Book cover of "The Best of Us" by Joyce Maynard featuring abstract circular designs and quotes about the memoir.

New York Times Bestseller

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New York Times Bestseller 〰️

THE BEST OF US

A deeply moving memoir about love found late and lost too soon. After discovering a profound partnership she never expected, Joyce Maynard is forced to confront devastating loss—and in the process, learns what it truly means to love, to grieve, and to go on with courage and grace.

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What People are Saying

  • "The Best of Us is so candid, so deeply moving, so powerful . . . a testament to human resilience. Joyce Maynard is unfathomably heroic."

    ~ Joyce Carol Oates

  • "I love this new work. I think it is the most important writing of her life--profound, heart wrenching, inspiring, full of joy and tears and life."

    ~ New York Times bestselling author Anne Lamott

  • "Filled with passion and humor and beauty and aching sadness, The Best of Us gets at the heart of what love is: a willingness to open your heart completely to another person despite the risk of heartbreak."

    ~ New York Times bestselling author Christina Baker Kline

  • "Joyce has captured her all too brief time with Jim in The Best of Us with her characteristic honesty and with so much love that my heart broke and soared on every page. Everyone needs to read this book."

    ~ Ann Hood, author of The Knitting Circle

  • "This fiercely honest book is as much about life as it is about death. We understand the magnitude of Maynard’s loss because she has shown us the magnitude of her gain: the transformative joy of finding love in her late fifties. I could not stop turning the pages."

    ~ Pulitzer Prize winning author, Anne Fadiman

  • "Joyce Maynard's memoir of life, death, and love is written with honesty, intimacy and a generosity of spirit that left me weeping, and in awe. I loved it."

    ~ New York Times bestselling author Abigail Thomas

  • "The Best of Us is shattering in the best possible sense. With exquisite honesty, bravery, and large-heartedness, Joyce Maynard gives us a love story that we read breathlessly, even though we know how it will end. This is a beautiful story about the complexity of ever daring to adore another human being. I was moved and transfixed."

    ~ New York Times bestselling author Dani Shapiro

  • "Oh! This book! Tender, insightful, ruminative, soaring. To find such love and then to lose it, and to capture so much of its beauty on the meager page--Joyce Maynard alchemizes life-numbing pain into dazzling prose."

    ~ Hope Edelman, author of Motherless Daughters

Listen

Listen to an excerpt from The Best of Us Narrated by the author, Joyce Maynard.

Our Story

This book is the story of how I came to learn, late in the game, what it is to be married, and to love a person in a way that has nothing to do with what he has to give you. It’s not about grand passion or extraordinary sex or the exciting, wonderful future you’ll create with your amazing, handsome, dashing partner.  With my husband Jim, I found my amazing, handsome, dashing partner, but when illness stripped all of that away I learned what it meant to love without asking anything back, because the act of loving was, itself, the gift.