Rating: 
Summary: Not bad, considering...
Review: I heard about this book several years ago, and
did not expect to find myself reading it. I knew
of Joyce Maynard from her columns in "Parents",
which I found uninspiring and often gratuitously
patronizing. Eventually I took this book out from
the public library when I was in the mood for some
light reading, and was pleasantly suprised. The main
strenght of the book IMO is it's lyrical narrative.
The quality of the writing for the most transcends
what I consider to be Joyce's uninspiring
life story, and that includes the Big Love Affair With
Salinger. For someone as intelligent and capable as she
clearly was, Joyce's adult life reads like alot of
poorly-thought-out decisions and missed opportunities,
which she makes the best of. But for his fame and
idiosyncratic ways, the affair with Salinger does
not by my lights make Joyce unique among any other
young women of her generation that had father fixations.
The real heroine of the
story IMO is her mother, who taught Joyce discipline
and the art of writing, while reclaiming her own life.
Rating: 
Summary: Why not tell?
Review: Does a person have a right to her own life story? Guess not. Strange as it must have seemed to the apparently unquenchable ego of the unsavory hermit who preyed on Joyce Maynard, he wasn't the only person in the story. It happened to her, too, and it's her story as much as his. Maybe more so, because it only happened to her the one time, whereas he apparently repeated the May/December affair ad nauseum. Just because he wrote well and crafted a bizarre mystique of impenetrable solitude about himself doesn't mean it needs to be honored at all costs. I enjoyed this book, as Ms. Maynard's prose rings true throughout, especially whe she writes about her relationships with her parents. You go, girl! Keep writing the truth, even though it be about false or fallen idols.
Rating: 
Summary: Don't tell anybody the secrets
Review: As a fellow boomer, I enjoyed and related to Ms Maynard's early 70s memoir, "Looking Back." We now learn that what she wrote on those pages was, while perhaps accurate, not exactly truthful. In "At Home in the World" she seemed determined to tell the truth. The lesson we learn is that truth has a steep price. It is particularly expensive for Mr. Salinger, who appears to have had the misfortune to have been, although seriously eccentric, mostly human. His biggest mistake was that of bad judgment. He trusted Ms Maynard. This is not to say that Ms Maynard's decision to write about her relationship with him, and the resulting consequences, was wrong. At the time of their relationship she was a journalist of sorts, so Mr. Salinger's decision to place trust in an eighteen-year-old budding writer/journalist, seems today to be foolish. Reading "At Home in the World" is a lot like passing a horrible traffic accident on the road. You know you shouldn't look, but you do. You know it's a huge invasion of the victims' privacy, but you do it anyway. This book is a story of coming to terms with our middle age lives. It is a book about what made us what we are . It is a book about choices, good and bad. Where we were once filled with promise, we now must come to terms with the lives we have led. Ms Maynard does this beautifully. Her book makes you think, makes you reflect. Often it is disturbing. It is a compelling story of her search to make sense out of the complicated and twisted road we call life. I am sure that Ms Maynard's intention in disclosing extremely intimate details of her relationship with her former lover was honest. I am sure it was therapeutic for Ms Maynard to write this updated memoir. I am equally sure it will help a lot of people. She is a wonderful writer. I am sure the result will be beneficial to many struggling to make sense out of their lives. The truth is, and this is what makes life difficult and complicated, that all these good intentions do not make what she did right. The problem is that in the process of purging her own demons, she felt it necessary to violate the sanctity of her former lover's most sacred right, the right to be secure in the secrets he unveiled to her. In "Metal Firecracker", Lucinda Williams, in a song about a broken intimate relationship, pleads: "All I ask, don't tell anybody the secrets, don't tell anybody the secrets, I told you." Anyone who reads "At Home in the World" will know that it is not a book about Jerry Salinger. It is not, in a strict sense, a kiss and tell book. It is however-- a shame. A shame on Ms Maynard for telling his secrets. And shame on us for wanting to know.
Rating:
Summary: A book that deserves respect--as does its author
Review: I first read this book several months ago, but feel compelled to comment now because so many members of the press have treated Joyce Maynard as though she had peed on the American flag. What she has done is to write a painfully honest story of a family journey that includes one major, attention-getting stop: her sad, brief, and ultimately devastating relationship with an American icon. When J.D. Salinger realized that the painfully young, painfully thin, unworldly girl he had invited into his New Hampshire aerie was only human, and not able to follow his abstemious, judgmental way of life no matter how hard she tried, he kicked her out. Joyce Maynard, who'd given up a scholarship to Yale at Salinger's bidding, initially may have reminded him of the perfect, pure little-girl characters he created, and that so many American readers love (such as Phoebe from "Catcher in the Rye," or Esme from "For Esme--With Love and Squalor"). But this powerful, famous man became, as Joyce Maynard writes, "the closest thing I ever had to a religion." Once this "religion" was snatched away from her, she labored to put together a life for herself. How Joyce stumbled and fell, how she picked herself up, makes fascinating reading. "At Home in the World" also speaks volumes about what is expected from women (and what women expect from themselves) as lovers, wives, mothers, and wage-earners. Perhaps Joyce Maynard's detractors see her work as a mirror that reminds them, all too uncomfortably, of themselves. Give this book a chance.
Rating:
Summary: Not bad, considering...
Review: I heard about this book several years ago, and
did not expect to find myself reading it. I knew
of Joyce Maynard from her columns in "Parents",
which I found uninspiring and often gratuitously
patronizing. Eventually I took this book out from
the public library when I was in the mood for some
light reading, and was pleasantly suprised. The main
strenght of the book IMO is it's lyrical narrative.
The quality of the writing for the most transcends
what I consider to be Joyce's uninspiring
life story, and that includes the Big Love Affair With
Salinger. For someone as intelligent and capable as she
clearly was, Joyce's adult life reads like alot of
poorly-thought-out decisions and missed opportunities,
which she makes the best of. But for his fame and
idiosyncratic ways, the affair with Salinger does
not by my lights make Joyce unique among any other
young women of her generation that had father fixations.
The real heroine of the
story IMO is her mother, who taught Joyce discipline
and the art of writing, while reclaiming her own life.
Rating:
Summary: Honest, but Ultimately Sad
Review: During her freshman year at Yale in 1972, Joyce Maynard published a story in the Sunday New York Times Magazine called ``An Eighteen-Year-Old Looks Back on Life''. Her picture appeared on the magazine's cover. Among the hundreds of responses she received to that story was a letter that changed her life. It was from the well-known author and recluse J. D. Salinger, a man thirty-five years her senior. Maynard and Salinger soon began a daily correspondence that consumed them both. Eventually, Maynard drove to Salinger's home in New Hampshire to meet him. At the start of her sophomore year, she dropped out of college to move in with him. The book covers much more than the relationship with Salinger, although it is centered around her time with him. Even allowing for the fact that we hear only one side of that story, the portrait of Salinger that emerges is one of a manipulative and bitter man. It might be said that Maynard, in the writing of this book, has exploited her relationship with Salinger and betrayed his intense desire for privacy. In anticipation of those criticisms, she writes in her preface, ``While I have no doubt that some will view my choice to tell this story honestly as an invasion of others' privacy, I have tried hard to describe only those events and experiences that had a direct effect on the one story I believe I have a right to tell completely: my own.'' She goes on to recount her life and to describe the people in it with startling honesty, including none-too-flattering portraits of herself and her family. Her forthrightness builds trust, and ultimately, makes us care about Joyce and her story. Still, despite the panoply of friends she trots out at the end of the book, I couldn't help but wonder about the title Maynard chose for her memoir --- she still strikes me as being rather uncomfortable in this world, and haunted by her past. Mostly, this book made me sad --- sad that so many people with so much intellect and talent could act so foolishly for so long. It's not a pretty picture of the human condition!
Rating: 
Summary: Very disappointing
Review: Perhaps my expectations of this book were too high, but with all the experiences in her life that she had to portray, Joyce Maynard comes up woefully short in holding the reader's interest. Her early passion for J.D. Salinger becomes a seething hatred, with the acclaimed author seeming no more than a curmudgeonly near-pedophile. And, for all the exorcising of her demons and the details of her private life she attempts to share in this book, she is surprisingly light on revelations. I wanted so much more, but found that she used pages to go out of her way not to tell more. It's frustrating, and an ultimately boring read. I was very disappointed.
Rating: 
Summary: Maturity and its Enlightenment
Review: Perhaps if you will take a hint of honesty about a man that has been practically idolized by people all over, from a seventh grade english student reading her father's boyhood copy of a catcher in the rye for the first time to professors of literature, as a personal offense at your own manhood, then you should not read this book. (in the very least if you are that personally bothered by it you shouldn't instruct the author to "grow up")
I too will share a bit about myself. j.d. salinger is my favorite author. and just to be clear, he is my favorite author, not person. i read his books for pleasure and to make me think, i do not read his books in order to fill a void i feel in my own life. Reading this book did not make me dislike the man, i have never met him, nor am i likely to, so frankly i don't think it matters(to him or me). nor did this book cause me to like or dislike ms. maynard, that was not ther reason i purchased it. what reading this book did provide was insight on the life and reasoning of the author to whom i had been peculiarly, and thusfar unexplicably, drawn to for a long time.
as evidenced by other reviews of this book, many people (not surprisingly, mostly men) appeared to have read this book because they felt deprived, almost cheated, by the effect of salinger's reclusiveness on their own lives. they thought this book was going to help them know a man whom they have so desparately wanted to meet, but who clearly has no desire to share anything with them. unfortunately because these people read this book with a personal mission, they had a personal reaction which has caused them to try and convince others to not read this book. they have had their perfect image shattered, and are trying to do some damage control. for these people i have one question. if salinger doesn't care why do you? it does not affect his work, it does not take away the feelings you had when you read each of his stories for the first time, and it does not fit nicely as a substitute for the long awaited for next work by salinger himself. what it may do is make you realize that if your teenage daughter declares she will be living with him in seclusion, that you should strongly advise against it. however, (thankfully) none of us are in any danger of being stuck in that predicament. therefore, one should only read this book if they can approach it as Ms. Maynard's very personal and unique story. One should not expect a biography of salinger or the long awaited for explanation for his seclusion (or if it does serve the latter purpose, one should be prepared that the answer allows us to be thankful that we are not mr. salinger's lover or child, but his only readers)
one cannot put themselves in the position of ms. maynard, or in fact of mr. salinger; they have both experienced things that we can only read about. that is why we read books, to experience things we would not otherwise be able to. and we can all admit that ms. maynard's life involves numerous experiences that we will never have. just because someone's actual life is not what we would have fantasized for ourselves, is not a reason to not be informed by it. i have often wondered how salinger could write the way he did (does?), and also why i can not. i now know that perhaps the reasoning and source for his art is not something that i should be striving towards. it is better to live in his world only in his words, not in his lifestyle.
it's true that i would not likely have read this book but for my interest in salinger, but that does not detract from its independent value. there were parts of maynard's life that reflected upon my own but that had nothing to do with the salinger involvement in her's. i found her insight and descriptions intriguing, something i may not have been able to experience but for salinger's recognition of the same thing in her. i am still going to periodically re-read salinger material, i am still going to want to know more about him, i am still going to anxiously await any words he might choose to share with us, but i am also now going to wait to see if Maynard has anything else to share, no matter what the topic.
Rating:
Summary: Spot the Phony
Review: This is a don't miss, one of the best autobiographies of the last decade. Joyce Maynard's subject, here and elsewhere, is Joyce Maynard. It is a subject she knows better than any other and, like the high Romantics, her study of the self (at its best) ripples out to encompass and illuminate a larger world. Here she is definitely at her best. The experiences with Salinger add subsidiary interest and a touch of scandal, though her experiences within her family are also instructive. The hissy fits thrown by some reviewers demonstrate their preference for ignorance and secretiveness when one of their icons is in the dock. In an age of unending self-indulgence and self-reflection, not to mention the near total politicization of letters, one can hardly exaggerate the degree of hollowness in the claims that one should consider the art alone and leave the private activities of the artist behind closed doors. As one of Amazon's astute reviewers noted, if you don't want your activities to end up in print, don't be so foolish as to seduce and abandon a journalist. The most delicious dimension of the book is its subtext. What Joyce Maynard is, of course, doing, is rewriting CATCHER and recording the details of the discovery of the biggest phony of them all, the landsman as virtual child molester. The blame-the-female-victim response of reviewers one might expect more from serves as a kind of coda, one that Joyce Maynard was surely shrewd enough to anticipate. They went for the bait like hungry trout, demonstrating their own phoniness and complicity in a literary culture obsessed with victimology but unable to stomach its realities when it hits just a little too close to home. Joyce didn't even have to turn on the lights which revealed their convenient forgetting of their own ideologies; they grabbed at the switch all by themselves. One doesn't often see the joining of high Romantic practice with the techniques of the modern journalist. Here one sees them in ways so expert and so exquisite that all one can do is urge others to share the view. Get out your lamb patties and your homeopathic nostrums and watch one very cool customer play Spot the Phony.
Rating:
Summary: Hell hath no fury...
Review: In the style of Ms. Maynard, I will begin by writing lots of things about myself that can hardly be of interest to you. (If you'd rather know something about the book under discussion, skip to the next paragraph.) I have never read "Catcher in the Rye", not having taken an English class that obliged me to do so. As an adult, I read "Franny" to see what all the fuss was about. I still didn't see it. I'm as curious about authors who shun publicity as the next person, probably even more so. I respect Salinger for the diligence and success against fierce opposition with which he has guarded his privacy, even as I compromise his efforts by reading this book which, its many pious contentions to the contrary notwithstanding, is obviously a vendetta, and a lucrative one at that - the most fanatically single-minded memoiristic act of payback since Mia Farrow's "What Falls Away". In one key respect, Ms. Maynard's production cannot be faulted. Her publishers ponied up the dough in exchange for all the dirt on Salinger and the author delivered in full. Thanks to her tireless exertions, those interested may lurk unnoticed in the author's bedroom, observe him as he undresses for lovemaking, and sympathize (or cackle, depending on your feminist sympathies) as he repeatedly fails to "her chaste treasure open", as Laertes put it. I am in no position to condemn Maynard for this retroactive violation of intimacy; I am, after all, participating in her shabby act by reading the book. But I can take her to task for her stupefyingly artless prose, which follows the famous route to boredom by telling everything. (And I do mean everything. If, unlike me, you opened this book so you could find out which foods her father liked to eat for breakfast, or obtain a list of her favorite childhood TV shows, you won't be disappointed.) So what do we learn of Mr. Salinger? He is a new-age sort of kook, subscribing to quaint Eastern theories of diet and medicine that, while unappetizing and somewhat ridiculous, harm no one but beef industry lobbyists. As a single father in a small New England town, he apparently shops for girlfriends by mail order. This is admittedly unorthodox but perhaps necessary, given his isolation, and strikes me as less than sinister. He seems to like his women young and worshipful, suggesting that he harbors personal insecurities, but in this he seems nothing more peculiar than a member of the human race. The story, in a nutshell, is that the emotionally under-developed (but already career-savvy and ambitious) Maynard is charmed by the flattering attentions of a famous, though creepily older, writer and drops out of Yale to live with him. Their domesticity, like anyone else's, endures its daily irritations. She's a slob, for one thing, leaving banana peels all over the kitchen after she bakes bread. She's also physically frigid, a condition that Salinger treats with notable patience and sensitivity. Her values are diametrically opposed to his. (See "career-savvy" above.) And, I almost forgot, her carelessness allows Time magazine, which had already raked Salinger over the coals in a malicious profile, to get his home phone number... Well, Jerry decides that enough is enough and he sends her packing. His manner is curt (one-sided breakups are usually grim affairs) but he engages in nothing that would strike an objective observer as needlessly cruel. Young Maynard takes it as badly as you would expect a worshipful teenager to take it, but endeavors to cauterize the pain by pursuing her writing career, buying a house (lots of us bought houses at that age, right?), and so on. Actually, this is a pretty dull story so far. The fascinating part comes later when the now-adult Maynard, whose own marriage has failed (gee, I wonder why), who has grown into the kind of person who doesn't go to her mother's funeral because she's sulking over a fight with her sister, with an 18 year old daughter of her own, suddenly decides that she needs closure, or that the young women of the world need to be protected, or that she needs a big payday to cover the balloon payment on her mortgage, or something. She drives to Salinger's house (uninvited, needless to say), walks right up to the back door, and demands the now septuagenarian idol to account for his actions those many, many years ago. (To which another old man might reply, "Eh? What was that, girlie? I don't hear so good anymore.") Salinger, who, in his cranky way, has always shown himself to be an uncannily apt judge of people's self-serving behavior, immediately recognizes that she's planning to revenge her youthful disappointment with a tell-all. Attacked in his own home, he tells her some unpleasant truths: that she's a hack, for one thing (we, the readers, have long since figured this out for ourselves), and that the only way she can get more of the cheap attention she's always craved is to exploit her connection with him. Seemingly doomed to never get the point, she draws upon her apparently infinite resources of self-pity and says something like "Who exploited who?" and finally goes away, having manufactured the Big Finish that her slapdash book required. I've gone on at length here but this pathetic document could be reviewed in just three words: Oh, grow up.
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