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About Joyce
A native of New Hampshire, Joyce Maynard began publishing her stories in magazines when she was thirteen years old. She first came to national attention with the publication of her New York Times cover story, “An Eighteen Year Old Looks Back on Life”, in 1972, when she was a freshman at Yale. Since then, she has been a reporter and columnist for The New York Times, a syndicated newspaper columnist whose “Domestic Affairs” column appeared in over fifty papers nationwide, a regular contributor to NPR and national magazines including Vogue, The New York Times Magazine, and many more. She is a longtime performer with The Moth.
50 YEARS 1973 - 2023
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLING AUTHOR
Fifty years after The New York Times Magazine feature that first made her a household name, Joyce Maynard, one of our most cherished storytellers, delivers a great American novel – a decades- spanning, page-turning family saga – fearless, heartrending, timely
Use the link below to order How the Light Gets In.
You can also order the audiobook on Audible, read by me.
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Now available in paperback — with Book Club questions.
PRAISE FOR HOW THE LIGHT GETS IN
“In turns joyful and heartbreaking, How the Light Gets In is a wise and bittersweet portrait of a complicated family. Joyce Maynard writes the kind of books that readers adore – bighearted, beautifully crafted, propulsively readable, and full of flawed and fickle characters who make difficult decisions and big mistakes, stumbling through life and love, trying to do their best. A word of advice: clear your calendar before you start reading!”
ADRIENNE BRODEUR, NATIONALLY BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF LITTLE MONSTERS AND WILD GAME
“Joyce Maynard’s How the Light Gets In grabbed ahold of me in the first chapter and didn’t let go till I’d finished the epilogue. A master storyteller at the top of her game, Maynard populates her story with characters I worried about, rooted for, and related to. I LOVED this book!”
WALLY LAMB, #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLING AUTHOR
"Joyce Maynard has stitched together a warm, rich patchwork quilt of a novel that reminds us history is made up simply of our stories; and that even in broken, imperfect things one finds beauty and strength.”
JODI PICOULT, #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLING AUTHOR
Eleanor and Cam meet at a crafts fair in Vermont in the early 1970s. She’s an artist and writer, he makes wooden bowls. Within four years they are parents to three children, two daughters and a red-headed son who fills his pockets with rocks, plays the violin and talks to God. To Eleanor, their New Hampshire farm provides everything she always wanted—summer nights watching Cam’s softball games, snow days by the fire and the annual tradition of making paper boats and cork people to launch in the brook every spring. If Eleanor and Cam don’t make love as often as they used to, they have something that matters more. Their family.
Then comes a terrible accident, caused by Cam’s negligence. Unable to forgive him, Eleanor is consumed by bitterness, losing herself in her life as a mother, while Cam finds solace with a new young partner.
Over the decades that follow, the five members of this fractured family make surprising discoveries and decisions that occasionally bring them together, and often tear them apart. Tracing the course of their lives—through the gender transition of one child and another’s choice to completely break with her mother—Joyce Maynard captures a family forced to confront essential, painful truths of its past, and find redemption in its darkest hours.
A story of holding on and learning to let go, Count the Ways is an achingly beautiful, poignant, and deeply compassionate novel of home, parenthood, love, and forgiveness.
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