NEW!                            
Good Girl Gone Bad
Charlie Rose Interview

At Home in the World
by Joyce Maynard

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

Nearly two years have passed since that chilly November day when I stood on Jerry Salinger’s doorstep and asked him my question -- "what was my purpose in your life?" Seeing him again as I did that day -- with the eyes of a mature woman, and not a terrified and worshipful teenager -- freed me to write this book. More than that it changed my outlook on my life.

For more than four decades I had lived with a deep and abiding need to please others. Since the age of eighteen, I had been haunted by the fear of J.D. Salinger’s disapproval and wrath. And I wasn’t wrong that my decision to break a long-held silence concerning a literary icon’s role in my life would bring terrible wrath and disapproval upon me.

Released from the fear of actively displeasing the man whose opinion once meant more to me than that of anybody else, I felt able for the first time to speak with true honesty not only of the part of my history concerning Jerry Salinger but about so many other things that had brought me to where I stood that day. Because when one piece of a story is missing, none of the others quite makes sense...

At Home in the World Afterword, from the St. Martin's paperback edition,
published a year after the hardback.
Afterword from At Home in the World
Not only does the paperback version of At Home in the World contain the article, An Eighteen-Year-Old Looks Back on Life, Joyce also wrote a new afterword to address the reaction to its original publication. Read the Afterword, in its entirety, via the link above.

NEW Good Girl Gone Bad — I wrote this essay nearly a decade after the publication of my memoir, At Home in the World. It's about the experience of breaking a long and costly silence concerning my early relationship with Salinger...

NEW Charlie Rose Interview — an appearance I made some years back -- 1998 -- talking about my memoir, At Home in the World. (My portion of the program begins about halfway through the hour.)

As I recall, a bug was in the studio at the time, and kept circling my head. Perhaps there's a metaphor in there somewhere, but I'll refrain from exploring it. All I can tell you after taking a brief look at this broadcast is this: why don't we know and appreciate how young we are, when we're 45? Can it be that I will one day look back at 54 and feel the same way about this age I'm at now?

  Hear an audio clip (mp3) from Chapter Eight of At Home in the World, from the abridged audio version of the book, read by Joyce. See the Joyce Maynard Catalogue to order your copy.

More from At Home in the World...

Read an excerpt from the book, from Chapter 19, concerning the differences between Joyce's public and private family life while writing her syndicated column, Domestic Affairs.

Print out copies of the Reader's Group Guide for the next meeting of your book group.

Read Chris Kraus' reaction to the reaction to At Home in the World: "Private Parts, Public Women," published in The Nation, November 16, 1998.

Get the answers to interviewers' most oft-asked questions when
JOYCE MAYNARD interviews JOYCE MAYNARD.

An Eighteen-Year-Old Looks Back on Life - the article that launched Joyce Maynard's writing career, and led to the publication of her book, Looking Back. Joyce's memoir, At Home in the World, reveals what happened when that first, major article appeared in the New York Times Magazine, and the real story behind the writing of Looking Back.

What reviewers had to say about At Home in the World:

"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

"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

Order the hardback or the abridged audio version of At Home in the World.

 RECOMMEND JOYCEMAYNARD.COM TO A FRIEND

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