Joyce Maynard

Joyce Maynard at the 2010 Texas Book Festival.

Daphne Joyce Maynard (born November 5, 1953) is an American author known for writing with candor about her life, as well as for her works of fiction and hundreds of essays and newpaper columns, often about parenting and family. The 1998 publication of her memoir, At Home in the World, made her the object of intense criticism among some members of the literary world for having revealed the story of the relationship she had with author J. D. Salinger when he was 53 and she was 18.

Biography

Maynard grew up in Durham, New Hampshire, daughter of the Canadian painter Max Maynard and writer Fredelle Maynard. She attended the Oyster River School District and Phillips Exeter Academy. She won early recognition for her writing from The Scholastic Art & Writing Awards, winning student writing awards in 1966-8, 1970, and 1971. While in her teens, she wrote regularly for Seventeen magazine. She entered Yale University in 1971 and sent a collection of her writings to the editors of The New York Times Magazine. They asked her to write an article for them, which was published as "An Eighteen Year Old Looks Back On Life" in the magazine's April 23, 1972 issue. The article prompted a letter from J. D. Salinger, then 53 years old, who complimented her writing and warned her of the dangers of publicity.

Relationship with Salinger

They exchanged 25 letters, and Maynard dropped out of Yale the summer after her freshman year to live with Salinger in Cornish, New Hampshire.^[1] Maynard spent ten months living in Salinger's Cornish home, during which time she completed work on her first book, Looking Back, a memoir that was published in 1973, in which she adhered to Salinger's request that she not mention his role in her life. Her relationship with Salinger ended abruptly just prior to the book's publication. According to Maynard's memoir, he cut off the relationship suddenly while on a family vacation with her and with his two children; she was devastated and begged him to take her back.

Maynard never returned to college. In 1973, she used the proceeds from her first book to purchase a house on a large piece of land in Hillsborough, New Hampshire Hillsborough, New Hampshire, where she lived alone for over two years. From 1973 until 1975, she contributed commentaries to a series called “Spectrum”, broadcast on CBS radio and television, frequently debating the conservative voices of Phyllis Schlafly and James J. Kilpatrick.

In 1975, Maynard joined the staff of the New York Times, where she worked as a general assignment reporter also contributing feature stories. She left the New York Times in 1977 when she married and returned to New Hampshire, where she had three children, Audrey, Charlie and Wilson.

From 1984 to 1990, Maynard wrote the weekly syndicated column, “Domestic Affairs”, in which she wrote candidly about marriage, parenthood and family life. She also served as a book reviewer and a columnist for Mademoiselle and Harrowsmith magazines . She published her first novel, Baby Love, and two children’s books illustrated by her husband Steve Bethel. In 1986 she was a leader in the opposition to the construction of the nation’s first high-level nuclear waste dump in her home state of New Hampshire, a story she told in a cover story in the New York Times in April 1986. When Maynard’s own marriage ended in 1989—an event she explored in her column—many newspapers dropped the “Domestic Affairs” column, though it was reinstated in a number of markets in response to reader protest. After her divorce, Maynard and her children moved to the city of Keene, New Hampshire.

Mature works

Maynard gained widespread commercial acceptance in 1992 with the publication of her novel To Die For which drew several elements from the real-life Pamela Smart murder case. It was adapted into a 1995 film of the same name, starring Nicole Kidman, Matt Dillon and Joaquin Phoenix and directed by Gus Van Sant. In the late 1990s, Maynard became one of the first authors to communicate on a daily basis with her readership by making use of the Internet and an online discussion forum, The Domestic Affairs Message Board (DAMB).

For many years, Maynard chose not to discuss her affair with Salinger in any of her writings, but she broke her silence in At Home In the World, a 1999 memoir. The same year, Maynard put up for auction the letters Salinger had written to her. In the ensuing controversy over her decision, Maynard claimed that she was forced to auction the letters for financial reasons, including her children's college educations; she would have preferred to donate them to Beinecke Library. Software developer Peter Norton bought the letters for $156,500 and announced his intention to return them to Salinger.^[2]

Maynard has subsequently published in several genres. Both The Usual Rules (2003) and "The Cloud Chamber" (2005) are Young Adult titles. Internal Combustion (2006), was her first in the true crime genre. Although nonfiction it had thematic similarities to the fictionalized crime in "To Die For", dealing with the case of Michigan resident Nancy Seaman, convicted of killing her husband in 2004. "Labor Day", an adult literary novel, was published in 2009, and is presently being adapted for a film to be directed by Academy Award-nominated director Jason Reitman. Maynard's most recent novel is The Good Daughters, published in 2010.

Maynard and her sister Rona (also a writer and the retired editor of Chatelaine) collaborated in 2007 to jointly examine their sisterhood. Rona Maynard's memoir My Mother's Daughter was published in the fall of 2007.

Recent years

Joyce Maynard has lived in Mill Valley, California since 1996. She was an adjunct professor at the University of Southern Maine and now runs writing workshops at Lake Atitlan, Guatemala Lake Atitlan, Guatemala.^[3] She frequently performs as an onstage storyteller with The Moth in New York City.

In January 2010, Maynard came into the spotlight when JD Salinger died of natural causes at age 91. She chose not to comment to the press on the occasion of Salinger’s death. In the years since the original publication of Maynard’s memoir in which she first spoke of her relationship with the author, numerous other women have come forward detailing correspondences they also had with Salinger when they were young, causing a reassessment of previous charges that Maynard had unfairly exploited the writer’s privacy.

Bibliography

Fiction

• Baby Love (1981)
• To Die For (1992) (ISBN 978-0-595-26939-6)
• Where Love Goes (1995)
• The Usual Rules (2003)
• The Cloud Chamber (2005)
• Labor Day (2009)
• The Good Daughters (2010)

Nonfiction

• Looking Back (1973)
• Domestic Affairs (1987)
• At Home In The World (1998)
• Internal Combustion (2006)
• Bad Girls: 26 Writers Misbehave essay, "A Good Girl Goes Bad" (2007) Mr Wrong, edited by Harriet Brown, essay "Your Friend Always"
• The Face in the Mirror: Writers Reflect on Their Dreams of Youth and the Reality of Age essay, "Someone Like Me, but Younger" (2009)

References

1. ^ Alexander, Paul (1998-02-09). "J. D. Salinger’s Women". New York. http://nymag.com/nymetro/arts/features/2162/. Retrieved 2007-04-12. 
2. ^ "Salinger letters bring $156,500 at auction". CNN. 1999-06-22. http://www.cnn.com/books/news/9906/22/salinger.letters/. Retrieved 2007-04-12. 
3. ^ http://www.joycemaynard.com/Joyce_Maynard/WRITING_WORKSHOPS.html

External links

• Official website
• Joyce Maynard on the Internet Movie Database
• Author-itative Site by Austin Bunn - a 1998 Village Voice article about Joyce's online community (scroll to second segment of column).
• Why Does the American Press Hate Joyce Maynard? by Jules Siegel
• If You Really Want to Hear About It Review by Jules Siegel originally published in the San Francisco Chronicle.

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Name	Maynard, Joyce
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Date of birth	1953-11-05
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