At Home in the World: READER'S GROUP GUIDE
by Joyce Maynard

Picador USA - A Division of St. Martin's Press - 1999

"Brilliant... At Home in the World reads like a thriller. Wonderful, compelling, honest, and right on target."
          -- Jeffrey M. Masson, author of Dogs Never Lie About Love
             and When Elephants Weep

Known to many as the Yale freshman who burst on the writing scene in 1972 with a New York Times Magazine cover story "An 18-Year-Old Looks Back on Life," Joyce Maynard has since maintained a varied career in the field. She has been a newspaper reporter, radio commentator, syndicated columnist, frequent magazine journalist, and fiction writer. A divorced mother of three, she has chronicled her marriage, motherhood, single parenthood, and the death of her own parents in many magazines and on National Public Radio. Now, in At Home in the World, written at the age of 42, Joyce Maynard looks at her own life as a woman who as live with a combination of apparent openness and deep secret-keeping. For the first time, in these pages, she tells the whole story.

Joyce Maynard on writing At Home in the World:

  "I think there is something universal in the arc of the life I'm describing, so far as I've lived it. Mine is the story of a woman searching for a place in the world, seeking to be part of the goings-on she finds herself forever observing from the sidelines."

Discussion questions:

1. The epigraph for At Home in the World is a short passage from the well known story The Velveteen Rabbit, by Margery Williams. How does this passage relate to Maynard's story? What do you think becoming "real" means?

2. Both of Maynard's parents are described as bright and educated. Yet only her father, Max, who struggles with alcoholism, works to be the breadwinner of the family, while her mother, Fredelle, assumes the traditional role of the homemaker responsible for rearing their two daughters. What pressures compelled Fredelle to suppress her own ambitions? What effect does this ultimately have in Maynard's relationship with her mother? How would Fredelle's amitions be looked upon today?

3. Society looks at alcoholism today with deeper compassion than the scornful view that was common a generation ago. It is considered more an illness rather than a failure of character. How is each member of Maynard's family hurt and emotionally damaged by Max's alcoholism? In what ways was it the root of her family's dysfunction?

4. Maynard's relationship with her sister Rona seems to be remote when they were growing up. How did each find an escape to normalcy from their uncertain and alienating family life? Why did they not find comfort in each other?

5. At Home in the World reveals a particular portion of J.D. Salinger's reclusive life; yet Maynard's story would not be complete if it did not include the part of her life that involves him. Why is it essential that Maynard's story be told fully? In what ways might secrecy and shame be more painful than disclosure? Do you feel that Maynard's revelations invade Salinger's personal privacy?

6. How do you respond to Maynard's Emotional and sexual naivete in her relationship with J.D. Salinger? Does you find her innocence frustrating, or does it make her more sympathetic? How does their difference in age affect their relationship? What do you think of her parents' lack of involvement during this time?

7. Eating disorders were brought to the awareness of popular cultureduring the 1970s and have continued to be a visible reflection of teen anxiety. How is Maynard's bulimia nervosa related to her quest for perfection? To what extent does she seem aware of this disorder and the disproportionate importance she places on her body?

8. Particularly with her daughter, Audrey, Maynard experiences emotional conflict with her children, wanting to encourage independence while at the same time being overly protective. Is this a natural feeling of parenthood, or is this conflict unusually heightened because of Maynard's experience? How were childhood and parenting in Maynard's generation different from today?

9. One reviewer described Maynard as having written At Home in the World with a kind of double vision, split between the child she was and the woman she became. In what ways might At Home in the World be said to reconcile these two aspects of her personality? What additional perspective regarding her adolescent self is provided by her article "An 18-Year-Old Looks Back on Life" (reprinted in the paperback of At Home in the World)?

10. Memoirs have become increasingly popular. To what extent do autobiographers such as Maynard invent a self to "perform" in their memoirs? Is it the story itself that's most important in a memoir, or is it the unique way of telling that draws in the reader? Are there major differences in the way women memoirists are perceived in comparison to their male counterparts, and in the kinds of stories they tell?

11. Our culture seems more ready to accept and even invite public disclosure of people's private lives, whether they are famous or not. Why are writers sharing more with readers in "tell-all" autobiographies that often discuss unpleasant life experiences, such as rape, incest, or other kinds of abuse? What meaning is there for the reader to hear these stories, and for the writer to tell them?

12. In telling her story, Maynard has confronted a number of deeply rooted demons in her life. By the end of the book, does she seem to be geuinely "at home in the world"?

Quotes:

"Riveting and disturbing."
           -- Katha Pollitt, The New York Times Book Review

"Maynard's narrative often reads like Lolita from the child-woman's point of view. Even Salinger loyalists may feel compelled to reexamine their idol."
          -- Sara Nelson, Glamour

"Dazzling... the star of this absorbing, funny and emotionally blistering book is not J. D. Salinger but Joyce Maynard. At Home in the World is a memoir that demands reading for the astounding pleasure to be found in a writer who has the courage to show herself inside out."
          -- Jules Siegel, San Francisco Chronicle

"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 Catcher in the Rye. Unsparing self-scrutiny, maturity and emotional candor."
          -- Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

"[Maynard] has, as she intended, let herself rip. 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 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

"I see [Maynard] as one of America's literary pioneers."
          -- Barbara Raskin, The Washington Post Book World

"A wry, painful, engaging book."
          -- Frank McCourt, author of Angela's Ashes

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Order copies of At Home in the World for your reader's group...

You'll find the hardback version in the Joyce Maynard Catalogue.
Order the paperback version from amazon.com.

More from At Home in the World:

Chapter 8
Afterword, only found in the paperback edition, and here
Excerpt from Chapter 19
"Private Parts, Public Women," from The Nation
JOYCE MAYNARD interviews JOYCE MAYNARD

Order the hardback or abridged audio version of At Home in the World, from the Joyce Maynard Catalogue.

 RECOMMEND JOYCEMAYNARD.COM TO A FRIEND

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