New York Times bestselling author of Labor Day
With a New Preface
When it was first published in 1998, At Home in the World set off a furor in the literary world and beyond. Joyce Maynard's memoir broke a silence concerning her relationship―at age eighteen―with J.D. Salinger, the famously reclusive author of The Catcher in the Rye, then age fifty-three, who had read a story she wrote for The New York Times in her freshman year of college and sent her a letter that changed her life. Reviewers called her book "shameless" and "powerful" and its author was simultaneously reviled and cheered.
With what some have viewed as shocking honesty, Maynard explores her coming of age in an alcoholic family, her mother's dream to mold her into a writer, her self-imposed exile from the world of her peers when she left Yale to live with Salinger, and her struggle to reclaim her sense of self in the crushing aftermath of his dismissal of her not long after her nineteenth birthday. A quarter of a century later―having become a writer, survived the end of her marriage and the deaths of her parents, and with an eighteen-year-old daughter of her own―Maynard pays a visit to the man who broke her heart. The story she tells―of the girl she was and the woman she became―is at once devastating, inspiring, and triumphant.
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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 sympathize 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 realize 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 pretense of truth to obscure key realities. One of the many curiosities in this discomfiting book? Salinger dreamt that he and Maynard had a child together: "I saw her face clearly. Her name was Bint." The World War II veteran then looks up the word. "What do you know," he says. "It's archaic British, for little girl." Maynard never, even now, has questioned his definition. In fact, it's slang, used especially in World War II, for prostitute. When Salinger forced the 19-year-old to clear her things out of his New Hampshire house, she was still unaware of the word's force. "On the window of Jerry's bedroom, where the glass is dusty, I write, with my finger, the name of the child we had talked about: BINT." --Kerry Fried
"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
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Book Description Paperback. Condition: new. Paperback. New York Times bestselling author of Labor DayWhen it was first published in 1998, At Home in the World set off a furor in the literary world and beyond. Joyce Maynard's memoir broke a silence concerning her relationship--at age eighteen--with J.D. Salinger, the famously reclusive author of The Catcher in the Rye, then age fifty-three, who had read a story she wrote for The New York Times in her freshman year of college and sent her a letter that changed her life. Reviewers called her book "shameless" and "powerful" and its author was simultaneously reviled and cheered. With what some have viewed as shocking honesty, Maynard explores her coming of age in an alcoholic family, her mother's dream to mold her into a writer, her self-imposed exile from the world of her peers when she left Yale to live with Salinger, and her struggle to reclaim her sense of self in the crushing aftermath of his dismissal of her not long after her nineteenth birthday. A quarter of a century later--having become a writer, survived the end of her marriage and the deaths of her parents, and with an eighteen-year-old daughter of her own--Maynard pays a visit to the man who broke her heart. The story she tells--of the girl she was and the woman she became--is at once devastating, inspiring, and triumphant. This coming-of-age memoir, which outraged some and inspired others when first released in 1998, goes beyond Maynard's writing life to explore the heartbreaks and triumphs of her life growing up with brilliant parents, who also had faults, as well as her short romance at age 18 with J.D. Salinger, a subsequent failed marriage, and her struggle to rebuild at mid-life. Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability. Seller Inventory # 9781250046444