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Letter from Joyce Archives
Look for the February 2004 release of The Usual Rules in paperback!
November 26, 2006
Dear Friends,
In the last six weeks, I’ve traveled to eighteen towns and cities around the United States, talking about my new book, Internal Combustion. Sometimes a crowd showed up. Sometimes four or five people. Once, nobody. (So I had a nice conversation with the bookseller and called it a day.) Every place I went, I made a point of tracking down old friends -- and on occasion, making new ones. Austin, Texas, for instance, was added to my tour schedule when a young couple who run a wonderful little cafe there, Progress Coffee, emailed me to suggest that I come to give a reading. So I spent a night in their guest room, read a little from the new book, and baked a pie for the audience. (And the good news was, there weren’t so many people in attendance that everyone didn’t get a piece.)
I also got to visit with a number of writer friends along the way: Elinor Lipman, Suzanne Strempek Shea and Leslea Newman in Northampton, Mass; Judy Blume in Key West Florida; Richard Bausch in Memphis, Robert Olen Butler and Elizabeth Dewberry in Miami…. I ate deep-fried pickles at Silly’s in Portland, Maine, and oysters in Seattle, fresh-caught crappie in Michigan, the best cornbread ever in Charlottesville. And I made friends with a woman who showed me her vast and wonderful collection of 1960’s Barbies in their original outfits (exactly the vintage I always loved, myself), and sat on the couch with my friend Helaine’s daughter, Jill, in Haverford, Pennsylvania, discussing her college essay, and met a man I’d gone to kindergarten with, back in New Hampshire, who recited to me, word for word, a poem I’d written for him that year, and our own webmistress, Myrna Uhlig, in Portland, Oregon, who had driven in to see me from the coast, even though it was flooding from all the rain there, and took a little cloth bag from her purse and scattered on the table a collection of beautiful glass pendants she’d been making, one of which -- patterened like a peacock feather -- is now mine.
I rode a bicycle through Philadelphia with a friend I met on my bike trip with my son Will in Italy last spring, and entered a bowling tournament with my friend Travis in Maine (my score: 60), and -- though it was October by the time I got there -- took one last swim of the season in Michigan, at the cottage of my good friends Lori and Mike, in La Peer, who threw a party there, while we watched the Detroit Tigers win the ball game that would bring them to the World Series. (Later they lost, of course. But that night, we were all pretty excited.)
At the JCC in Boca Raton, Florida, I met a woman just a few years younger than me who took from her purse a photograph given to her by her eighty five year old mother, showing two young girls in cotton dresses, in the late thirties. One of the girls was this woman’s mother, the other was mine, who died seventeen years ago. Then Deborah took from her purse the other thing her mother had given her to show me: a letter my mother had written to that same girlhood friend, fifty years later, when she was dying of cancer -- saying goodbye, and saying how much their friendship had meant to her over the years.
Five minutes after reading that letter, I had to go up on the podium to deliver my talk, and somehow, when the time came, Internal Combustion didn’t feel like the right book to talk about that day, so I talked about my mother instead, and about mothers and daughters, all the things we carry with us from our families, and the ways we struggle to free ourselves from some of those things, too.
One afternoon, in Massachusetts, I got a call from my daughter, Audrey, who runs an organic sauce company in the small town in New Hampshire where she was born, and where I made my home for all the years of my marriage. The farm where she lives is her father’s place now, and for many years, that place symbolized all the losses I’d lived through during those days and after them. I went back there only to pick up my children from visits with their father, when they were younger, but mostly, in recent years, there was no need any more to drive down that dirt road.
That day, though, Audrey was calling to say there was going to be a harvest party at our old place -- her father’s place now, with cider made from the apples in the field, the way we used to do when they were small, and music and lots of food -- pot luck -- from neighbors and old friends whose children had grown up with mine, so long ago. Both of my sons had come to visit that weekend (one from Los Angeles, one from New York). I was invited to attend.
I was supposed to give a reading in Shrewsbury, Massachusetts that afternoon, and even though I knew it was more than likely that only a handful of people would show up, I have always honored my commitments to be there. This time, though, I called the bookseller and told her I had to cancel. I said my family needed me to be somewhere and that was true. (And if any of you were among those who might have shown up that day, I apologize for not being there.).
Then I made the two hour drive north, arriving at the party on a chilly fall afternoon, just as the cider was coming out of the press.
Nothing particularly large or dramatic took place that afternoon. I visited with people I hadn’t seen in twenty years, whose children had been babies with mine. I sampled pesto salads and brownies and dipped carrot sticks into the hummus. I watched a little boy play in the field, who looked a little like my sons, when they were that age -- five. My ex-husband’s child, with his partner.
He and I didn’t talk much, and didn’t feel the need for it, I think. It was enough to know I’d been invited, and to see how happy our children were, that we were all on this piece of land together, sharing a fall afternoon and posing for a photograph in which we are all older, greyer, more lined (in the cases of the two parents pictured), but smiling. Nothing that happened over all the weeks of my traveling around the country for the book was more important than that, I think.
There is a feeling I have been seeking for years -- seeking to feel, seeking to be granted -- and it is forgiveness. It was present that day. No more was needed than that.
The journey required to arrive at that place (and I don’t mean simply, an eighteen-city book tour, or, for my destination, a farmhouse in New Hampshire) is actually the subject of an essay of mine on the stands now in the current issue (Nov/Dec) of MORE magazine. The essay will also be appearing in a new collection, called The Honeymoon’s Over, to be published early next year.
I wanted to share it with you now. And as always, when I do that, please know I love hearing from you. Myrna’s still working on locating better software that will once again allow friends to post thoughts and observations and stories of your own on a discussion forum, but meanwhile, you can always write to me at jmaynard@joycemaynard.com.
Finally, a quick reminder to any of you who may have been thinking about joining me at my memoir writing workshop on Lake Atitlan, in Guatemala, this February. The workshop is almost filled, so let me know if you’d like to be part of it. (The December workshops in Mill Valley are also filled now.) Helping other writers tell their stories is one of the joys in my life. I hope one day yours may be one of them.
With friendship,
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