Rating: 
Summary: A Pity Party by the Blame Game Champion!
Review: This is a Pity Party by the Queen of Victimization! She plays the Blame game to the HILT! She never takes any responsibility for any of the events in her life. She blames it all on JD Salinger, her parents, her husband. Save yourself some grief. Don't waste your time. This woman needs some Psychiatric help!
Rating: 
Summary: One woman's reflections
Review: First of all, I was captivated by the storytelling. It's a great story, superbly told. It's about her parents, herself, her lovers, her marriage and children. This is a story of growing up -- as a child as much as an adult. I was deeply touched. This is about a woman trying to understand her life. She tells her story with honesty, humor and emotional grit. This story is not about blame or voyeurism. It's about one person's search for truth and freedom. The cast is first class! And so is the depth and wisdom of the writer. Every word rang true.
Rating: 
Summary: Multifaceted Look at One's Life
Review: I enjoyed this book on many levels. One, the acknowledgment of "family secrets" re: Ms. Maynard's alcoholic father and "incestous" mother. Also, Joyce's look into relationships - mainly the one with J.D. Salinger. Perhaps the public is at first interested in her memoir because she tells all re: her affair with the writer. But ultimately, he could have been any person in a position of power for us to witness the abuse of power in relationships. Maynard's book also shows her perseverence in the face of adversity. Her success, both in her career and according the the story her children's success (they seemed unscathed, though we would need to hear from them to know their reality) is a good example of how even with the darkness of life bearing forth, one can still prevail. I do believe her life is worth reading about. She may not be a major hero, but does it matter. She's a woman with her own story. And that's enough.
Rating: 
Summary: Oh My
Review: Ever notice how reviewers at Amazon dot Com give books one or five stars? This book was neither great nor awful. If you enjoy Oprah-like confessionals where an author stares into her navel you might appreciate it more than I did. If you require authors to have led interesting lives before writing memoirs you might find it a crushing bore. Who cares about the salacious details about Salinger? Anyone who doesn't know that great artists can be horrible, boring, neurotic, overbearing, etc., should get over his or her hero worship. Putting such figures on a pedestal is inane but singling them out for special contempt is insipid. She was over 18, hence responsible for her share of what happened. If the author had kept his name anonymous I suspect she could have portrayed the relationship with greater authenticity. But that book, I suspect, wouldn't get much attention.
Rating:
Summary: An excellent read by a great author
Review: This book was very intriguing. Learning about Joyce's life growing up was interesting enough. But to be drawn into her strange relationship with the famous J. D. Salinger was extremely captivating. Their quirky life over the course of a year or so was detailed beautifully by Miss Maynard. The book is witty at times, sad at others and overall triumphant. This would be a good read for women of all ages. I imagine many men enjoy her writing style as well. A "must read" for anyone that enjoys autobiographies or any of Joyce's other titles.
Rating: 
Summary: What's all the fuss about?
Review: This book is THE WORST, end of debate. No matter who used who, whose privacy may or may not have been invaded, who was naughty or who was nice -- this book stinks. It could have been written by any mildly precocious high school student, and actually sounds as it it were, now that I think of it. If you buy this book, the joke is on you.
Rating:
Summary: An excellent, sometimes profound memoir. . .
Review: Though not someone who has followed all of Joyce Maynard's career, I still found myself immersed almost from her opening paragraphs. There is a lot here, some disturbing, some thought-provoking, and always fascinating. I was surprised, as I was one who, almost on principle, felt J. D. Salinger's privacy, if it's so important to him, should above all not be violated. However, I realized as I went along, that this is really missing the point and is also implicitly saying that Salinger, as Great Writer, is more important than others in his life. But this IS Joyce Maynard's life, not J. D. Salinger's, though he does figure in her life for 10 months and she learned a great deal about herself from analyzing that relationship's hold upon her.I do not see that she has exploited her relationship with him; I don't even see that she has particularly said horribly negative things about him, for that matter. I also feel that all the focus on this book as being about Maynard's sense of "victimization" by a "dysfunctional family" and an older man, J. D. Salinger, are simply way off the mark and totally missing the main points of her story. She does not portray herself as a victim and her self-analyses and self-criticism ring true as evidence of her having made some hardwon peace with her past and having reached a maturity that has often not seemed characteristic of her work in the past. I also think there is a great deal more humor and a great deal more irony than people have generally been writing about in reviewing this book. The theme of authenticity vs. inauthenticity, for example, is an important one, whether one is critical of Maynard's narcissism or not. J. D. Salinger's own naricissism is fairly transparent in her story & obviously one of the reasons, coming from the family that she did, that he had such a hold over her. Ultimately, of course, his concern with authenticity and genuineness and purity are indeed compromised by the many things within himself that he doesn't wish to look at. Actually, I thought she was quite kind about the relationship, as if she had taken responsibility for the part she played in getting involved with him in the first place. A couple of interesting lines that keep coming back to me are "What purpose did I serve in your life" and her observation that she was . . . "one who had made the mistake of trying to live out fictions best left on the page," a common mistake of imaginative young people & we'd all be doing well to have accepted our past with the grace and wisdom she seems to have arrived at.
Rating:
Summary: Who decides to publish stuff like this?
Review: Whoa. This was bad. Phony and pathetic and aimed at the wallets of women who are sad and lonely and phony and pathetic, too. I couldn't read the whole thing. After a couple of boring chapters I read here and there and when I got to the staged ending I went back to see what took our heroine there. I figured I wouldn't find that information in the book though. She made that trip to Salinger's not for her own sense of peace, but to have something to SELL in the book. Transparent. But that's Joyce Maynard. I did not like this book. Not worth the money, certainly not worth the time.
Rating:
Summary: This book is about MUCH more than J.D. Salinger!
Review: This is hardly the kiss-and-tell fluff that the hotshot reviewers dismiss it as being... it's a first-rate, beautifully written and intimate look into author Joyce Maynard's life. Rich in detail and yet sparingly and honestly written, her description of the year she spent with Salinger is a small but critical piece of the puzzle of her life which she was reluctant to explore until a few years ago. I've read the many negative reviews that resulted from the book's publication, and let me say that most of them are dead wrong! The media's obsession with keeping Salinger's image untarnished has so little to do with what the author seemed to be attempting in this moving memoir.Joyce Maynard's inner turmoil, her growth process, her joys and sorrows were certainly affected by the traumatic end of her relationship with "Jerry", but give her a break...Maynard's life went on...with love and marriage and three kids in the baby carriage... and I consider her a valiant survivor.Don't we all know that issues in our lives, particularly painful or unresolved ones, never let go of us until we face them? The story of Joyce Maynard's life is crystal clear in it's honest voice, and deeply touching. She is a powerful, talented writer, and I am holding my breath for her next project. Shame on you, you confused and rude reviewers! This book is a TREASURE.
Rating:
Summary: How sad this endless charade and spectacle . . . .
Review: The self-cultivated persona that passed (for some, including, once, me) as charismatic, has carried Joyce Maynard a long way, or at least a long time. In defending herself against one among the many who called this latest book shameless, a new low even for her, she reportedly said: "I wonder why you are so quick to see exploitation in the actions of a woman--sought out at 18 by a man 35 years her senior who promised to love her forever and asked her to forswear all else to come and live with him, who waited 25 years to write her story (her story, I repeat, not his). And yet you cannot see exploitation in the man who did this. I wonder what you would think of the story if it were your daughters. Would you still have her keep her mouth shut, out of respect for this man's privacy?" Let me see if I have this straight. Here is a woman who wore her association with J. D. Salinger like a badge of honor for 25 years. The same woman who flattered herself again by insisting, invariably, emphatically, and in public, that she would never breach his privacy by writing about him. This is the same woman who now, in transparent pursuit of her peculiar fame and fortune, cloaks herself in victim-hood and then adds insult to injury by calling this her story, not his, a cautionary tale for mothers everywhere. Please. With all the practice that Joyce Maynard has had in rationalizing away her public actions, I would think that by now she would at least have gotten better at it.
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