Joyce Maynard

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Daphne Joyce Maynard (born November 5, 1953) is an American author who, in addition to her own literary career, is known for the relationship she had with author J. D. Salinger when she was 19.

Maynard grew up in Durham, New Hampshire and attended local public schools before joining the first coeducational class at Phillips Exeter Academy. As a young woman, she wrote regularly for Seventeen magazine. She entered Yale University in 1971 and sent a collection of her writings to the editors of The New York Times Magazine. They asked her to write an article for them, which was published as "An Eighteen Year Old Looks Back On Life" in the magazine's April 23, 1972 issue. The article garnered a great deal of media attention, and prompted a letter from J. D. Salinger, then 53 years old, who complimented her writing and warned her of the dangers of publicity.

They exchanged 25 letters, and Maynard dropped out of Yale the summer after her freshman year to live with Salinger in Cornish, New Hampshire.^[1] Maynard spent ten months living in Salinger's Cornish home, during which time she completed work on her first book, Looking Back, a memoir which was published in 1973. Her relationship with Salinger ended abruptly just prior to the book's publication; according to Salinger's daughter Margaret, he ended things because Maynard wanted children and he felt he was too old.^[2]

During the 1980s, Joyce Maynard lived in the town of Hillsboro, New Hampshire. She also married a fellow Yale graduate and had three children. While living in Hillsboro, she wrote a thinly veiled novel of people who lived in the town. She left afterwards.

Maynard gained widespread commercial acceptance in 1992 with the publication of her novel To Die For, which drew several elements from the Pamela Smart murder case. It was adapted into a 1995 film of the same name, starring Nicole Kidman and Matt Dillon and directed by Gus Van Sant. In the late 1990s, Maynard became one of the first authors to communicate on a daily basis with her readership by making use of the Internet and an online discussion forum, The Domestic Affairs Message Board (DAMB).

For many years, Maynard chose not to discuss her affair with Salinger in any of her writings, but she broke her silence in At Home In the World, a 1999 memoir. Among other indiscretions, the book described how Maynard's mother had consulted with her on how to appeal to the aging author, and described Maynard's relationship with Salinger at length. The same year, Maynard put up for auction the letters Salinger had written to her. In the ensuing controversy over her decision, Maynard claimed that she was forced to auction the letters for financial reasons; she would have preferred to donate them to Beinecke Library. Software developer Peter Norton bought the letters for $156,500 and announced his intention to return them to Salinger.^[3]

Maynard's young-adult novel The Usual Rules (2003) was one of the first novels to deal with the September 11, 2001 attacks. Her nonfiction book Internal Combustion (2006) deals with a similar real-life case to that of Pamela Smart's, that of Michigan resident Nancy Seaman, convicted of killing her husband in 2004.

Maynard and her sister Rona (also a writer and the retired editor of Chatelaine) collaborated in 2007 to jointly examine their sisterhood. Rona Maynard's memoir My Mother's Daughter was published in the fall of 2007.

Living in Mill Valley, CA for ten years, in 2006 Joyce Maynard accepted a job to teach at a writers' workshop run by the University of Southern Maine, one of the schools in the University of Maine system, and holds writing workshops in several locations throughout the year.

She lives and works near San Marcos La Laguna,Guatamala part-time.

Contents 1 Bibliography 1.1 Fiction 1.2 Nonfiction 2 References 3 External links

[edit] Bibliography

[edit] Fiction

• Baby Love (1981)
• To Die For (1992)
• Where Love Goes (1995)
• The Usual Rules (2003)
• The Cloud Chamber (2005)

[edit] Nonfiction

• Looking Back (1973)
• Domestic Affairs (1987)
• At Home In The World (1998)
• Internal Combustion (2006)
• Bad Girls: 26 Writers Misbehave essay, "A Good Girl Goes Bad" (2007)

[edit] References

[edit] External links

• Official website
• Joyce Maynard on the Internet Movie Database
• 1992 audio interview with Joyce Maynard by Don Swaim at Wired for Books.
• Author-itative Site by Austin Bunn - a 1998 Village Voice article about Joyce's online community (scroll to second segment of column).
• Why Does the American Press Hate Joyce Maynard? by Jules Siegel
• If You Really Want to Hear About It Review by Jules Siegel originally published in the San Francisco Chronicle.