sylvia Plath, I have always felt that Plath contrived a safe distance from her reader audience. Maynard does not do this, and neither does Oakley. Both these writers convey the impression of approaching their readers with their open arms, as if saying "Here I am, take me as you find me." Plath, on the other hand, covers her face with her hands in defence of herself and the rawness of her pain. There is little difference between Ted Hughes's treatment of Plath and Salinger's treatment of Maynard, except that Salinger released Joyce in life, while Hughes released Sylvia in death.

Once I began this book I was unable to put it don, so involved was I with the lives of teh people within the covers. I have an urgent need to share it with my own daughter (aged 21) and with my best women friends. Thank you, Joyce Maynard, for having the courage to share your story and giving us the courage to share ours.