True Life Stories:
A GOOD GIRL GOES BAD
by Joyce Maynard
(From Bad Girls, edited by Ellen Sussman, Norton, 2007)
Added on July 10, 2007
I wrote this essay -- "A Good Girl Goes Bad" -- 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. There were costs, for me, in speaking out, as there had been in stifling my voice. But one thing nobody should ever ask us to do is deny our own story. This is not my only story, I'm glad to say, but it was a formative experience, a part of what made me who I am today, and -- sadly -- it's a story many other women can identify with. I tell it in the hope that some young girl, reading my words, may make healthier choices one day for her own life.
For the first four and a half decades of my life, I was -- with a few minor exceptions -- an unusually good girl. For all the seventeen years I lived under the roof of my parents' house, the only memory that comes to mind of an event in which discipline was necessary concerns a time I took a little dirt out of the large ceramic pot where my mother's favorite schefflara grew, for the purpose of starting an avocado plant. Mostly, though, I worked hard at pleasing my parents, and with surprising regularity, I succeeded at that. As for why it mattered so much that I assume the role of a good girl -- this is a long and complicated story, no doubt. Short answer being that as the daughter of a beloved alcoholic parent -- my father -- and another beloved parent who suffered my father's drinking stoically but with profound sorrow, the best thing I knew to do to slow down the drinking and make my mother happy, was to be as perfect as I could.
I was a good student. I was skinny, as my mother (a lifelong dieter) had always wanted me to be, and I dressed in outfits she chose for me. I was cheerful and outgoing, while my older sister (never particularly good at being a good girl) holed up in her room reading dark poetry and playing sad songs on her guitar. At the age where some teenage girls rode around in cars with boys and rolled joints, I took nature walks with my father and wrote prim essays in which I expressed my abhorrence of marijuana.
My parents were not the only ones who found my written words pleasing. They met with the approval of magazine editors, first at Seventeen, and then other places as well, where -- while still a teenager -- I launched my career, a further effort to bring joy to my father and mother. While other young women might be engaging in the kinds of activities their parents worried about, I sat at my typewriter, clicking away.
One piece published in this period was titled "My Parents are My Friends." In another, I described the experience of lying awake on the top bunk of my dormitory bed (the college was Yale; I'd pleased their admissions team as well) while, below me, my roommate (a Bad Girl) was having a good time with her boyfriend. I was a virgin (a fact I also announced in print), and though I secretly longed for a boyfriend, the kind of behavior required of a girl to form a relationship with a member of the opposite sex seemed scary to me, as a girl whose measure of nearly everything in her life began with the question "What would my parents think?"
When I was eighteen, a famous and powerful man read a piece of my published
writing and sent me a letter of praise. The fact that I had won the admiration
of J.D.Salinger stood as the greatest accomplishment, now, in a lifelong
career of working hard to please people. His words, in that first letter
he wrote to me, came to be as essential to my existence as air. If J.D.
Salinger told me I was talented and perfect, I must be, because he was
the wisest and most wonderful man in the world.
So, within a few months of meeting Jerry, I did the first bad thing in my Good Girl life, which was to quit my amazing summer job at The New York Times to be with him in New Hampshire, and that fall I did an even more bad thing, which was to withdraw from Yale -- forfeiting my scholarship, abandoning the books and clothes I'd left there, along with my blue bicycle -- to live with him. Forever, I believed.
But though under nearly any other circumstances, my choice to drop out of an Ivy League university to move in with a fifty-three-year-old man would unquestionably have incurred the dismay and vehement opposition of my parents, they remained silent about my choice. No doubt this had to do with the identity of the particular fifty-three-year-old man with whom I now announced I would be spending my life. For a girl like me, the fact of having won Salinger's love seemed like the greatest accomplishment in my still-young but driven life.
I spent that year with Salinger writing a book -- a hundred and sixty page memoir, due to be delivered to my publishers shortly after my nineteenth birthday. And though it might have seemed like a tough problem, telling the story of my life without mentioning either the fact that I had grown up in a family where my father got drunk every night, or that one of the activities I engaged in to remain so pleasingly skinny was a daily regimen of self denial and bulimia, I steered clear of those topics in the pages of my first book. I confined my musings to safer topics like the Kennedy assassination and the Beatles' first appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show.
The other subject I didn't touch in my eighteen year old's autobiography was any mention of my relationship with a man known to be as reclusive and protective of his privacy as any writer alive. Not surprisingly, it was a source of tension between the two of us, that I was writing this book, and as its publication date approached, the tension between us grew, concerning my desire to go to New York and talk about the book, appear on television, give interviews about my work -- and his desire to remain far removed from the stuff of worldly life.
I did not argue with Jerry Salinger about his view that my desire to publish my writing and find readers for it stood as proof of fundamental flaws in my character. I was shallow and vain, he told me -- attracted, like a magpie to a piece of glittering aluminum foil, by meaningless worldly success, and (this much was surely true) too heavily invested in pleasing my parents. His words were hurtful, but back in those days, I didn't argue with anyone I loved and admired. I was a good girl still.
Three weeks before the publication of that first book of mine, Jerry Salinger
put a fifty dollar bill in my hand and told me to go away forever, and
I did. He told me, as he did so, how he had come to feel contempt for
me, and my hollow values, my hopelessly immature teenage behavior. Where
once I had inspired in him was the most glorious and extravagant adoration,
now what came forth from the man I revered were words that sliced through
my heart.
And so -- as a girl who had, all her life, measured her worth in the world by her ability to win approval -- I was left to view myself as the most unredeemable failure. Thirty years later, if a man I loved were to say to me, of myself, the things Salinger told me that day, I would revise my view of the man. But at nineteen -- and believing as I did at the time, that these words came from the wisest and most enlightened human being I had ever encountered, or ever would, the only person I thought less of as a result was myself.
My book (dedicated to my parents) was published almost twelve months to
the day from when I'd received Jerry Salinger's first letter. The book
received many glowing reviews. Many copies were sold, though the fact
that this was so barely registered with me at the time. I was too devastated.
I carried on with my life, for many months and many years after that. I did not return to Yale. Eventually, I married. But I carried with me a deep shame at having failed to earn the abiding love of the person whose love I had most longed to earn.
Though I continued to write articles and books, I know my parents were disappointed to see me forgoing a career in New York City for a life in New Hampshire, where the most important aspect of my days became the raising of my three children. I was haunted by the sense of having fallen short of my mother and father's hopes for me.
In one way at least, though, I remained a good girl. Though it had been known by many people that once, long ago, I had lived with Salinger, and though not a week of my life went by in which some journalist or curiousity-seeker didn't ask me about him, I maintained a fierce and unrelenting loyalty to the requirement Jerry Salinger had laid down back when he had loved me, that I never speak of him, or write of him. He was so much more important and valuable than I was, I knew. His voice had spoken on this subject, and so mine must remain mute. The only way I had to prove to him that I was not completely unworthy lay in my silence.
Over the years, I published articles and essays about many subjects that
would once have seemed unmentionable. I wrote about the experience of
growing up in a house where my father got drunk every night. I wrote about
being a young girl who stuck her finger down her throat to remain thin.
I wrote about the death of my marriage, and the death of my mother. Only
one story remained unmentionable, out of the belief that I owed loyalty
and protection to the great man whom it concerned. And I think that for
all those years, too, I held onto the picture of myself presented to me
by the man I had so revered, who had dismissed me as unworthy.
And then something changed. My daughter -- firstborn child, only girl -- turned the age that I was, when Jerry Salinger wrote me that first letter, and all the other ones that followed it. And where, always before, the person I had deemed most deserving of protection and loyalty had been the man who had demanded my silence, suddenly, I found myself revisiting that first and most brutal love affair of my life through the eyes of the young girl. Maybe I couldn't see myself as deserving anything more than what I'd gotten from Salinger, but I knew that if it had been my daughter I would have understood she deserved better.
Twenty five years had passed since I'd read the letters that had first ignited my unyielding devotion to their author, but I took them out and reread them, now, with the eyes of a forty four year old woman -- the mother of a daughter of her own. Twenty five years later, what I saw was not the simple brilliance and wisdom of their author, but manipulation and then (when I got to the last one) cruelty.
When I read the letters as a grown woman, and thought about the events those letters had set in motion in my life, the story looked different, concerning what had happened when Jerry Salinger plucked me out of the pages of the New York Times. I thought about the ways my life and work had been shaped by the events of that sad and confusing year, so long ago. I thought about the book I'd written when I was very young -- a memoir in which I had kept hidden the truest parts of my experience, at a cost of my own voice. Not as an act of vengeance, I think -- only a desire to locate my authentic voice -- I decided to tell the story again. Only the real one, this time. Not the one constructed to please anyone, or to spare me the wrath of a powerful man's displeasure.
Twenty five years after the last time I'd set foot in the home of the first man I ever loved -- the man who had remained, for me, like a religion -- I paid a visit to him then, one more time. Once, long ago, it had been he who'd instructed me to give up my good girl ways, as a writer -- my well-established habit of attempting to ingratiate myself with those I loved, in favor of simply telling the truth. He had criticized that first book of mine for its inauthenticity, concerning the real story of my parents, my father's drinking, my family. "Write in your strong voice," he told me then. No thought, as he spoke those words, that the day might ever come when the need to tell an authentic story, in my own voice, might find me writing about him.
Never before in my life, and never since, have I encountered greater rage or greater contempt than what Jerry Salinger expressed to me the afternoon I paid him that visit, on the eve of my forty fourth birthday. But in a strange and profound way, looking in the eyes of a man I once loved, as he shook his fist at me and pronounced me a person beneath his contempt -- a woman, he now witheringly dismissed, for having "loved the world" -- freed me from a quarter century of silent deference. Perhaps some part of me knew that an avalanche of criticism awaited me when I ceased to comply with the code of silence, but having survived the wrath of Salinger himself, I gave little thought to what anyone else would say about me now.
The book I went on to write -- my second memoir -- was published two years later -- the most authentic work I'd ever produced, I believed. A full twenty five years after the events it described had taken place, I had told my real story, and having done so, I believed I had finally laid to rest an experience I'd carried with me more than half my life, like a heavy stone pressed against my heart. Now I could go on with the rest of my life, tell other stories -- but with the freedom gained from having laid this one to rest finally.
After the publication of that book, an outcry occurred, in the literary
world at least, in which a kind of venom was expressed -- not so much
against my memoir even, as against me -- unlike anything I'd encountered.
Review after review I read (before I gave up reading them) spoke of me
as the shameless exploiter of a great man, a "predator", a woman
who had violated every code of decency and acceptable behavior by invading
the privacy of a man whose whole life bore testimony to his wish to be
left alone. There were hideous caricatures accompanying these reviews,
vicious hate mail, and websites full of angry postings from lovers of
Catcher in the Rye. The only good thing about my book, one critic
wrote, in Time Magazine, was the fact that at least now that I'd
told this story, nobody would ever have to hear from me. Once, visiting
New York, an old friend who'd invited me to a dinner party called back
to suggest, gently, I'd do better not to attend. "There will be Salinger
fans present," he told me. "It wouldn't be a good idea for you
to be at the table."
And so, for the first time in my life, perhaps, I was a bad girl. I hadn't done what I was told, this time. I spoke when I was supposed to keep my mouth shut. One of my critics made reference to a scene in my book in which I hazily described a scene of forced oral sex. "There she goes," the woman wrote. "Joyce Maynard and her big mouth." Nearing the age of fifty now, having raised three children and worked as a writer for close to three decades, I remained -- at least to my critics, and there were legions of them -- the aging former sex partner of an icon, cashing in on her one claim to fame.
I have lived through a number of hard times: the end of my marriage, the
deaths of my parents. Struggles with my children, struggles to support
my family. Challenges in my work. And of course, that first terrible loss
of love, when I was young, that marked me in all kinds of lasting ways.
But it is possible that no experience I have lived through has been more painful, in certain ways, than the fall of that year when I published that second memoir. The true one.
When I was eighteen, I lost my voice, and when I was forty five, I reclaimed it -- finding as I did so that a substantial portion of the literary world believed that in presuming to tell my story, I had committed an unforgivable moral offense.
Now came a moment when I had to confront, full on, the condemnation of a crowd of critics, aligned in the view that I was a reprehensible person. (Salinger himself remained silent and removed, as I had known he would. No need to wonder anymore, what he might think of me now. I knew.)
And so, as a woman who lived for the approval of others, and one who had spent a significant portion of her lifetime assessing her value based on what those in authority said about her, I might simply have retreated to the darkest corner I could locate at least.
The experience did not silence me this time, or fill me with self hatred and shame. That critic who wrote that he'd never have to read another book of mine was wrong. So were those who suggested that the only event of meaning or significance that ever happened in my life -- the only story I had to tell -- had been that once, when I was young, I'd shared the bed of a famous and important man.
Once, when I was young, a famous and important man chose to become a part of my story, and I dared to acknowledge that it happened. It was not my only story, not even my first story, but it was one of them. Telling it laid it to rest. Telling it, and surviving all of what that telling brought upon me, freed me from what I had feared more than anything else, which was the picture of myself, displeasing those whose good favor I sought.
All my life, I think, I'd been afraid that if I were ever to be a bad girl, no one would love me anymore. But what does it mean, anyway, if what it takes to be loved is the denial of one's own story?
And what is a bad girl, really, but a girl who doesn't always do the things other people tell her she's supposed to? Sometimes, it's true, a bad girl may be someone who cheats or steals or hurts people or lies. And sometimes, a bad girl is just someone who tells the truth.
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