At Home in the World - by Joyce Maynard (Paperback)

About the Book

This coming-of-age memoir, which outraged some and inspired others when first released in 1998, goes beyond Maynard's writing life to explore the heartbreaks and triumphs of her life growing up with brilliant parents, who also had faults, as well as her short romance at age 18 with J.D. Salinger, a subsequent failed marriage, and her struggle to rebuild at mid-life.

Book Synopsis

From the New York Times bestselling author of Labor Day comes At Home in the World, an honest and shocking memoir of falling in love--at age 18--with one of America's most reclusive literary figures, J. D. Salinger.

When it was first published in 1998, At Home in the World set off a furor in the literary world and beyond. Joyce Maynard's memoir broke a silence concerning her relationship--at age eighteen--with J.D. Salinger, the famously reclusive author of The Catcher in the Rye, then age fifty-three, who had read a story she wrote for The New York Times in her freshman year of college and sent her a letter that changed her life. Reviewers called her book "shameless" and "powerful" and its author was simultaneously reviled and cheered.

With what some have viewed as shocking honesty, Maynard explores her coming of age in an alcoholic family, her mother's dream to mold her into a writer, her self-imposed exile from the world of her peers when she left Yale to live with Salinger, and her struggle to reclaim her sense of self in the crushing aftermath of his dismissal of her not long after her nineteenth birthday. A quarter of a century later--having become a writer, survived the end of her marriage and the deaths of her parents, and with an eighteen-year-old daughter of her own--Maynard pays a visit to the man who broke her heart. The story she tells--of the girl she was and the woman she became--is at once devastating, inspiring, and triumphant.

Review Quotes

"Unsparing self-scrutiny...maturity and emotional candor." --Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

"Absorbing, funny, and emotionally blistering." --Jules Siegel, San Francisco Chronicle

"A wry, painful, engaging book." --Frank McCourt, author of Angela's Ashes

"Maynard's testimony is priceless." --Mary Cantwell, Vogue

"Riveting and disturbing." --The New York Times Book Review

"Even Salinger loyalists may feel compelled to reexamine their idol." --Glamour

"Dazzling." --San Francisco Chronicle

About the Author

Joyce Maynard's essays have appeared in magazines and newspapers for five decades. She is the author of four works of nonfiction and nine novels, including After Her, To Die For, and Labor Day, which was the basis of the 2013 major motion picture of the same name