Technology.talk - Joyce Maynard

By Patrick J. Suarez-Regular Contributor to The DataBus - pjsuarez (at) gemair.com

Illustrious DMA® member Gary Turner once said that the true power of the Internet was the willingness of people to share information and experiences with one another. Perhaps truer words about the Net were never spoken. I might further that idea with the notion that the Internet gives us the ability to discover new friends (while expanding, refining, testing and perhaps validating our own beliefs) and, maybe more important, rediscovering old friends. Recently, the Internet, by way of an e-mail advertisement for a book on CD, helped me rediscover someone who had been my writing mentor and a significant influence.

All writers have mentors and role models. Mine were Al Misenko, one-time Adjunct Professor of English at Wittenberg University, and authors Joan Didion and Joyce Maynard.

Didion and Maynard are America's finest writers. Their styles and works are interesting, thought provoking, literate and intelligent. Didion has been writing for nearly four decades, Maynard for three. They write about life and the Byzantine influences that surround and shape it. I cannot imagine literature without their contributions.

Maynard's introduction to the public was startling. She was just 18 years old when no less than the Sunday New York Times Magazine published her thoughts about life from the vantage point of America's youth. Shortly thereafter, she appeared in Newsweek's My Turn column with a piece called "Searching for Sages". At 19, she published "Looking Back", probably history's only memoir by someone not yet two decades old.

While still in my early twenties, I caught the Newsweek article and was mesmerized by its profound sense of expression. As I read those paragraphs, I had to look at the author's headshot over and over. I was reading something recondite, a work from the pen of a person who had decades of wisdom under her belt. But the photo was of a teenager, a youngster with huge eyes and an intense gaze. How could this be?

When "Looking Back" hit the shelves, I snapped it up. The Newsweek article was no fluke; Maynard was the real deal and her writing voice and style helped shape my own less accomplished one.

Throughout the '70s and '80s, I followed Joyce Maynard's work where I could find it. She wrote several successful works, including one, "To Die For", that became a movie starring Nicole Kidman. In the '80s, the Dayton Daily News dropped her column and I was outraged. When a junior editor told me that the DDN wanted to concentrate on local writers, I found his explanation specious, and I dropped my subscription.

However, in the '90s, I did far less reading than any time in my past, and I sadly shelved my long-time mentor. In the process, I missed a publishing event that shook up the literary world. And, oh my, what an event it was.

In her 1987 book, "Domestic Affairs", Maynard chronicled her life as a wife and mother. On the surface, it was entertaining. But there was another, more important story that Maynard needed to get out, the story of her hellish relationship with famed author J. D. Salinger ("The Catcher in the Rye") and her near destruction at his manipulative and bizarre hands.

That she did in 1998 in "At Home in the World", an autobiography of jaw-dropping intensity and honesty. In it she chronicled her relationships with: her gifted but eccentric and sometimes difficult parents; Jerry (as she calls him) Salinger; her ex-husband Steve; her sister, Rona; her three children, Audrey, Charlie and Willie.

This is no ho-hum compendium of events. It is a riveting exploration of the extent of torment one human being can endure at the hands of people, excepting here her three children, who are supposed to nurture but instead have to be, literally, survived. Trust me when I tell you that you will read incidents where you will have to put the book down, if only to catch your breath to recover. And then pick it right back up again to see what follows. As it turns out, I didn't read this book in 1998, I heard it earlier this year as a book on unabridged CDs during my daily trek to and from Columbus each day.

Words have a special character all their own. Reading epithets or horrific episodes in a life carries certain weight; hearing those words carries an additional wallop. There were times when I felt as if I'd taken a right cross to the jaw as I listened to the CDs. The pointed cruelty in them was, for me, unprecedented. And they came from people from whom they should not have come, including Salinger.

While Maynard felt liberated with "At Home in the World", her critics and Salinger's supporters attacked her relentlessly, viciously and unfairly. While such behavior was wrong on many levels, it was particularly unjust because Maynard, throughout "At Home", had the good grace and journalistic integrity to not whine or overly opinionate. She merely stated what happened to her and what her reaction was at the time. Not too many human beings have the character to hold back with that kind of objectivity, especially in light of the carpet-bombing she took for years from almost all sides.

"At Home in the World" is a testament to the power of redemption and the ability to forgive. It also should be required reading for anyone planning to have a relationship with or marry someone else. If you can't read this masterpiece of the human condition and not treat your significant other better, you have ice water, not blood, coursing through your arteries.

These days, Joyce Maynard is a happy, fulfilled woman who has more than earned the fame that she sought as a youngster. Her Web site is as endlessly fascinating as she is, filled with photos, thoughts and an electronic bulletin board to which she occasionally contributes. Visit it soon at www.joycemaynard.com.

One should choose one's influences and mentors carefully, and I couldn't have chosen a better person than Joyce Maynard. Thank you, Joyce, for all that you've done and taught us, and for all that you'll do in the future.

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