Product Description

Journalist and novelist Joyce Maynard writes about her extraordinary life, including the story of her year-long love affair with the notoriously reclusive author of "The Catcher in the Rye", J.D. Salinger. At the time of their relationship, she was 18, Salinger was 53.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #884088 in Books
• Published on: 1999-08-05
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 345 pages

Amazon.co.uk 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 American writer is the centrepiece 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 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 sympathise 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 realise 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 pretence of truth to obscure key realities. --Kerry Fried

Review
A breathtakingly precise depiction of Maynard's short affair with the reclusive writer J D Salinger. A clear, journalistic narrator with no inhibitions about revealing her own and others' thoughts and motives, Maynard caught Salinger's eye with an article she wrote, age 18, for the New York Times Magazine. He was 35 years older than her. After an intense correspondence they met, and Maynard moved in with him, abandoning her college course and adopting his eccentric, neurotic way of living. Written more than 20 years later, with the wounds still festering, Maynard's memoir manages to combine public humiliation with a degree of personal catharsis. It's not a comfortable story, but it is utterly gripping. Review by ROSEMARY GORING, literary editor of Scotland on Sunday. (Kirkus UK)

From the Back Cover
In 1972, Joyce Maynard, an undergraduate at Yale, wrote an article for the New York Times Magazine called 'An Eighteen Year Old Looks Back on Life'. Among the hundreds of letters she received as a result, one expressed deep affection for her writing, and concern at the exploitation that she might be subjected to. The writer was J.D. Salinger, author of Catcher in the Rye.