At Home in the World by Joyce Maynard (Picador, 1999)
The daughter of brilliant, academic and dysfunctional parents and herself a precocious and driven achiever, Joyce Maynard was one of the first handful of girls to attend Phillips Exeter Academy and published her first book at 18. Also at 18, Maynard dropped out of Yale to move in with her 53-year-old lover, J.D. Salinger, “America’s Most Private Citizen.”
In this riveting, clearly-written and often epistolary memoir, Ms. Maynard explores her life-long battle with eating disorders, her father’s alcoholism and her desperate fixation to please her parents as well as her oddly reclusive older lover. When Salinger suddenly dumps her after a year, she is able to collect herself, gets back on her feet, gets married and has a family, using all her various life experiences as fodder for her writing. It is the process of writing this very memoir that precipitates her return to Salinger, all these years later, to ask the intriguing question: “What was my purpose in your life?” In then end, Maynard seizes upon the right to tell her own story and what a compelling story it is (9.5/10).
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