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  Contents

  Copyright Notice

  About the Author

  Also by Joyce Maynard

  Praise

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Preface to the 2013 Edition

  Epigraph

  Introduction

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Afterword

  Author’s Note

  An 18-Year-Old Looks Back on Life

  Copyright

  JOYCE MAYNARD has been a reporter for The New York Times, a magazine journalist, NPR commentator, and syndicated columnist. She is the author of seven novels, including To Die For, Labor Day, and, most recent, After Her, as well as four books of nonfiction. Maynard’s bestselling novel Labor Day has been adapted for film by Academy Award–nominated director Jason Reitman and stars Kate Winslet and Josh Brolin. At Home in the World has been translated into ten languages. The mother of three grown children, Maynard makes her home in Northern California.

  Also by Joyce Maynard

  After Her

  The Good Daughters

  Labor Day

  Internal Combustion

  The Cloud Chamber

  The Usual Rules

  Where Love Goes

  To Die For

  Domestic Affairs

  Baby Love

  Looking Back

  “When Picador announced last year that they were publishing At Home in the World, Jonathan Yardley of The Washington Post condemned her as ‘reckless’ and The New York Times questioned whether anyone should write about ‘America’s most private citizen.’ The subtext behind these articles was ‘Keep quiet, little girl; you’re not the big important writer he is.’ Fortunately Maynard ignored them. Her confusion, suffering, and the lasting impact of her brush with a powerful older man show us the dark side of the Pygmalion myth.”

  —Cynthia Kling, Harper’s Bazaar

  “Maynard has written, in a completely unpretentious manner, a poignant, deep memoir in which a very bright woman looks back at her life and reveals truths that most of us would rather never have to face.… I thought the book was 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 penetrating Reviving Ophelia, a study of the painful and crosswired contradictions that still plague ambitious girls.”

  —Chris Kraus, The Nation

  “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 … 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 The Catcher in the Rye.…”

  —Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

  “Many, mostly male literary critics abhor her egocentric material and call her self-absorbed and silly. I see her as one of America’s literary pioneers.”

  —Barbara Raskin, The Washington Post Book World

  “[Maynard] has an interesting and disturbing story to tell, and she tells it simply but vividly.… She also captures the innocent strivings of a precocious young girl remarkably well.”

  —Marion Winik, Newsday

  “In her very shamelessness; in the unrelenting thoroughness of her self-exposure; in her determination not only to tell the truth but to tear it open and eviscerate it and squeeze it until it is bled dry—Maynard is surprisingly powerful.”

  —Larissa MacFarquhar, The New York Times Magazine

  “At Home in the World is a memoir that demands reading for the outstanding pleasure to be found in a writer who has the courage to show herself inside out.”

  —Julius Siegel, The San Francisco Chronicle

  To my sister, Rona, with admiration and love.

  And to Audrey, my firstborn child and only daughter, who may think that her father and I brought her into the world. But truly, she is the one who brought me here.

  Preface to the 2013 Edition

  I WAS GETTING off a plane when I learned the news: J. D. Salinger was dead.

  I was fifty-six years old, and with the exception of one brief meeting on his doorstep, thirteen years before—an encounter that lasted no more than five minutes, in which I found myself the object of a greater wrath than any I’d ever known—nearly four decades had passed since the last time I had spoken with the man.

  But I had loved him once, and more even than loved, had worshipped him. I had grafted his view of how a person should be so utterly onto my sense of who I was in the world that there existed a time when I no longer knew who I was, separate from Jerry. Everything I believed came from him.

  He told me what movies to watch, what music to listen to, what food to eat. Jerry told me what to think, and write, and not write, what was real and what was false. He told me who to be, and, because I adored him, I wanted to be that person.

  The relationship lasted just eleven months, and ended forty years ago, when I was nineteen years old. But absent as Salinger has been all my adult life, he has remained an almost daily presence in it. This is not a fact of my choosing.

  At first (when I was nineteen, then twenty, then twenty-one) Salinger haunted me because I longed so desperately to earn back his good opinion of me. I kept his voice in my head: offering up opinions of everything he loved, and everything he condemned, and for a long time his views were simply mine. This was true even though on his list of the condemned was my own self.

  To the girl I was then, Jerry Salinger remained the wisest and best person I’d ever known, or ever would—the purest, the most enlightened, the funniest. He had written once, early in our correspondence, that I was a wonderful writer, and the most lovable girl. When he told me, a year after, that I was a shallow, worthless person, I believed that too.

  I got over this. But even after I moved on to build another kind of life, I continued, as many people did and many do still, to adhere to the code he’d laid down long before, that to speak of him constituted an unforgivable crime, and proof of one’s own reprobate soul. To a stunning degree, for a period of nearly five decades, Salinger managed to convince not only those around him but the rest of the world as well that his words and actions should be exempt from scrutiny. He might write someone a letter. But she must never say she received it. He might break her heart—or wound it badly, or even derail her. But she must never mention it happened.

  For twenty-five years I did not speak of him, or what his presence in my young life had cost me. Then I did speak of it, and that cost me dearly too.

  * * *

  I did not seek out J. D. Salinger. He wrote me a letter. I was eighteen years old. He was fifty-three.

  Eight weeks after receiving that first letter, I walked out of the world of my own making and into a world that was his. When he was finished with the chapter that had me in it, I no longer knew where I belonged—if such a place even existed. The fact that, at the age of nineteen, I believed I might never know love again, is a part of my story. But far more significant is the fact that my life did not end at age nineteen. Neither does the story that unfolds in these pages—a story I felt moved to write when my only daughter reached the age of eighteen.

  Salinger was the first man with whom I shared a sexual relationship, and his assessment of me as a girl (never a woman) shaped my view of my own sexuality for a long time. Here my story is far from unique: it belongs to so many young girls who give themselves over, young, to a man of vastly greater age and power and, in the course of doing that, abandon themselves. And then believe it is their obligation to remain silent.

  Twenty-five years later, I gave myself permission to tell my story.

  “Oh, you’re the one who wrote that book about Salinger,” people have said to me over the years since.

  “I wrote a book about me,” I tell them. “Salinger chose to make himself a part of my story.”

  My story. Not his.

  * * *

  I have not spent the last four decades consumed with J. D. Salinger, or haunted by the year I spent with him. In certain significant ways, I was shaped by that time, and by Salinger. But more so, by my parents, by my father’s love of art and my mother’s love of language and my early passion for both. And by my father’s drinking and the unhappiness of their marriage.

  The failure of my own marriage
is a large part of my story, as are the lessons of divorce, and the experience of raising my children and supporting my family, after. My story contains books and music and places I’ve traveled and the friends I’ve made there. When I reflect on what it is that made me the woman I am now, those are the things I name first.

  Not J. D. Salinger. My experience with Salinger, and the manner in which it ended, left me shattered and lost for time when I was young. But I reclaimed myself. I never saw myself as a ruined person, or a victim. I did not cease to trust, or to be hopeful, or to seek love, and love back. Also, I never stopped being a writer.

  * * *

  Many things have happened between that day Jerry Salinger put those two fifty-dollar bills in my hand and told me to clear my things out of his house, and this one. I have broadcast political commentaries on the radio and worked as a newspaper reporter. I married and gave birth to three children. I made a good home in New Hampshire, then watched our good home fall apart when my husband and I entered into an angry and bitter divorce. I wrote a few books. I fell in love a few times. I traveled to Africa. I sat by the bedside of my dying mother. Buried my father. Fought with my sister. Made peace with her.

  In the fifteen years since the publication of this memoir, I’ve written seven more novels and a few hundred essays. I built a home in a Mayan village in Guatemala, on the edge of a deep lake, looking out to a volcano. I taught a few hundred people (a thousand, probably) how to make a good pie the way my mother taught me. With their father—my former husband—I’ve watched our three children launch themselves into the world, managing despite all the old battles to take nobody’s side and love us both, and to make brave, interesting, and adventuresome lives of their own, and to forgive us both the many ways we fell short. All of this has contributed to the story of my life, far more than J. D. Salinger did.

  Like many people my age, I have known a few big successes and an equal measure of large and occasionally brutal failures. One year, when the Department of Energy announced its intention to locate a high-level nuclear waste dump in my beloved state of New Hampshire, I helped to organize the resistance that ultimately defeated that effort. I adopted two older children from Ethiopia, and then learned, painfully, that I was not the parent they needed, and searched for—and found—the couple who could be. If that sentence reads simply enough, the events it describes were not.

  Still, the old story dogged me. It didn’t matter that I’d turned thirty, and then forty, and then fifty. I would surpass the age Jerry had been when I knew him, and yet I would still be, to many people I encountered, the girl who lived with a famous writer. When a book of mine was published, the reviewer would speak of The Catcher in the Rye, and of the ancient history of my connection to its author. And so it came to seem I needed to tell the truth about what happened, so I would never need to tell it again.

  There are many things to say about me (good and ill) besides the fact that for a brief time in my late teens I was the follower (a more apt word than “lover”) of a famous man. But to excise the story of Salinger from the rest, out of a sense of obligation to protect the great man’s secrets, would have made it impossible to know myself, or to be known, or to pursue what every human being deserves—the simple right to tell her story.

  I was forty-four years old when I wrote At Home in the World, having at that point maintained my career as a writer for twenty-five years. For seven years I’d published a weekly newspaper column about my experiences, never mentioning Salinger. A novel of mine—To Die For—had recently been adapted into a film. Still, when this memoir was published in 1998, many people expressed the view of me as a “leach” (the word selected by Maureen Dowd in The New York Times) who had made her living off the flimsy story of a brief girlhood affair.

  “The only good thing about At Home in the World,” one critic wrote, “is that now we’ll never have to read another book by Joyce Maynard again.”

  It was the view of many of my critics (and I seemed to have nothing but critics that year) that because my story involved that of a great man who demanded not to be spoken of, I owed him my silence. The attacks, not only on my memoir, but even more so on my character, were brutal, intensely personal, and relentless. The Washington Post called At Home in the World “the worst book ever published.” I was labeled an exploiter, a “predator.” I lost count of the times I was described as “shameless.”

  At a literary gathering the winter after this book’s publication (a rare event to which I’d been invited to read, thanks to the insistence of a powerful friend), a stunning thing occurred. As I took the stage to speak, an entire row of highly respected literary types got up from their seats—en masse—and exited the hall. Their message was clear: what I had to say did not deserve to be heard. Their sense of my story, and their outrage that I’d written it, would be preserved.

  And in many quarters it still is. Five years ago, when I brought the unsold manuscript of my novel Labor Day to the agent who would ultimately decide to represent me, he agreed to try and sell it, but with one proviso.

  “I know this will sound harsh,” he told me. “But I’d like to submit this piece of work without your name on it. So people will read it free from … preconceptions.”

  Many editors expressed interest in buying that novel. Later, when it was revealed that the book had been written by me, a number withdrew their offers. Or lowered them substantially.

  * * *

  I’m looking now at a photograph well known to me, of the girl I was at eighteen, taken on a sunny day in late March 1972, at the Yale University library, with my messy hair and my red sneakers and my too-big man’s watch flopping on my too-thin wrist. At the time this photograph was taken, I remained ignorant of the fact that this was precisely how a character named Esmé wore her watch too, in a short story by a writer whose books I was aware of but had not read.

  I was exploding with optimism back in those days—a girl more naïve in some ways, even, than most eighteen-year-olds, though possessed of large ambition and an abiding curiosity—hunger, really—to find my place in the world. In April of 1972, when that photograph of me ran on the cover of The New York Times Magazine, with an article by me inside, speaking with a certain affected world-weariness of “growing up old,” it caught the attention of the author of that short story.

  I was already a girl with troubles in her life: a father I loved deeply who drank too much, a mother I adored who—blocked from achieving a career of her own—had poured her vast energies into seeing that I had one, to the exclusion perhaps of my ability to define for myself what my dreams might have been. Like many young girls inhabiting complicated families, I was eager to please the people I loved. Sometimes at the expense of my own well-being.

  Still, I was a hopeful and optimistic person, and a trusting one. The afternoon I opened Salinger’s first letter to me—inspired by my article and the accompanying photograph, perhaps—I possessed a fundamental belief that the world was a good place, and that a wonderful life lay ahead of me.

  You will be exploited, he warned me in that letter. There remained one person and one only—a landsman—who understood me. This was him.

  By July, I’d moved in with him, and in September I gave up my little off-campus apartment and my scholarship and withdrew from Yale. Like many young girls—even the modern kind, who may (as I did) call themselves feminists—I still believed that the path to happiness was true and undying love.

  * * *

  Thirteen months from that sunny afternoon when the New York Times photographer, Ted Croner, took my picture at the Yale Library, I had my picture taken again. The relationship with Salinger was over now. He’d instructed me to depart from his life as suddenly and irrevocably as he had summoned me to enter it.

  The photographer focusing his lens on my face in May of 1973 was Richard Avedon—assigned by Vogue magazine to create a portrait of Twelve Significant Women of the Year. Flattered that I’d been included (and then guilty for feeling this way, knowing—as I always did—what Jerry would say about this), I made the drive down from New Hampshire into Manhattan to have my photograph taken by another great man. I think I believed he might make me beautiful.

  Little resemblance exists between the impishly smiling girl in the red sneakers on the cover of The New York Times Magazine the spring of 1972 and the one captured on film by Richard Avedon just a year later—a wary, sad-eyed exile, her face puffy from too much crying and too many containers of boysenberry yogurt—who believed that the one person she’d ever known who understood the truth about life had found her unworthy of spending his with her.