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 writer is the centerpiece 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. (Lamb burgers, formed into patties and then frozen--before being cooked at a dysentery-friendly 150 degrees--also figure heavily.)

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


From Publishers Weekly
Maynard, novelist (Baby Love; To Die For) essayist, columnist and Web-page chatteuse, was a freshman at Yale in April 1972 when the New York Times Magazine published her cover article, "An Eighteen Year Old Looks Back on Life." Of the hundreds of letters she received, one from the reclusive J.D. Salinger, then 53, praising her talent and warning her against the dangers of early success, struck a particular chord. Maynard quickly wrote back and, following a summer of letters, phone calls and visits to Cornish, N.H., she dropped out of Yale and moved in with him. Maynard's observant, straight-faced presentation of what are nonetheless often hilarious events chez Salinger has to be one of the shrewdest deflations of a literary reputation on record. What's plain and most damaging is the nature of Jerry's interest in Joyce, who looked about 11 and who arrived for her first visit in a dress almost identical to one she wore in first grade. Maynard poignantly describes her alienation and isolation, which Salinger reinforced before cruelly discarding her. Unable for legal reasons to quote Salinger's letters, Maynard nevertheless makes the reader see why his words so captivated her: "I fell in love with his voice on the page," she says. Once she moved in, however, Jerry began to sound like an aging Holden Caulfield, abrasive and contemptuous. Maynard takes too long setting up her family history pre-Salinger and far too long recounting her life since, inadvertently revealing why Salinger and others seem to have wearied of her. But her painstaking honesty about herself lends credence to her portrayal of Salinger as something worse than a cranky eccentric. This will be a hard story to ignore. First serial to Vanity Fair. Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
This memoir chronicles the brief relationship author Maynard had with J.D. Salinger when she was 18 years old. Maynard begins by telling the story of her alcoholic father and intelligent but stifled mother. She moves on to the writing career she launched as a teenager, including the essay published in the New York Times Magazine that prompted Salinger to send her a letter. Maynard then speaks of the unfolding of her relationship with Salinger in exacting detail and, in comparison, glosses over the effects it had on her life. Her reading is clear and well paced, but while the present tense she favors might work in print, it jars in the audio production. This tape will primarily attract those looking for a glimpse of Salinger the person, or those interested in how this 18-year-old began a career as a writer at such a young age. Recommended for a literary crowd.-Adrienne Furness, Genesee Community Coll., Batavia, NY Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.


The New Yorker, Daphne Merkin
Too much of At Home in the World takes the form of reconstructed conversations from more than twenty-five years ago and is narrated in a hazy dream time where past and present blur.... At Home in the World strikes me as a bit deluded, as though Maynard thought she could force Salinger to acknowledge her by blowing his cover. The attempt seems not only misjudged but grasping....


Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
Although many readers will doubtless find the Salinger chapters the most compelling--and unsettling--part of this book, AT HOME IN THE WORLD is not a sleazy tell-all memoir about the author's affair with a famous (and famously reclusive) man. It's actually an earnest, if at time self-serving, autobiography that, in the course of tracing the author's coming of age, delineates her first serious love affair, one that happened to be with the author of CATCHER IN THE RYE... AT HOME IN THE WORLD demonstrates a marked leap forward in maturity and emotional candor. The sanctimonious world-weariness affected in "An 18-Year-Old Looks Back on Life"--in which Ms. Maynard presumed to speak for her generation--has been replaced by a more direct, uninflected voice.... In fact, 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.


The Boston Globe, Diane White
She's clearly trying to work things out in this memoir, to achieve self-understanding. She has some insight, but she should have thought longer and dug more deeply before she sent the manuscript to the publisher. "At Home in the World" is fascinating, the way certain disasters are fascinating. It's a mess, but a riveting mess. You really don't want to look, and yet you can't help wanting to see it all.


From AudioFile
Maynard, a minor writer and National Public Radio commentator, here recalls her brief love affair with the reclusive J.D. Salinger. She reads nicely, though what she reads reveals very little about either Salinger or herself, except that he hurt her feelings. An interview on the final side of this cassette set is hardly more enlightening. Y.R. (c)AudioFile, Portland, Maine

FROM THE PUBLISHER

In the spring of 1972, Joyce Maynard, a freshman at Yale, published a cover story in The New York Times Magazine about life as a young person in the '60s. Among the many letters of praise, offers for writing assignments, and requests for interviews was a one-page letter from the famously reclusive author, J. D. Salinger.

At Home in the World is the story of a girl who loved and lived with J. D. Salinger, and the woman she became. A crucial turning point in Joyce Maynard's life occurred when her own daughter turned 18 -- the age Maynard was when Salinger first approached her. Breaking a 25-year silence, Joyce Maynard addresses her relationship with Salinger for the first time, as well as the complicated, troubled and yet creative nature of her youth and family. She vividly describes the details of the times and her life with the finesse of a natural storyteller.

Courageously written by a woman determined to allow her life to unfold with authenticity, At Home in the World is a testament to the resilency of the spirit and the honesty of an unwavering eye.

FROM THE CRITICS

Katherine Wolff

Joyce Maynard -- whose byline, depending on the reader's tastes, is regularly greeted with everything from sympathy to disgust -- plays her trump card here. If she hasn't yet won the record for sustained self-indulgence in print, this latest memoir, which documents her affair with J.D. Salinger, might just give her the edge she needs. Maynard's highly personal books, essays, newspaper columns and Web site have inspired truckloads of mail over the course of her 26-year career. Her story is, by now, familiar. In 1972, as an 18-year-old Yale undergrad with off-the-charts ambition, she appeared on the cover of the New York Times Magazine as a self-appointed spokeswoman of a generation. The then 53-year-old "Jerry" Salinger spotted the piece and lured her to New Hampshire. After months of playing a kind of eroticized Daddy Dearest, he dropped Maynard abruptly.

To read At Home in the World doesn't require a suspension of disbelief, but it does require the suspension of literary standards. Because Salinger copyrighted his letters, Maynard can quote only small portions and must largely resort to paraphrase. Then there's the issue of dialogue re-created from a quarter-century ago. Perhaps to compensate for these logistical obstacles, Maynard writes in a taut present tense. Event follows event too closely, as if she's sealing herself and her readers from interpretation: "My throat is sore from making myself throw up. I write Jerry daily."

Sadly, Salinger's warnings to Maynard -- about the seduction of fame, the fresh but ephemeral perspective of youth, the strict conditions under which true art can thrive -- offer the only compelling themes in the book. Savvy readers may often find themselves siding with Salinger. Yet the author of The Catcher in the Rye emerges as a pathetic figure himself. In Maynard's retelling, he's gentle at first, then caustic: a lonely man whose misanthropy guides his every act.

You never doubt Maynard's account in At Home in the World, if only because she's so damn thorough. But thoroughness isn't a virtue in itself. The best memoirs are selective, not comprehensive; they transform the personal into the universal. Maynard's attempt to do this leads her to the notion of motherhood. She wants her children to feel what she didn't feel as a child: "at home in the world." The title phrase echoes like a hard slap in Salinger's face. Surely the bitter recluse -- the man who chased an ideal of feminine precocity -- would never be comforted by this brand of worldliness.

Joyce Maynard is no Phoebe Caulfield. Holden Caulfield's kid sister preserves a mystery; she practices discretion. As Salinger wrote, "When [Phoebe] can't think of anything to say, she doesn't say a goddam word." It's not Maynard's fault she had an alcoholic father and a suffocating mother. It's not her fault she swallowed the cliché of making it big in New York. And it's certainly not her fault she lost the innocence that might have first drawn Salinger to her. She can, however, be blamed for not sifting through the wreckage, for choosing simply to tell all. -- Salon

Peter Szatmary

Maynard's relationship with Salinger figures as both touchstone and crucible in At Home in the World, and this is the book's attraction and its downfall. . . [it] is too confessional. . . The book isn't seamy or vindictive. It's no tell-all. -- Biblio Magazine

Katha Pollitt - New York Times Book Review

[The book's]...real theme is . . .that lots of happy families are secretly miserable and lots of people who pass for normal are bonkers. . . .while still very young Maynard [received] quite a bit of damage from adults. If she doesn't always seem to understand her own story. . .maybe that goes to show how deep the damage went.

Craig Wilson - USA Today

If you love Salinger, you most likely will find this a rude and mercenery intrusion into the life of a man who demands privacy. . . . do we need to read another tale of obsession. . .with famous men. . . .All one needs to do is buy a newspaper these days to get that . . .

Michiko Kakutani

. . .[A]n earnest, if at times self-serving, autobiography. . . .[It is] too beholden to the confessional tenets of the therapeutic movement to be a first-rate memoir. . . .Ms. Maynard writes. . .with a sort of double vision, recreating the girl and young woman she was while. . .looking at that younger self through the retrospective lens of middle age. —The New York Times Read all 12 "From The Critics" >

WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING

A wry, painful, engaging book. — Frank McCourt, author of Angela's Ashes

Jeffrey M. Mason