More Maynard Stories

Here’s an example of why I keep saying that Joyce Maynard is incapable of any degree of self-awareness.

After rehoming the two girls she carelessly adopted from Africa, Maynard felt guilty. She’d have to be a psychopath not to. A few months after getting rid of the girls, she badgered her boyfriend, a lawyer, into helping a man who had failed medical school to force the medical board to let him practice medicine. The failed wannabe doctor was from… Africa.

Maynard was so dedicated into inflicting this unqualified man on American patients that she became a sort of a legal secretary, helping her boyfriend build an Affirmative Action case to get the African an undeserved MD diploma. This took place in California, and you can imagine the depths of the man’s incompetence if even there the medical board refused to give in to the badgering or even spend much time hearing the case.

One doesn’t need to be Sigmund Freud to realize that Maynard’s extensive efforts to turn a woefully incompetent man from rural Nigeria into an American doctor constituted an attempt to make up for the damage she’d done to two African girls.

Maynard, of course, is stoically deaf to the knocks of an insight that is languishing of neglect at her doorstep. Not for her is the task of wondering, “why do I do these things? Why do I feel this?” The spectacle of a mind so unclouded by the realization that there might be a why is an awe-inspiring sight. I’m addicted to Maynard’s memoirs because it’s hard to believe she is for real.

She’s now 71, and I really hope she writes one more memoir. Her political beliefs would make a great topic. People like these saddle us with incompetent firefighters and unqualified doctors and yell at us to shut up when we protest. It’s highly instructive to observe how their brains work.