At Home in the World: A Memoir (Paperback)

by Joyce Maynard (Author) "THE HOUSE WHERE I grew up, in Durham, New Hampshire, is the only one on the street with a fence surrounding it..." (more)
Key Phrases: crawl stroke, New York, New Hampshire, Jerry Salinger (more...)

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 x 6.1 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 0.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars See all reviews (141 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #346,366 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

20 of 21 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 "doctor_trish" (Sydney, Australia) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.

19 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

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

By	Marian Leighton "Marian Leighton" (Newburyport, MA) - See all my reviews

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.

20 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Intelligent, brave and enriching. Wonderful., October 18, 1999

By A Customer

At Home in the World is an absolutely amazing coming-of-age odyssey. For just piercing observation and the capturing of life's nuances alone, this is one of the best autobiographies I have read. But it soars beyond memoir and delivers far more than insights into the personal life of J.D. Salinger. This is foremost a heartbreaking cautionary tale about the dangers of repressing shame, risks of interpersonal manipulation, and the emotional devastation that can stem from power imbalances within intimate relationships, particularly those involving young adults. It also speaks volumes about the vulnerabilities and contradictions faced by girls in our culture. (Anyone who liked Reviving Ophelia must read this book.)

One of the most powerful aspects of the book, paradoxically, is its understated writing style. Joyce Maynard has an enviable gift of being able to relate emotionally amped personal experiences in a tempered, eloquently subdued tone. Her narration almost seems to run in the background. What this does is permit the lessons and compelling revelations from her life to quietly rise to the surface and subtly but potently merge with the reader's. At Home In the World is one of the most emotionally involving books out there; it awakens much within the alert reader.

Maybe it's the dignity within AHITW that partly explains why it has engendered so much controversy. (Actually an entire other book could be written analyzing the explosive responses to this memoir and to Joyce Maynard herself, and what it reveals about some of our baser cultural values.) In this day of shrill, tabloid-style kiss-and-tells, I'm guessing more than a few critics were angry and disappointed that Ms. Maynard didn't produce a juicier, rancorous memoir chock-a-block with shocking insights and salacious four-poster details about America's most reclusive writer. Instead, I found her treatment of Salinger to be respectful -- where it was deserved -- and even-handed. This is an admirably fair and dignified recollection of an intolerant and controlling talent who appears to have had few qualms about exercising his power to beckon, transform and mentally imprison teenage girls. And then devastatingly dismiss them. In short, a man who seems to have some irregularities in his Rorschachs.

Joyce Maynard is a daring writer and At Home in the World is an astonishing accomplishment. Ms. Maynard makes a relentless search for truth that both inspires and challenges us to search for our own truth. Her writing of this book was an act of heroism: for teenage girls and their parents, for women, for men, for us all. At Home in the World is wise, insightful and constructed with heartrending skill. Enriching and disturbing, it will stay with the reader for a long, long time.