Looking Back Read online

  Reading over now what I wrote all those years ago, I can hear my young self speaking: that sharp, precocious, slightly know-it-all voice, so well-trained by my mother from all our hundreds of evenings in the family living room, when I read my stories out loud from my yellow legal pads. Certain parts make me smile. Some could make me weep (like my cool assessments—written as if this were no more than a fascinating cultural phenomenon—of the kind of eating disorders that were, in fact, tormenting me). I wrote about the diving under my desk for air raid practice during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the Beatles’ first appearance on the Ed Sullivan show, and catching the first glimpse (via the cover of Life magazine) of what a human fetus looked like in utero. But I was not so adept at revealing my own inner self. That part of my story I kept off the page, mostly.

  I had been offered the impossible assignment to write about my generation and I supposed the way to do this was to smooth over the rough edges of my life and create something of an Everywoman. (Or an Everygirl, anyway. White, middle class, and heterosexual.) I made liberal use of the third person plural in this book—spoke of “my generation” more than I spoke of myself. If there were odd and troubling—and very likely embarrassing—aspects to my experience, I kept those hidden, out of fear that to do otherwise would invoke judgment and disapproval in a reader and shame in my own self.

  This is why, in the 160 pages of Looking Back, no mention can be found of the fact that I grew up in an alcoholic family—though my father’s nightly drinking was a central and formative part of my growing up and one I now understand I shared with so many of the very people at my school, and beyond, from whom I worked so hard to keep this hidden.

  I spoke, in my book, about obsession with looks and body image, but only in the abstract, as if I were an anthropologist. In truth, the girl who wrote Looking Back lived in terror of gaining weight, stepped on the scale several times a day, and regularly made herself throw up (a skill taught to her by the man she loved). In a visit with the editors of a major national magazine that same year, I suggested that they assign me an article on the topic of bulimia, but was told by the editor-in-chief that this sounded way obscure and bizarre for a general audience. Ten years later, Karen Carpenter—whose voice provided the soundtrack to a thousand senior proms and weddings of the day—was dead of anorexia.

  At 18, I couldn’t write about my difficult relationship with my mother, or the struggles between my sister and me, or the fact that my best friend at college had struggled with the knowledge that he was gay. I didn’t write about the social studies teacher at my high school who invited one of my best friends to move in with him during her junior year (and she did, though she never get over the habit of addressing him by the title “Mr.”). Nor did I write about the relatively common practice at my Ivy League college, in those days, for young girls (including my roommate) to get together with their graduate student teaching assistants and, on occasion, their professors—or the fact that when it happened, nobody seemed to view this as a problem. If anything, a relationship with an older person (as modeled by Mia Farrow with Frank Sinatra, and Margaret Trudeau with the Prime Minister of Canada) demonstrated a girl’s sophistication, success, and desirability.

  Most strikingly absent, of course, from my 1972 account of my young life, is any mention of the first love affair I ever had, embarked upon, as an 18-year-old virgin, in the summer after the publication of that article in the New York Times. I do not say, in the book that purports to be the story of my life to date, that I have dropped out of college (never to return, though I didn’t know this yet) and moved in with a man 35 years older than I am. I do not say this man is J. D. Salinger.

  Only one small clue exists in the pages of the book you are holding in your hand, suggesting what was actually going on in my private life at the time I was writing it. It appears on the second-to-last page of Looking Back, in the final chapter, that I wrote on the morning of January 1, 1973—which happened to be Jerry Salinger’s 54th birthday. I don’t say that it was his birthday, but I refer to having rung in the New Year “with popcorn and Guy Lombardo.” Talk about extinct phenomena: The only people watching the band leader Guy Lombardo on New Year’s Eve were people over 50, probably. But I was living with one of them and being the girl I was then, I listened to the music he liked and kept my Johnny Cash and Rolling Stones albums in the closet.

  I kept a lot of my truest self hidden there too.

  Certain parts of this book—the sense of the narrator as a perpetual outsider, sitting on the sidelines at every party she attended, watching everyone else get drunk, or stoned, or fall in love, while she herself kept scribbling on that infernal legal pad—strike me now as familiar, and touching, and sad. Sometimes the voice of the girl I was comes across as funny and wise, and sometimes terribly young. Her observations can be perceptive and compassionate—when she speaks about the power of Seventeen magazine to shape girls’ sense of themselves and their sense of who they should be, the fear of death, and the social structures of junior high.

  As strongly as I did when I was 18, I can feel the humiliations described in these pages of a boy at my school (I remember him vividly still) whose voice never fully changed, so every time he spoke in class (and this happened with less and less frequency) you never knew what octave he’d be speaking in. (Years later, I heard he had committed suicide. No doubt there were other problems, and plenty of them, that accounted for this. Still I am struck—reading my description of him all those years before—by my recognition of how cruel the world can be, and was, to people who were different. And my own way of addressing that, which was to keep safely under wraps the evidence of my own greatest sources of discomfort and shame.)

  There are times here where my assessments of my life, growing up in the sixties, strike me as overly grandiose and sweeping, for sure. There are also some moments in these pages when my 18-year-old self captured something that feels, all these years later, like truth—and sometimes, oddly enough, what I say shows less in the way of how much things have changed than it does how much has stayed the same. That happens when the voice of the narrator—me, at 18—writes of being “worldly not from seeing the world, but from watching it on television.” And when I speak of my television-occupied world as “a visual glut” that served to deaden the senses to the point where hardly anything seemed amazing or wonderful any more.

  I can muster affection and sympathy for this girl who was me—for her yearnings for religion, her admission that sometimes she changes her outfit nine times before going out, her willingness to admit she doesn’t smoke marijuana and have sex. (Though she slips into the third person when she starts talking about this. First person is just too close to the bone.) But at other times—mostly when making pronouncements about youth and “my generation” she is maddening, to the point where I want to shake her.

  “You think you know so much,” I would tell my young self. “Just wait.”

  I remember a conversation I had many years later with my own daughter, when she was about the same age and came home to visit after her first semester at college. She had been taking a course called “Introduction to Feminism” taught by a famous former Berkeley radical, and she was exploding with ideas and opinions not yet fully supported by life experience. “Oh, Mama,” she said to me—weighing in on a decision I’d made that struck her as evidence of my lack of enlightenment concerning the female condition—“you have no idea what women have gone through.”

  Here is some of what I did not know at 18 about what women go through, as they pass beyond their teens and into their twenties, and beyond that to the thirties, and the forties, to the age I own as I write this now: 58.

  I didn’t know that my parents, the people to whom I dedicated Looking Back, and the home I’d lived in for all my growing-up years—the place I’d hitchhiked back to from New Haven for the purpose of writing my article because it had seemed to me like the one safe spot on earth—would break apart within months of finishing my book. Within
twelve months my parents had divorced—with great anger and bitterness, brought on in no small part by the presence in my father’s life of a young girlfriend, only a few years older than I was.

  The war in Vietnam ended around the time Looking Back was published. Nixon resigned. The soldiers came home. “The boys of 1953, my year, will be the last to go,” I’d written in my book. I didn’t know how many among that generation of young men would spend the rest of their lives struggling with what the experience of fighting in that war had done to their minds—and how through their attachment to those men, the women who loved them and the children they bore would struggle too.

  I didn’t know—none of us did—that there would be something more dangerous about sex than pregnancy and that was AIDS. In 1972 the Beatles were still together. Girls at my high school had to pay 25 cents for the privilege of wearing pants to school—one day a year. Pluto was still a planet. Muhammad Ali was The Greatest. My parents were alive.

  I knew I would have children and that part didn’t change. But I thought that when I got married, the marriage would last forever. I believed the words to songs, particularly the romantic ones. I believed in women’s liberation (the Equal Rights Amendment had been defeated the year before, but Billie Jean King would shortly beat Bobby Riggs). Product of an era when girls playing basketball were allowed no more than three dribbles (so as not to tax themselves, presumably) and those girls playing soccer at my school had to clear the field of stones before the game could begin (while the boys got the good field), I would have said I believed that women were entitled to any and all rights afforded men. I never for a day questioned that I would have a career. But I also eventually embarked on a marriage in which I accepted, for years, the notion that the majority of child care and housework would fall to the woman. Same as it had for my mother.

  I supported Roe v. Wade and the right of a woman to choose abortion. I didn’t know yet that six years later, when I had an abortion myself, the real-life experience would feel a lot more complicated and painful than embracing the political position.

  I was an old-fashioned girl who baked bread and wanted babies. (This was a nearly radical position at the time, by the way.) And like many girls (despite the powerful rise of feminism during these years, and my own intellectual support of what the feminists talked about), I was a good girl, raised to please. I derived my sense of my own worth from what the arbiters of power in my world conveyed—the editors of Seventeen and the New York Times, the admissions board at Yale, my parents. If a man I loved told me I was a wonderful girl and a real writer—as Jerry Salinger had told me when he wrote me that first letter—I felt I might be such a person. If that same man—so much wiser and more brilliant than I—told me differently, I would believe this, too.

  All of that fall, while I was writing Looking Back, Jerry Salinger had expressed his displeasure in my project, even as he looked over my manuscript, suggesting changes—many of which are reflected in the final work. It was Salinger—who spent hours meditating daily and urged me to do the same—who inspired the reference in these pages to Zen meditation, though (having missed the point, perhaps) I made the suggestion that I practiced the art by watching television. It was Salinger who urged me to end my book with a reference to the birds on his bird feeder that day and the importance—in a climate of so much faddishness and fashion—of holding onto a respect for the natural world.

  More important, it was Salinger who raised the question of whether my old dream of achieving fame and fortune in New York City would provide the basis for a meaningful life. Had he not written that first letter to me, and all the ones that followed—had I never met him—I can guess where I would have been headed: to a career in television, very likely, or as what he would have called “some goddamn female Truman Capote, hopping from one talk show couch to the next one,” carrying on a series of “hysterically amusing little exercises in assassination by typewriter.” Without ever asking myself the question (here came Salinger’s voice in my ear again): What purpose might all my words serve besides the shoring up of my own ego?

  “Do you ever see a student any more who simply loves to write, for the pure joy of the thing?” he asked me. “Or are they all hell-bent in making a name for themselves?”

  “Someday, Joyce,” he had said to me, “you’ll give up this business of delivering what everybody tells you to do. You’ll stop looking over your shoulder to make sure you’re keeping everybody happy. One day a long time from now you’ll cease to care anymore who you please or what anybody has to say about you. That’s when you’ll finally produce the work you’re capable of.”

  Back then, what mattered to me most was still to please the person I loved best. This mattered more than being a writer, or simply being myself. I would be whoever I needed to be, if it allowed me to hold onto the love of the man I believed to be funnier and more interesting and wiser and more enlightened than any other.

  When, in January, a small item appeared in Time magazine, disclosing that I had dropped out of Yale and moved in with the author of The Catcher in the Rye, Jerry Salinger exploded at me with so much fury I hid in the closet until I fell asleep there and emerged begging forgiveness.

  In the spring of 1973, three weeks before the much-publicized release of Looking Back, on a trip with Jerry and his children to Florida, he told me he was weary of me and weary of our relationship. He placed a 50-dollar bill in my hand, put me in a taxi, and sent me to the airport with instructions to clear my things out of his house before he and the children returned home.

  This I did.

  In that first article I’d published in the New York Times, just eleven months earlier, I’d spoken of my dream to live in the country. “I feel a sudden desire to buy land,” I’d written. “Just a small plot of earth so that whatever they do to the country I’ll have a place where I can go—a kind of fallout shelter, I guess. . . . A little house, a comfortable chair, peace and quiet—retirement sounds tempting.”

  After Salinger sent me away, I informed my publishers that I would not be embarking on the book tour they’d planned for me, after all. I took $17,000 I’d earned from the sale of Looking Back and made a down payment on an old house on 50 acres of land at the end of a dead-end road four miles outside of a very small town in New Hampshire. On Memorial Day of that year, one month after the publication of my book, I moved in to that house. I planted a vegetable garden there and bought copies of The Tassajara Bread Book and Helen and Scott Nearing’s The Good Life.

  I lived in that house, alone, for a little over two years—continuing to write articles and record radio and television commentaries as the anointed Youth Spokesperson of America, though my own life bore less resemblance than ever to that of my contemporaries. Alone on those 50 acres, I inhabited a state of deep grief and a profound sense of failure.

  In 1975, I moved to New York City to take a job as a newspaper reporter. When—a little over a year later—I met the man I would marry, I quit my great job at the New York Times (explaining as I did so, to the shock of the managing editor, that I wanted to get married and have babies). My future husband and I left New York and moved back to that New Hampshire farm. We raised our three children there for the 12 years our marriage lasted.

  I wrote a number of books, and a few hundred articles and essays. Gradually, over the years, I learned that the best writing is the kind in which the writer dares to tell not only the easy stories, but also the uncomfortable ones.

  I am still doing that. It’s work I love. I no longer write to please. I write to tell the truth. Sometimes, first, I have to locate the truth within myself. It is not always readily apparent.

  In 1998—over 25 years after the publication of my first book about my life—I published a memoir, At Home in the World, that told the story I hadn’t felt able to write back when I was still living it. I was criticized in many circles—literary and otherwise—for doing this, most particularly for speaking of Salinger, and in many ways, the cost was great for doing
so. A lot of people called me “shameless.”

  It’s a label I accept proudly. If there is one difference between the girl I was at 18 and the woman I am now, it may be that. I would have been not only a better writer, sooner, but a woman more at peace had I believed then what I know now: There is nothing shameful about honesty.

  Oddly enough, it was the words of Salinger himself, delivered a quarter century before, that offered particular sustenance at the time.

  “Honest writing always makes people nervous, and they’ll think of all kinds of ways to make your life hell. Forget this business of tripping along as some blue-jeans-wearing spokesperson. Just write what you love, and nothing less. Write what’s true. ”

  I am looking now at that photograph of me, from late winter of 1972, in my red-and-white checked sneakers, that appeared on the cover of the New York Times Magazine that April. All these years later, hardly a week goes by in my life—hardly a day, sometimes—in which someone or other doesn’t mention that image. They remember the big watch I was wearing and the way I folded my legs around each other, years before I’d set foot in a yoga class.

  The youthfulness on that face is long gone from now, of course. But it’s not the simple effects of aging that most strikingly differentiate the face I have now from the one of the girl in that picture.

  It’s the sense that image conveys of trust and innocence and faith. Whatever I said in that article (and say, in expanded form, in this book), there existed, in the 18-year-old version of myself, a belief that all things were possible. She could write a letter to the managing editor of the New York Times to say she’d like to write for him and he’d write back. A famous writer would send her a letter, himself, to say they were soul mates (the word he used: landsmen) and she’d believe him. One day she’d be writing a paper on Chaucer. The next day, she’d be on the train to New York City, auditioning for the starring role in a movie.