Joyce Maynard Author Views
Joyce Maynard began a reading for her new book, Internal Combustion, Sunday afternoon with a quick story about her affair with J.D. Salinger. Maynard likes to talk about her 10-month relationship with the famous author, and when she began to wind down ( He handed me a $50 bill and told me to go away ), it was clear the past was threatening to upstage Maynard's current work.
At 52, and after more than three decades of writing, Joyce Maynard still draws crowds -- on gorgeous, Sunday afternoons in the fall, no less -- to witness, mostly, the event that is Joyce Maynard. Judging by those waiting in line for a signature afterward, it's inconsequential that Maynard has a new book out, a true account of a Detroit woman who hatchets her husband to death. There's the 15-year-old girl who'd read The Usual Rules and The Cloud Chamber, Maynard's young adult novels, and wanted to tell the author she was her favorite writer; the 50-year-old woman who recalled Maynard's stage debut 30 years ago as a Yale student, and asked her to keep on writing ; the man who complimented her novel To Die For, which was turned into the movie starring Nicole Kidman; the middle-aged woman who had Maynard sign At Home in the World, the memoir that recounts her time in 1972-73 with Salinger, but also mentioned her own divorce and how Joyce's life had mirrored hers in many ways.
Cracks in the wall of silence that his friends, neighbours and family had built around him began to appear in 1999 when a former lover, Joyce Maynard, published a memoir of an affair she had with Salinger in 1972. But it was only a year later that Salinger's daughter published a memoir of her own that described an atmosphere of suspicion and paranoia, with the author in thrall to a succession of unusual diets and religions as he continued adding to the piles of colour-coded manuscripts waiting for publication. It was an account rejected by her brother, who wrote of his troubled sister's propensity to tell gothic tales of our supposed childhood and declared that he grew up in a very different house .
Joyce Maynard entered into a relation with the author when he complimented her writing. They exchanged more than 2 dozen letters after which Joyce Maynard started staying with the author in New Hampshire. However, the relation did not last long as they started developing differences when J.D. Salinger denied to father a child. Joyce Maynard walked out of the relation and married another person. Though J.D. Salinger shared relation with Joyce Maynard, he did not sever ties with Claire Douglas, his legal wife.
Joyce Maynard Author Images
