Joyce Maynard

Have You Read Her?

From time to time, I end up doing an impromptu author study, quickly plowing through a pile of books by the same writer. My studies are not anything like the podcaster Gretchen Rubin’s Summer of Proust. Mine are not premeditated, whereas Rubin’s, a Yale-trained former Sandra-Day- O’Connor-law clerk, never occur by happenstance. Although I have some things in common with Rubin, an overriding sense of deliberateness is not one of them. My unplanned author studies occur as I turn the final page of a book and think: Whoa. What else has this person written?

This year it is Joyce Maynard’s The Bird Hotel, published in 2023, that catches my attention. I had reserved The Bird Hotel at the library sometime after publication, and finally, this summer, I am first in the queue. I start reading the book at home in August, taking it on vacation with me. I can’t put it down. I snap a photo of the cover and text it to a few of my wine-making friends. Turns out it is one of them who had actually recommended the book to me in the first place.

I ask other well-read friends if they know Maynard’s work. She’s a prolific novelist and memoirist, as well as a former New York Times columnist. I ask myself the same question: Have I read any of her other work? Turns out I have read only one other Maynard title: Count the Ways, a 2021 novel that seemed like a prequel to her 2018 How the Light Gets In, which I recently devoured during a fifteen-day passage on a small sailboat bound for the Caribbean.

The day I return home, I head to the library. More Maynard waits for me. The Best of Us, her 2017 memoir recounting her second husband’s death from pancreatic cancer, is riveting. In it I see elements of her fiction, namely The Bird Hotel.

Today, December first, I read the final pages of At Home in the World, which arguably may be Maynard’s most controversial work, her 1998 account of her brief relationship with J.D. Salinger, author of The Catcher in the Rye. At Home is not always an easy book to read, particularly when eighteen-year-old Maynard drops out of Yale to go live in isolation with Salinger, then fifty-three. Yet Maynard writes with a candor that makes it palatable. In At Home in the World, Maynard details her first marriage and the birth of her three children themes she’ll pursue in her fiction, particularly Count the Ways and How the Lights Gets In.

Maynard’s work is not particularly literary, but she is a good storyteller. As in the television shows she and Jerry Salinger liked to discuss, the characters, setting, and plot stay with you.

I have not yet read Proust, although I share his famous protagonist’s love of sweets, and like the French author, I am inclined to write in bed. Maynard, like Proust, explores barely disguised autobiographical elements in her fiction. To date she has penned close to two dozen books. I don’t know if I will read all of them, but seeing the intersection of her memoirs and her fiction has satisfied a hunger I didn’t know I had.