At Home in the World By Joyce Maynard: Book Review

I picked up At Home in the World because of J.D. Salinger, but Joyce Maynard’s honesty about herself is what stayed with me most.

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At Home in the World - Book By Joyce Maynard

KEY TAKEAWAY:

Maynard doesn’t spare herself in this memoir, which is a big part of why I liked it.

FIRST REACTION:

I love this woman. I love the twisted parts of her, I pity her for some of what happened to her, and I admire her talent. And yes, the book itself is good too. What I liked so much was that Maynard doesn’t cast herself as the innocent victim of her own story. She can be painfully revealing about the people around her, but never in a way that lets herself off the hook.

SALINGER CONNECTION:

I’ll admit that J.D. Salinger was the reason I picked up the book in the first place. I’m a Salinger junkie, and Maynard spent part of her late teens in a relationship with him. She had written a piece looking back at her life at eighteen, somehow sounding at least three times her age, and Salinger, already in his fifties, contacted her. They started corresponding, she fell for him, eventually went to visit him, and gradually changed her life to fit his values and his needs. About a year after Salinger first contacted her, he ended the relationship and gave her two fifty dollar bills to get home.

FAMILY SECRETS:

The book is about much more than Salinger. She goes back to parts of her life that she had left out of her earlier memoir. Her father’s alcoholism, for example, remained a family secret while she was writing about what appeared to be an idyllic childhood in a highly educated family. Here she seems determined to tell things as she remembers them, even when the truth doesn’t make her look particularly good.

BOTH SIDES:

Salinger comes off badly, but so does Maynard at times, and I respected her for that. His coldness when he rejects her is so extreme that I found myself wondering how someone capable of writing such deeply understanding stories about people could behave that way. At the same time, Maynard shows herself begging him, crying over him, curling up against him, and desperately trying to hold onto the relationship. She lets you see just how young, lost, and helpless she was.

MY FRUSTRATION:

There were also times when I got frustrated with her. I wanted more insight into her eating disorder, especially because I never felt that she really explained how she eventually resolved it. I also kept wondering whether she understood just how lucky she had been to have New York publishers so interested in her despite some of her erratic behavior. When she later describes periods of being destitute, I had a hard time feeling as much sympathy as I probably should have, considering how many remarkable opportunities she had simply walked away from earlier in her life.

HER WRITING:

One thing Salinger pushed Maynard to do was be more authentic in her writing. For a long time, she either didn’t understand what he meant or simply didn’t do it. Later, after leaving her Domestic Affairs column, she seems to have realized that she hadn’t always been as honest with her readers as she should have been. I kept wondering whether she felt Salinger deserved any credit, or perhaps some blame, for pushing her toward that realization. What I do admire is how determined she was to finally get to the bottom of what happened between them. She kept going until she found answers that were both devastating and satisfying. Whether that meant she had finally taken his lectures about authenticity to heart or she was simply showing a great deal of courage, I thought she told that part of the story beautifully.

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