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.
"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.
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
"Unsparing self-scrutiny...maturity and emotional candor." --Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
"Absorbing, funny, and emotionally blistering." --Jules Siegel, San Francisco Chronicle
"A wry, painful, engaging book." --Frank McCourt, author of Angela's Ashes
"Maynard's testimony is priceless." --Mary Cantwell, Vogue
"Riveting and disturbing." --The New York Times Book Review
"Even Salinger loyalists may feel compelled to reexamine their idol." --Glamour
"Dazzling." --San Francisco Chronicle
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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