Vol. 1, Number 4	Winter 1998 issue

 

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Joyce Maynard's new memoir, At Home in the World, reads like an entertaining magazine article, —no surprise, considering that Maynard made her name through feature articles, columns, and a novel, To Die For, later a movie with Nicole Kidman.

So why has this seemingly benign book stirred up so much talk and controversy? Simple: half the boring details in At Home in the World describe Maynard's affair with America's most reclusive icon, J.D. Salinger. The perfect target for a literary tell-all, Salinger defined the psyche of the baby boom generation and then disappeared, leaving endless speculation in his wake. For a while, it seemed Maynard might follow the same path; in 1972, only months after her photograph on the cover of The New York Times Magazine made her the most famous teenager in America, she left Yale to live with Salinger in the backwoods of New Hampshire. Twenty-five years later, as Maynard speaks out about him for the first time, Salinger's name remains just as famous, consistently mysterious, and always controversial—qualities that sell magazines.

And books. Which led many in the literary world to protest that Maynard sold out, that she violated the privacy of a literary genius for profit and fame. Others are more generous, suggesting her motive was merely revenge.

Maynard anticipated these reactions. In the introduction to At Home in the World, she argues that exposure of this particular part of her life is a necessary step to making peace with her daughter and herself. Her website features "Joyce Maynard Interviews Joyce Maynard," where she defends the book and herself. This is not about J.D.Salinger, she seems to say, but rather about women who've "given up parts of themselves to please the man they love."

Despite such explanations and the hundred pages chronicling her childhood and married life, Maynard's memoir is explicitly about J.D. Salinger. Publicity would have concentrated on the Salinger connection in any case, but it happens to be accurate. Salinger, love him or loathe him, is the most interesting of what At Home in the World has to offer.

Maynard shows us little bits of the man that fit the fiction: his maniacal care with language, his rapport with children, even his skill at ballroom dancing. The richness of his letters evident even in her paraphrasing makes one long to read the real things. (The tragedy of this memoir is that Salinger would not, understandably, allow Maynard to quote anything he wrote.) And when Maynard remembers him saying, "But when they start in on your characters—and they do—it's murder," one feels a thrill at the closeness of this man to his fascinating creations.

Nevertheless, the portrayal of Salinger in At Home in the World does little to discount the most negative criticism of him. "Jerry" Salinger appears both ridiculous and cruel in this memoir, obsessed with the cooking temperature of his food and totally unsympathetic to the feelings or the youth of eighteen-year-old Joyce: after a year of living together he simply tells her to "go home" and refuses to speak to her again.

This presents problems for readers of Salinger. More than most authors, Salinger is identified with his characters. For those of us who fell in love with the narrative voice of Franny and Zooey and Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters, it is jarring to hear that same voice (and its similarity is the strongest argument for believing in the accuracy of Maynard's memory) at its most critical and caustic. Nevertheless, the strength of Salinger's voice survives even his own nastiness and Maynard's paraphrasing; he and his power with words dominate Maynard's memoir.

What's strange—and sad—is that At Home in the World didn't have to be this way. No nameless celebrity stalker, Maynard could have stolen the show. After all, how many Yale freshmen land themselves a lead article in The New York Times Magazine? But oddly like Salinger, Maynard's personal life can both resemble and overtake her written one. A member of the third class to include women at Yale, and the first to do so at Exeter, her life went on to exemplify many of the struggles and triumphs of women of her generation. Few lives could be more intrinsically interesting to a Yale co-ed my age with literary and historical interests than that of Joyce Maynard.

But after reading At Home in the World, I wanted to read more of Salinger, not Joyce Maynard. (How sad for me that more of the former is so much harder to come by!) I admit that I've always loved Salinger's work, but Maynard could have exploited that, using the ready-made audience of people like me who would read anything in the hopes of getting a few more words out of Salinger. She had a chance to convert Salingerians into Maynardites, but she took the easy way out, by trying to be liked instead of believed.

Memoirs are always a little self-ingratiating, but the really good ones get beyond this with critical perspective and a sense of humor. Maynard, by contrast, has no slant. She piles on the details of her life with Salinger and the events of her life without him without discussing what any of these might mean. Her final conversation with Salinger provides the title to her book, but little else; it reads like an account of a field trip for research.

The most interesting insights, in my mind, come not from Maynard but from a female classmate looking back on their peers at Yale. "Our feminist act was getting into Yale" says the friend. "The sexual revolution was happening. So we knew that now we could say yes. But we didn't really understand we could say no." Maynard's own experiences support these statements, but she seems unable to leave her own life long enough to confront these questions herself.

The failure to analyze is especially surprising given that the events of Maynard's life bear a striking resemblance to the standard magazine features and novelistic devices of the last thirty years. Claiming to talk about the details of women's lives, she laments alcoholism, anorexia, and breast implants as if we'd never heard of their dangers. The elements of her happy ending—moving to Northern California, glowing as her daughter explains a quilt to her women's studies class, her joycemaynard.com website—are recounted with total earnestness: no trace of self-deprecating humor here.

Maynard talks a lot about her earlier dishonesty as the spokeswoman of her generation: she wrote autobiographical articles without mentioning her turmoil over her father's alcoholism, her own eating disorder, or her marital problems. The implication of this admission, is, of course, that she is now being completely honest. But that takes more than revealing a life's worth of sexual history and eating disorders. A three-hundred-page memoir requires a deeper honesty than the little insights that make a good college essay, the easy truths and smooth style at which Maynard excels. A grown-up autobiography demands being a little critical, even self-critical. It certainly takes more than an extended public therapy session that decides Joyce Maynard is O.K. Had she gotten beyond such easy goals, she could have used J.D. Salinger and Joyce Maynard as springboards to valuable truths.

After all, the greatest revenge on Salinger would have been to make a masterpiece out of him.