From Library Journal
This memoir chronicles the brief relationship author Maynard had with J.D. Salinger when she was 18 years old. Maynard begins by telling the story of her alcoholic father and intelligent but stifled mother. She moves on to the writing career she launched as a teenager, including the essay published in the New York Times Magazine that prompted Salinger to send her a letter. Maynard then speaks of the unfolding of her relationship with Salinger in exacting detail and, in comparison, glosses over the effects it had on her life. Her reading is clear and well paced, but while the present tense she favors might work in print, it jars in the audio production. This tape will primarily attract those looking for a glimpse of Salinger the person, or those interested in how this 18-year-old began a career as a writer at such a young age. Recommended for a literary crowd.
-Adrienne Furness, Genesee Community Coll., Batavia, NY
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Review
“Unsparing self-scrutiny...maturity and emotional candor.” ―Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
“Absorbing, funny, and emotionally blistering.” ―Jules Siegel, San Francisco Chronicle
“A wry, painful, engaging book.” ―Frank McCourt, author of Angela's Ashes
“Maynard's testimony is priceless.” ―Mary Cantwell, Vogue
“Riveting and disturbing.” ―The New York Times Book Review
“Even Salinger loyalists may feel compelled to reexamine their idol.” ―Glamour
“Dazzling.” ―San Francisco Chronicle
From the Publisher
"Riveting and disturbing." --Katha Pollitt, The New York Times Book Review "Dazzling." --Jules Siegel, The San Francisco Chronicle
"Even Salinger loyalists may feel compelled to reexamine their idol." --Sara Nelson, Glamour
"Brilliant! At Home in the World reads like a thriller. Maynard has written a poignant, deep memoir. Wonderful, compelling, honest, and right on target." --Jeffrey M. Masson, author of Dogs Never Lie About Love and When Elephants Weep
"At Home in the World reads like a companion piece to Mary Pipher's Reviving Ophelia, a study of the painful and crosswired contradictions that still plague ambitious girls." --Chris Kraus, The Nation
"Ms. Maynard writes in this volume with a sort of double vision, recreating the girl and young woman she was while at the same time looking at that younger self through the retrospective lens of middle age." --Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
"Absorbing, funny and emotionally blistering. Clear, eloquent and unpretentious, At Home in the World demands reading for the astounding pleasure to be found in a writer who has the courage to show herself inside out." --Jules Siegel, The San Francisco Chronicle
"A wry, painful, engaging book." --Frank McCourt, author of Angela's Ashes
"Maynard's testimony is priceless." --Mary Cantwell, Vogue
"Maynard has an interesting and disturbing story to tell, and she tells it simply but vividly." --Marion Winik, Newsday
"Powerful." --Larissa MacFarquhar, The New York Times Magazine
About the Author
Joyce Maynard's essays have appeared in magazines and newspapers for five decades. She is the author of four works of nonfiction and nine novels, including After Her, To Die For, and Labor Day, which was the basis of the 2013 major motion picture of the same name.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Chapter One
THE HOUSE WHERE I grew up, in Durham, New Hampshire, is the only one on the street with a fence surrounding it. That fit. Our family—my mother, my father, my older sister, Rona, and I—never belonged in that town. Or anywhere else, it seemed to me, but in that house, with one another, like a country unto ourselves, a tiny principality with a population of four. Arguably three, since my sister tried to remove herself as much as possible.There was a phrase we used in our family: “one of us.” We didn’t use it often, but what it meant was that we’d encountered a person who might get inside the fence and enter the fortress of our family. No one ever did, fully. The only ones who were truly “one of us” were ourselves.
My father comes into my room just after six every morning and wakes me with the snap of my window blinds. “Time to get up, chum,” he says. Four decades since he lived there last, you can still hear England in his voice. Years later, when I’m in my thirties and beyond, and he’s long dead, I will sometimes be at a movie and Sir John Gielgud appears on the screen, and, though he looks nothing like my father, the sound of his voice will be enough to make me cry.There’s no unkindness in the way my father wakes me. He simply believes it’s an unconscionable waste to stay in bed when the sun is shining. Or even if it’s not. My whole life, I have been unable to sleep late.Every morning, my father brings my mother coffee in bed, then comes back down to make his breakfast. He’ll be eating it when I come down the stairs. Porridge, maybe, or an egg. He always reads while he eats breakfast. It might be the letters of Harold Nicolson, or the journals of Simone Weil. Although he knows Paradise Lost by heart—eighteenth-century literature is his field of specialty, and he teaches it at the University of New Hampshire—he may still read over a passage from Milton that he’ll be lecturing on today. Sometimes my father will read the Bible at breakfast—another book he knows well.My father’s parents were British Fundamentalist missionaries who left the Salvation Army because of its excessively liberal teachings to join a sect known as the Plymouth Brethren. The second to last of their seven children, my father, Max Maynard, was born sometime around the year 1900, in India, where his parents had come to proselytize. Of the many mysteries that surround my father’s family, the first concerned the date of his birth. He claimed his parents told him they were so occupied with the Lord they hadn’t written it down. I never met my father’s parents, or any parents so consumed with God that they’d forget the year of their child’s birth. If nothing else, the story told me something about my father’s perception of them.As a small child, my father had loved to act and sing, but his deepest passion was for painting. He had known for a long time that he wanted to make art, but hadn’t dared ask his parents for paints. When he was ten, he finally got himself a paintbox, which became his most treasured possession. He painted and read constantly, and with so much reckless abandon that he broke the inviolate rule of his household, to observe the Sabbath with no activity but reading of the scripture. His older brother saw him painting and reported the news to their parents.His father called him to his study.“Bring me your paints,” he said, and when my father delivered them, his father placed them in his desk drawer and slammed it shut. “For one year, Max, you shall not paint,” he said.
My father broke with the church and with most of his family when he was a young man, having emigrated from England by now and settled in British Columbia. While most of his brothers and sisters pursued a life within the church—one, Theodore Maynard, becoming a moderately well-known Catholic theologian—my father took up with a group of early modern artists in Victoria who were regarded as a radical bunch. One, a much older woman painter named Emily Carr, would become the mentor and inspiration of a group of young modern artists in the twenties and thirties. Several among this group would later become celebrated in Canada, part of what was known as the Group of Seven.From the little I’ve been able to gather of those early years of his—decades before I came on the scene—my father led a bohemian life: making art, making love, making poetry, and waking up with a terrible hangover the next morning. He was a handsome, dashing man—blue-eyed, blond-haired, compactly but athletically built, with the broad shoulders of a powerful swimmer. He had a cleft chin and a strong jaw, but what probably melted the hearts of women, more than his good looks, was his ability to draw and write for them. He could dash off light verse or a romantic sonnet in flawless iambic pentameter, illustrated with a funny or erotic drawing of a couple in mad embrace, or a caricature of himself, on bent knees, holding out an armload of flowers.When I was sixteen I learned my father had been married once before his marriage to my mother. Although that news came as a terrible shock, the stories of my father’s many flamboyantly romantic escapades in Manitoba and British Columbia were almost a source of pride and legend in our household. I think my mother actually derived some pleasure out of the sense of my father’s romantic and rakish past. He used to say she had probably saved his life; it was all so reckless and undisciplined before she “whipped him into shape.”He met her in Winnipeg, where he had fled, on the lam from some romantic disaster. He was hired by the University of Manitoba as a last-minute replacement for another professor—the only reason he could have gotten an academic job with no more in the way of credentials than a bachelor’s degree.His lack of formal training in literature hardly kept him from establishing a reputation as a riveting lecturer. My mother—at nineteen, in her senior year as the English department’s top student—was assigned the job of being his assistant, with the task of reading student papers. Partly, it was supposed, she was serious and sensible enough to withstand his attempts at seduction. She had already earned a reputation as a single-mindedly driven young woman, headed for a brilliant academic career.My mother labored over her first batch of essays with elaborate corrections and comments. After she’d delivered them, he stopped her outside his classroom to compliment her on the job she was doing.“But you mustn’t trouble yourself with tracing plagiarisms as you have,” he told her.“I didn’t trace them,” she said. “I recognized the sources.”
Where my father’s story has tended to be murky (relatives we never meet; an ex-wife I learn of only well into my teens; vague talk of a former career as a cowboy, a radio announcer, a diving instructor), my mother’s is so well known to me, from her own rich retellings, it has taken on the aura of mythology.She was born Freidele Bruser, the second daughter and last child of Jewish immigrants who fled the pogroms of Russia for Canada in the early part of the twentieth century. Her father was a shopkeeper and a dreamer—a tender-hearted, not particularly practical man who once opened every box of Cracker Jack in his store to give my mother the particular treat (a tin ring) she longed for. The store—a whole series of them, always named The OK Store—went bankrupt regularly.My grandmother, a woman of fierce ambition and pride in her children, particularly my mother, launched Freidele in the study of elocution, the oral presentation of poetry, popular in rural areas during the Depression. From the age of four, my mother was hustled to the front of grange halls to recite verses—sometimes comic, sometimes sentimental and tragic—in a voice that was not simply loud but strikingly clear, and capable of bringing the crowd to great laughter or tears.All through my growing up, my mother recited poetry to me. In the middle of dinner or driving to the store or hearing me describe an incident that happened on the playground at school, she plucked lines from her head—maybe Shakespeare, maybe Milton—that referred in some way to what was going on in our lives. For as long as she lived, whenever I needed a line of poetry for a paper, or a debate speech, and, one day, for my wedding, I only had to ask my mother.There was more to my mother’s encyclopedic knowledge of literature than the fluke of her photographic memory. She loved poetry, most of all reciting it out loud. Even when she wasn’t quoting poetry, its rhythms were present in her speech, as they were in my father’s.For both my parents, I think there was a sensual pleasure in shaping the words of Keats or Donne or Yeats or Dylan Thomas or Wordsworth. Neither one of my parents played a musical instrument. For them, language was music. They loved the sound of the human voice delivering the best the English language had to offer.They loved rhythm, meter, timbre, inflection. They were performers who knew instinctively when to take the breath, when to lower the voice very slowly, or pause, or linger over a syllable—and they did it so well, even a person who didn’t speak a word of English would know, just listening to them, that this had to be poetry, and pay attention.
My mother won the golden Governor General’s Award at the age of sixteen for being the top graduating senior in all of Canada in the year 1938. That earned her a full scholarship to col...
Maynard, a minor writer and National Public Radio commentator, here recalls her brief love affair with the reclusive J.D. Salinger. She reads nicely, though what she reads reveals very little about either Salinger or herself, except that he hurt her feelings. An interview on the final side of this cassette set is hardly more enlightening. Y.R. (c)AudioFile, Portland, Maine
