True Life Stories
by
Joyce Maynard
From Writing
for Health:
I'm at a party and someone asks me what I do for a living. I write, I tell her. "What about?" she asks.
There was a time when I hedged around this question, feeling defensive. But these days, I just say it. I write about myself. Other subjects too, of course. But for a quarter of a century -- since I was eighteen years old -- the subject I have most persistently returned to is my own experience, including some fairly intimate and painful experiences. I have written about the end of my marriage, written about having an abortion, about my father's alcoholism, about embarking on a love affair, and about ending one. The day my mother died I sat down and wrote about that. Call it self-absorption if you will (plenty have). I prefer to say that mine is the only life to which I have been granted total access. Mine is the only story I truly own.
Then too, there's that old saw every English teacher delivers to her students, "Write about what you know." So I have.
Most Requested: The Stories We Tell — Added November 27, 2006
NEW Lost and Sound, by Charlie Bethel — Added March 13, 2009
NEW Thirty Years Later, Still Watching the Scale — Added December 2, 2008
NEW Captured on Film — Added May 24, 2008
NEW Transplanted Gardener — Added May 10, 2008
NEW Someone Like Me, But Younger — Added March 25, 2008
A Julia Child Christmas — Added December 13, 2007
What the Camera Tells — Added October 1, 2007
Little Sister — Added October 1, 2007
Dost Though Know Who Loves Thee? — Added March 30, 2007
The Ones Who Weren't — Added March 30, 2007
Night in the Parking Lot — Added March 24, 2007
Your Friend, Always — Added February 6, 2007
An Innocent Man — Published December 17, 2002, in The Nation magazine.
Letting It Fly — New York Times Lives column, 1997
Perilous Journey — Hers column in the New York Times, 1983, and reprinted in the book, "Domestic Affairs"
The Burning Car — From NPR's All Things Considered, 1993
New Address Book — From NPR's All Things Considered
On the Death of Princess Diana — From NPR's All Things Considered
Packing It In — Originally published in Self Magazine, July 1996
Movin' Out West — In three parts. From the San Francisco Examiner
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