Joyce Maynard

Maynard was born in Durham, New Hampshire, the daughter of Fredelle (née Bruser), a journalist, writer, and English teacher, and Max Maynard, a painter and professor of English at the University of New Hampshire (and brother of theologian Theodore Maynard).[1][2] Her father was born in India to English missionary parents and later moved to Canada; her mother was born in Saskatchewan to Jewish immigrants from Russia.[3][4][5] Maynard has an older sister, Rona.

Maynard attended the Oyster River school district and Phillips Exeter Academy. She won Scholastic Art and Writing Awards in 1966, 1967, 1968, 1970, and 1971. In her teens, 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 about growing up in the 1960s, which was published under the title "An 18-Year-Old Looks Back on Life"[6] in the magazine's April 23, 1972, issue. After the article was published, Maynard received a letter from fiction writer J. D. Salinger, then 53 years old, who complimented her writing and warned her of the dangers of publicity. [7]

In spring 1972, Maynard and Salinger exchanged letters during her freshman year at Yale University. By July 1972, Maynard had given up her summer job writing for The New York Times to move in with Salinger into his house in Cornish, New Hampshire.[8][2] Salinger and his wife had divorced in 1967. By September 1972, she had given up her scholarship to Yale and dropped out. While living with him for eight months, mid-1972 until March 1973, Maynard wrote her first book, a memoir titled Looking Back: A Chronicle of Growing Up Old in the Sixties, which was published in 1973 soon after Maynard and Salinger ended their relationship.

Maynard withheld information about their relationship until her 1998 memoir At Home in the World. The memoir, an account of her entire life up to that point, is best known for its in-depth retelling of her relationship with Salinger, whom she portrays as a predator. At its publication, many reviewers furiously panned the book, such as Jonathan Yardley from the Washington Post, who called it “indescribably stupid.”[9]

During the same year, she auctioned the letters that Salinger had written to her. Software developer Peter Norton bought the letters for $156,500 and returned them to Salinger.[10][2]

In 2021, Maynard would write on the relationship in Vanity Fair relating to Allen v. Farrow, stating that “I was groomed to be the sexual partner of a narcissist who nearly derailed my life,” going into detail on the other relations with teenagers Salinger had at the same time, and "[w]hen he sent me away less than a year later with words of contempt and disdain, I believed the failure was mine, and that I was no longer worthy of his love or even respect." With regards to the reception of her memoirs, she notes the negative reception, adding “I was accused of trying to sell books, to make money from my brief and inconsequential connection to a great man,” noting "[O]ne writer, Cynthia Ozick—hardly alone among celebrated authors, weighing in with her condemnation—portrayed me as a person who, in possession of no talent of my own, had attached myself to Salinger to 'suck out' his celebrity."[11]

After moving out of Salinger's house in 1973, Maynard bought a house in Hillsborough, New Hampshire.[2] From 1973 to 1975, she contributed commentaries to a series called Spectrum on CBS Radio. In 1975, she joined the staff of The New York Times as a general assignment reporter and feature writer. She left The New York Times in 1977 when she married Steve Bethel. They moved to New Hampshire and had three children, Audrey, Charlie, and Wilson.

From 1984 to 1990, Maynard wrote the weekly syndicated column “Domestic Affairs,” dealing with marriage, parenthood, and family life. She worked as book reviewer and columnist for Mademoiselle and Harrowsmith magazine. In 1989, when Maynard's marriage to Steve Bethel ended, more than half of the newspapers dropped her "Domestic Affairs" column.

In 1986 she helped lead the opposition to the construction of the nation's first high-level nuclear waste dump in her home state of New Hampshire, with ground zero located in Hillsborough, where Maynard lived with her young family. Maynard described this campaign in a New York Times cover story in May 1986. Said Maynard, "The US Department of Energy named part of New Hampshire as a candidate for the first high-level nuclear waste "repository" (i.e. DUMP) on the planet." The government was planning to use technology never before tried and totally unproven as safe, to bury decades-worth of high-level nuclear waste in New Hampshire granite, and to create an entire highway and train system into the state to bring the extraordinarily dangerous material with a half life of a million years. Maynard and others rallied at town meetings and convoyed to Concord, and later that year, a law was passed prohibiting a nuclear waste dump in New Hampshire. To date, Maynard considers the stoppage of a nuclear waste dump in New Hampshire as one of her greatest accomplishments.

Maynard published her first novel, Baby Love, in 1981. Her 1992 novel To Die For drew from the Pamela Smart murder case and was adapted into the 1995 film of the same name, directed by Gus Van Sant and starring Nicole Kidman, Matt Dillon, and Joaquin Phoenix. In the late 1990s, she wrote to her readers in an online discussion forum, The Domestic Affairs Message Board.

She published two books of young adult fiction: The Usual Rules (2003) and The Cloud Chamber (2005). Her true crime book, Internal Combustion (2006), dealt with the case of Nancy Seaman, a Michigan resident who was convicted of killing her husband in 2004. The novel Labor Day was published in 2009 and turned into a movie of the same name, written and directed by Jason Reitman and starring Kate Winslet and Josh Brolin. Her other novels include The Good Daughters (2010), After Her (2013), and Under the Influence (2016).

In 2021, Maynard published Count the Ways, a deeply compassionate novel of home, parenthood, love, and forgiveness. In autumn 2021, Maynard was awarded The Grand Prix de Littérature Américaine 2021 for “Où vivaient les gens heureux" ("Count the Ways") published in France, on August 19, 2021 by Philippe Rey in a translation by Florence Lévy-Paoloni. In the winter of 2023, Maynard completed the sequel to Count the Ways - a first for her oeuvre. The sequel, titled How The Lights Get In, is scheduled for publication in 2024 by William Morrow.

In spring of 2023, the 50th Anniversary of Looking Back: A Chronicle of Growing Up Old in the Sixties was noted, with Maynard recording the audio version of the book. Said Maynard, "On every page, I read words written by my younger self that, if I could, I would have changed. The girl I used to be back then was naive and opinionated, frequently a prim know-it all. In the pages of what purported to be the story of her life so far, she was also keeping a large secret. In the end though, as the days of recording came to an end, a rush of pure, tender protectiveness for that girl overtook me. I wished I could reach through the pages I was reading out loud and put my arms around that girl, tell her to be careful of her body, her gifts, her precious and breakable heart. As I finished reading the final paragraph into the microphone, I realized I was weeping."

Maynard's latest work of fiction, The Bird Hotel, was published on May 2, 2023 by Arcade Publishing.[12] On August 24, 2023, 'L'hôtel des Oiseaux' will be published in France by Philippe Rey in a translation by Florence Lévy-Paoloni.

She married Steve Bethel in 1977 and divorced him in 1989. They had three children together: daughter Audrey, a social worker, and sons Charlie, a DJ/music producer known as Captain Planet, and Wilson, an actor known for Hart of Dixie and All Rise. After her divorce from Bethel in 1989, Maynard and her children moved to Keene, New Hampshire.

Maynard and her sister Rona, a writer and retired editor of Chatelaine magazine, collaborated on an examination of their sisterhood. Rona Maynard's memoir My Mother's Daughter was published in the fall of 2007. On August 12, 2023, Joyce Maynard and Rona Maynard share the stage for a premiere event - The Maynard Sisters In Conversation at The Toadstool Bookshop in Keene, NH.

Joyce Maynard has written about her experience of an international adoption and disruption, and in subsequent years, has served as an advocate and supporter for adoptive families and children experiencing challenges related to international adoption.

On July 6, 2013, she married lawyer Jim Barringer.[13] Barringer died on June 16, 2016, of pancreatic cancer, 19 months after his diagnosis.[14] Their relationship and his death is the subject of her 2017 memoir The Best of Us.[15]

Maynard returned to Yale as a sophomore in 2018 to complete her undergraduate education.[16] During the pandemic, Maynard left Yale again, considering herself a "two-time dropout."

She currently resides in the San Francisco Bay Area.

• "Why Does the American Press Hate Joyce Maynard?" by Jules Siegel (Book Arts)