Joyce Maynard (born November 5, 1953) is an American novelist and journalist. She began her career in journalism in the 1970s, writing for several publications, most notably Seventeen magazine and The New York Times. Maynard contributed to Mademoiselle and Harrowsmith magazines in the 1980s, while also beginning a career as a novelist with the publication of her first novel, Baby Love (1981). Her second novel, To Die For (1992), drew on the Pamela Smart murder case and was adapted by Gus Van Sant into the film To Die For in 1995. Maynard received significant media attention in 1998 with the publication of her memoir At Home in the World, in which she describes her relationship with J. D. Salinger.
Maynard has published novels in a wide range of literary genres, including fiction, young adult fiction, and true crime. Her sixth novel, Labor Day (2009), was adapted into the 2013 film Labor Day, directed by Jason Reitman. Her recent novels include Under the Influence (2016), Count the Ways (2021), The Bird Hotel (2023), and How the Light Gets In (2024).
Early life
Maynard was born in Durham, New Hampshire, to Fredelle (née Bruser), a journalist, writer, and English teacher, and Max Maynard, a painter and professor of English at the University of New Hampshire (and brother of theologian Theodore Maynard).[1][2] Her father was born in India to English missionary parents and later moved to Canada; her mother was born in Saskatchewan to Jewish immigrants from Russia.[3][4][5] Maynard has an older sister, Rona.
Maynard attended the Oyster River school district and Phillips Exeter Academy. She won Scholastic Art and Writing Awards in 1966, 1967, 1968, 1970, and 1971. In her teens, she wrote regularly for Seventeen magazine. She entered Yale University in 1971 and sent a collection of her writings to the editors of The New York Times Magazine. They asked her to write an article about growing up in the 1960s, which was published under the title "An 18-Year-Old Looks Back on Life"[6] in the magazine's April 23, 1972, issue. After the article was published, Maynard received a letter from fiction writer J. D. Salinger, then 53 years old, who complimented her writing and warned her of the dangers of publicity.[7]
Relationship with Salinger and At Home in the World
In spring 1972, Maynard and Salinger exchanged letters during her freshman year at Yale. By July, Maynard had given up her summer job writing for The New York Times to move in with Salinger in Cornish, New Hampshire.[8][2] Salinger and his wife had divorced in 1967. By September 1972, Maynard had given up her scholarship to Yale and dropped out. While living with Salinger for eight months, until March 1973, Maynard wrote her first book, the memoir Looking Back: A Chronicle of Growing Up Old in the Sixties, which was published in 1973, soon after Maynard and Salinger ended their relationship.[citation needed]
Maynard withheld information about their relationship until her 1998 memoir At Home in the World. The memoir, an account of her entire life up to that point, is best known for its in-depth retelling of her relationship with Salinger, whom she portrays as a predator. At its publication, many reviewers furiously panned the book, such as Jonathan Yardley from the Washington Post, who called it "indescribably stupid".[9]
During the same year, she auctioned the letters Salinger had written her. Software developer Peter Norton bought them for $156,500 and returned them to Salinger.[10][2]
In 2021, Maynard wrote about the relationship in Vanity Fair in connection with the TV series Allen v. Farrow: "I was groomed to be the sexual partner of a narcissist who nearly derailed my life". She went into detail about the other relationships with teenagers Salinger had had at the same time, adding, "When he sent me away less than a year later with words of contempt and disdain, I believed the failure was mine, and that I was no longer worthy of his love or even respect." Of the reception of her memoirs, she wrote, "I was accused of trying to sell books, to make money from my brief and inconsequential connection to a great man", adding, "one writer, Cynthia Ozick—hardly alone among celebrated authors, weighing in with her condemnation—portrayed me as a person who, in possession of no talent of my own, had attached myself to Salinger to 'suck out' his celebrity."[11]
Journalism
After moving out of Salinger's house in 1973, Maynard bought a house in Hillsborough, New Hampshire.[2] From 1973 to 1975, she contributed commentaries to a series called Spectrum on CBS Radio. In 1975, she joined the staff of The New York Times as a general assignment reporter and feature writer. She left The New York Times in 1977 when she married Steve Bethel. They moved to New Hampshire and had three children, Audrey, Charlie, and Wilson.
From 1984 to 1990, Maynard wrote the weekly syndicated column "Domestic Affairs", dealing with marriage, parenthood, and family life. She worked as book reviewer and columnist for Mademoiselle and Harrowsmith magazine. In 1989, when Maynard's marriage ended, more than half the newspapers that ran her "Domestic Affairs" column dropped it.
In 1986, Maynard helped lead the opposition to the construction of the nation's first high-level nuclear waste dump in New Hampshire, with ground zero in Hillsborough, where she lived with her family. Maynard described this campaign in a May 1986 New York Times cover story.[12] She wrote, "The US Department of Energy named part of New Hampshire as a candidate for the first high-level nuclear waste 'repository' (i.e., DUMP) on the planet." The government was planning to use technology never before tried and totally unproven as safe, to bury decades-worth of high-level nuclear waste in New Hampshire granite, and to create an entire highway and train system into the state to bring the extraordinarily dangerous material with a half life of a million years.[clarify] Maynard and others rallied at town meetings and convoyed to Concord, and later that year, a law was passed prohibiting a nuclear waste dump in New Hampshire. To date, Maynard considers stopping the nuclear waste dump one of her greatest accomplishments.[citation needed]
Fiction
Maynard published her first novel, Baby Love, in 1981. Her 1992 novel To Die For drew from the Pamela Smart murder case and was adapted into a 1995 film, also called To Die For, directed by Gus Van Sant and starring Nicole Kidman, Matt Dillon, and Joaquin Phoenix. In the late 1990s, she wrote to her readers in an online discussion forum, The Domestic Affairs Message Board.
She published two books of young adult fiction: The Usual Rules (2003) and The Cloud Chamber (2005). Her true crime book Internal Combustion (2006) deals with the case of Nancy Seaman, a Michigan resident convicted in 2004 of killing her husband. The novel Labor Day was published in 2009 and adapted into a movie, written and directed by Jason Reitman and starring Kate Winslet and Josh Brolin. Her other novels include The Good Daughters (2010), After Her (2013), and Under the Influence (2016).
In summer 2021, Maynard published Count the Ways, a well-received novel about home, parenthood, love, and forgiveness. That autumn, she won The Grand Prix de Littérature Américaine 2021 for "Où vivaient les gens heureux" (Count the Ways), published in France in August 2021 by Philippe Rey in a translation by Florence Lévy-Paoloni.
In 2023, the 50th anniversary of Looking Back: A Chronicle of Growing Up Old in the Sixties was noted, with Maynard recording an audio version of the book. She said: "On every page, I read words written by my younger self that, if I could, I would have changed. The girl I used to be back then was naive and opinionated, frequently a prim know-it-all. In the pages of what purported to be the story of her life so far, she was also keeping a large secret. In the end though, as the days of recording came to an end, a rush of pure, tender protectiveness for that girl overtook me. I wished I could reach through the pages I was reading out loud and put my arms around that girl, tell her to be careful of her body, her gifts, her precious and breakable heart. As I finished reading the final paragraph into the microphone, I realized I was weeping."
In May 2023, Maynard's novel The Bird Hotel was published by Arcade.[13] On August 24, 2023, Philippe Rey published it in France under the title L'hôtel des oiseaux, translated by Florence Lévy-Paoloni.
Maynard's novel How the Light Gets In, published in June 2024 by William Morrow, is a sequel. It follows the characters of Count the Ways (2021) into the current American climate.
Personal life
Maynard married Steve Bethel in 1977 and divorced him in 1989. They had three children together: daughter Audrey, a social worker, and sons Charlie, a DJ/music producer known as Captain Planet, and Wilson, an actor known for Hart of Dixie, Daredevil, and All Rise. After the divorce, Maynard and her children moved to Keene, New Hampshire.[citation needed]
Maynard and her sister, Rona, a writer and retired editor of Chatelaine magazine, collaborated on an examination of their sisterhood. Rona Maynard's memoir My Mother's Daughter was published in 2007.[citation needed] On August 12, 2023, Joyce and Rona Maynard shared the stage for a premiere event, "The Maynard Sisters In Conversation", at The Toadstool Bookshop in Keene.
Maynard has written about her experience of an international adoption and disruption, and has served as an advocate and supporter for adoptive families and children experiencing challenges related to international adoption.[citation needed]
On July 6, 2013, she married lawyer Jim Barringer.[14] Barringer died on June 16, 2016, of pancreatic cancer, 19 months after his diagnosis.[15] Their relationship and his death is the subject of her 2017 memoir The Best of Us.[16]
Maynard returned to Yale as a sophomore in 2018 to complete her undergraduate education.[17] During the pandemic, she left Yale again, calling herself a "two-time dropout". She resides in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Looking Back: A Chronicle of Growing Up Old in the Sixties (1973)
Domestic Affairs: Enduring the Pleasures of Motherhood and Family Life (1987)
At Home in the World (1998)
Internal Combustion: A Story of a Marriage and a Murder in the Motor City (2006)
"A Good Girl Goes Bad" (2007), in Bad Girls: 26 Writers Misbehave, edited by Ellen Sussman
"Your Friend Always" (2007), in Mr. Wrong: Real-Life Stories About the Men We Used to Love, edited by Harriet Brown
"Someone Like Me, But Younger" (2009), in The Face in the Mirror: Writers Reflect on Their Dreams of Youth and the Reality of Age, edited by Victoria Zackheim
"Straw into Gold" (2013), in Knitting Yarns: Writers on Knitting, edited by Ann Hood (W. W. Norton & Company)
The Best of Us (2017)
Related Research Articles
Angela Anaïs Juana Antolina Rosa Edelmira Nin y Culmell was a French-born American diarist, essayist, novelist, and writer of short stories and erotica. Born to Cuban parents in France, Nin was the daughter of the composer Joaquín Nin and the classically trained singer Rosa Culmell. Nin spent her early years in Spain and Cuba, about sixteen years in Paris (1924–1940), and the remaining half of her life in the United States, where she became an established author.
Amy Ruth Tan is an American author best known for her novel The Joy Luck Club (1989), which was adapted into a 1993 film. She is also known for other novels, short story collections, children's books, and a memoir.
Alice Babette Toklas was an American-born member of the Parisian avant-garde of the early 20th century, and the life partner of American writer Gertrude Stein.
The Catcher in the Rye is a novel by American author J. D. Salinger that was partially published in serial form in 1945–46 before being novelized in 1951. Originally intended for adults, it is often read by adolescents for its themes of angst and alienation, and as a critique of superficiality in society. The novel also deals with themes of innocence, identity, belonging, loss, connection, sex, and depression. The main character, Holden Caulfield, has become an icon for teenage rebellion. Caulfield, nearly of age, gives his opinion on a wide variety of topics as he narrates his recent life events.
Joyce Carol Oates is an American writer. Oates published her first book in 1963, and has since published 58 novels, a number of plays and novellas, and many volumes of short stories, poetry, and non-fiction. Her novels Black Water (1992), What I Lived For (1994), and Blonde (2000), and her short story collections The Wheel of Love (1970) and Lovely, Dark, Deep: Stories (2014) were each finalists for the Pulitzer Prize. She has won many awards for her writing, including the National Book Award, for her novel Them (1969), two O. Henry Awards, the National Humanities Medal, and the Jerusalem Prize (2019).
Elizabeth Lee Wurtzel was an American writer, journalist, and lawyer known for the confessional memoir Prozac Nation, which she published at the age of 27. Her work often focused on chronicling her personal struggles with depression, addiction, career, and relationships. Wurtzel's work drove a boom in confessional writing and the personal memoir genre during the 1990s, and she was viewed as a voice of Generation X. In her later life, Wurtzel worked briefly as an attorney before her death from breast cancer.
Carolyn Heilbrun was an American academic at Columbia University, the first woman to receive tenure in the English department, and a prolific feminist author of academic studies. In addition, beginning in the 1960s, she published numerous popular mystery novels with a woman protagonist, under the pen name of Amanda Cross. These have been translated into numerous languages and in total sold nearly one million copies worldwide.
Jane Vance Rule was a Canadian-American writer of lesbian-themed works. Her first novel, Desert of the Heart, appeared in 1964, when gay activity was still a criminal offence. It turned Rule into a reluctant media celebrity, and brought her massive correspondence from women who had never dared explore lesbianism. Rule became an active anti-censorship campaigner, and served on the executive of the Writers' Union of Canada.
Joyce Johnson is an American author of fiction and nonfiction, whose writing has been closely associated with the Beat Generation. She was also a child actress and appeared in the Broadway production of I Remember Mama, which she went on to write about in her 2004 memoir Missing Men.
Margaret Caroline Anderson was the American founder, editor and publisher of the art and literary magazine The Little Review, which published a collection of modern American, English and Irish writers between 1914 and 1929. The periodical is most noted for introducing many prominent American and British writers of the 20th century, such as Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot, in the United States and publishing the first thirteen chapters of James Joyce's then-unpublished novel Ulysses.
Katharine Weber is an American novelist and nonfiction writer. She has taught fiction and nonfiction writing at Yale University, Goucher College, the Paris Writers Workshop and elsewhere. She held the Visiting Richard L. Thomas Chair in Creative Writing at Kenyon College from 2012 to 2019.
Paule Marshall was an American writer, best known for her 1959 debut novel Brown Girl, Brownstones. In 1992, at the age of 63, Marshall was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship grant.
Kathryn Harrison is an American author. She has published seven novels, two memoirs, two collections of personal essays, a travelogue, two biographies, and a book of true crime. She reviews regularly for The New York Times Book Review. Her personal essays have been included in many anthologies and have appeared in Bookforum, Harper's Magazine, More Magazine, The New Yorker, O, The Oprah Magazine, and Vogue, Salon, and Nerve.
Elizabeth Gilbert is an American journalist and author. She is best known for her 2006 memoir Eat, Pray, Love, which has sold over 12 million copies and has been translated into over 30 languages. The book was also made into a film of the same name in 2010.
Jerome David Salinger was an American author best known for his 1951 novel The Catcher in the Rye. Salinger published several short stories in Story magazine in 1940, before serving in World War II. In 1948, his critically acclaimed story "A Perfect Day for Bananafish" appeared in The New Yorker, which published much of his later work.
Emma Forrest is an English film director, screenwriter and novelist.
Jennifer Finney Boylan is an American author, transgender activist, professor at Barnard College, and a former contributing opinion writer for the New York Times. In December 2023, she became the president of PEN America, having previously been the vice president.
Roxane Gay is an American writer, professor, editor, and social commentator. Gay is the author of The New York Times best-selling essay collection Bad Feminist (2014), as well as the short story collection Ayiti (2011), the novel An Untamed State (2014), the short story collection Difficult Women (2017), and the memoir Hunger (2017).
Joanna Rakoff is an American novelist and memoirist.
1 2 3 4 Salerno, Shane; Shields, David (2013). Salinger (First Simon & Schuster hardcovered.). New York, NY [etc.]: Simon & Schuster. ISBN9781476744834.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
