Book Notes: Joyce Maynard’s At Home in the World

Joyce Maynard’s autobiography At Home in the World is like a thriller. You hang on every word, waiting for the author to get some insight into her own life. A chance to say “and then I finally understood, learned, figured out, grew up, realized” is why the genre of autobiography exists. If you start recounting the events of your life, it must be because you found a common thread that binds them, learned a lesson, discovered something worth sharing.

Maynard discovered nothing and clearly never even suspected that anything could be discovered. Her conclusion about her life is that she has spent it among unreasonable people of whom she has been a victim. Even the laziest of readers can’t avoid noticing, for example, that Maynard is one of those women who sees men solely as a conduit to getting babies, and that men tend to react negatively to being instrumentalized in that manner. Maynard, however, heroically ignores the insight that not only stares her in the face but howls like an unfed coyote. Not for her is the task of analyzing or wondering. She seems aware that the persona of “a prim know-it-all” (as she puts it) was hers at the very beginning of her writing career. That it accompanied her well into her middle age doesn’t seem to occur to her.

The autobiography is exceptionally well-written. It’s engrossing to the point where I breezed through it in a day and a half. Maynard did not have an easy life. She was sexually molested for years by her own mother. She tells about this honestly and explicitly in the book, yet never wonders whether this experience might have had any impact on, for example, her severe sexual problems in adulthood. Or her anorexia. Or her unhealthy relationship with her own daughter.

At the age of 18, Maynard started a relationship of sorts with JD Salinger and quit college to cohabit with the writer. Their relationship was never fully sexual and quite unsatisfactory in most every way, yet Maynard was stunned when Salinger decided to end it. As a person incapable of any degree of insight, she then spent the next quarter of a century trying to figure out why the relationship had ended. There’s a scene in the book where 25 years after the breakup, Maynard barges into the house where a 78-year-old Salinger lives with his wife. She ignores the wife and starts interrogating the elderly author about their long-ago dalliance. Salinger is horrified (and who wouldn’t be if a paramour from a quarter century earlier materialized in their living room and started making a scene?), and again, Maynard doesn’t have the slightest suspicion that her own actions might be causing Salinger’s negative reaction to her appearance.

At some point, Maynard gets in trouble with the law, but once again, there’s no realization that her assumed childishness is not endearing in a middle-aged woman and that the police is absolutely right to pursue the matter.

It’s hard for me to understand how a person can be as interested as Maynard in the minutiae of her life – what she cooked for specific occasions, what she wore, who she pouted at at any given moment – but remain so stonily indifferent to her own motivations. She has the self-awareness of a house pet, and observing a human being who is completely devoid of the need to understand herself is a large part of the book’s attraction.

This is the most enjoyable autobiography I have read in years. There’s not a boring sentence in it, and I’m very grateful to the author for the entertainment this book provided.