I’m Still Here

A life told in NYT bylines

If you only know one thing about me, it’s probably this: When I was 18 years old, an essay I wrote was published in the New York Times magazine, with a picture of me in my blue jeans on the cover and a title splashed across the top—one whose irony escaped me at the time—“An Eighteen-Year-Old Looks Back on Life”.

I’ve published twenty books since then and (just a guess) a few thousand other essays and articles. I’ve done a lot of other things besides. But 53 years later, that story still defines me for a lot of people. When I die, if my obituary makes it into the New York Times, that fact about me is likely to feature in the first paragraph.

So will the name of the celebrated writer who, having seen my photograph on that magazine cover, wrote me a letter—then many more—and invited me to pay him a visit, which led to my decision to give up my full scholarship at Yale and move in with him, believing we’d be together always.

That one’s a story for another day. For now I’ll just say that as much as times have changed for women since 1972 (for the good, though now in grave jeopardy of going backwards) my own life path has taught me how much a woman’s identity may still be defined, in the eyes of some, based on her association with some far more important man.

But my story didn’t end when J.D. Salinger put a couple of $50 bills in my hand and told me to get out of his life. That happened 52 years ago, just before the publication of my first book. I’ve been writing ever since.

Mostly what I write these days are books—particularly now that magazines, where I got my start as a writer (first with publishing stories in Seventeen), barely exist anymore. But it struck me the other day—with a piece of mine appearing in the New York Times once again this Sunday—that one way I can mark time and recognize its passage—one way I can look at the story of my life and the way it has evolved over the years—lies in the stories I’ve published in the Times over the years. I haven’t counted, but the number must be in the hundreds. I could say that one way of looking at the story of my life, and the way it has evolved over the years, could be measured by what I’ve published there.

After that first essay launched my career, with offers coming at me from all directions (book editors, TV producers, movie directors, magazines) I was given a huge private office on the tenth floor of the Times building and assigned the unlikely job of writing editorials from the perspective of Voice of American Youth. I quit partway through the summer, fleeing New York to head north, to live with Salinger.

I didn’t write for the Times again until long after, when I got a job as a reporter on the Metro desk: twenty-one years old, a small-town girl from New Hampshire. I covered a garbage strike and the death of Freddy Prinze, and how to have a date in Manhattan on a $5 budget. (You ordered one oyster at The Oyster Bar in Grand Central Station and took the aerial tram to Roosevelt Island.)

One time, early on in my (brief) career as a reporter—in a story about the growing popularity of disco bars in the city — I quoted a man I interviewed who told me his name was Dick Hertz. I noticed nothing odd about this, but that information was deleted from later editions of the paper. And if you don’t get why, say the name out loud.

My star rose rapidly at the paper back then. Before long I was getting assigned to bigger stories and celebrity profiles—my favorite, hands down, being the time I got to fly to Benton Harbor, Michigan to interview Muhammad Ali at his training camp as he was preparing for a fight. Though his views on women were pretty old-fashioned, I may never have met a more intelligent, thoughtful or courageous man.

Though I’d been told I would have just half an hour with Ali, he suggested I stay on a few days at his camp. But I had recently met the man I would later marry, and—young as I was, 23—I believed it was important to rush home that night to be with him. When I explained this to Ali, he gave me a belt buckle with his image to give to my boyfriend and wished me luck.

If passing up an invitation to spend more time with Muhammad Ali wasn’t bad enough, the following week I turned down the assignment offered to me to interview John Travolta, who had just set movie screens on fire in Saturday Night Fever. Never mind the career opportunities that beckoned to me. For the girl I was in 1977, the central goal and my most burning ambition (the women’s liberation movement notwithstanding) was to be part of a happy family, an experience I’d never known.

Just eighteen months after I’d been hired at the New York Times, I quit my job there—to the astonishment of every other ambitious young reporter at the paper along with the managing editor of the paper, who reminded me of all the great opportunities that lay ahead for me, if I stayed on—the kinds of opportunities my mother and most women of her generation seldom if ever got to have.

Not my proudest hour. These were the early days of second-wave feminism. But when Abe Rosenthal asked me why I was leaving, I told him I wanted to move to New Hampshire and have babies. I might as well have said I wanted to crawl into a hole and die.

My artist husband and I were married in a field of daisies in New Hampshire that summer. I gave birth to our daughter the following year. The next time my byline appeared in the Times—for some very short piece a year or two later—I used my married name.

I wrote one novel. Baby Love. Then no more. Over the years that followed, there were two more babies and fewer stories. Mostly to get free tickets for my family, I wrote, in 1984, about taking my two-year-old son—obsessed with the Thriller video on MTV—to a Michael Jackson concert. In 1986, I wrote about how the U.S. Department of Energy had designated our part of New Hampshire as a potential site for the first high level nuclear waste dump on the planet. But other than that, I was no longer viewed as a writer whom editors sought out for important stories. New York City editors had little interest in what a mother raising children on a farm in New Hampshire had to say.

By the mid-eighties, as the signs of trouble in my marriage became more apparent, I served as a guest writer for a series of Hers columns in the Times—here’s one—about motherhood and family life in which I presented a grittier picture than the kind women typically offered up in those days. Those columns led to a ten-year stint writing a weekly column called Domestic Affairs that ran in newspapers across the country.

Then came my divorce. More than half of the newspaper editors who’d been running Domestic Affairs dropped my column then, explaining (in the words of an editor in Chicago) that “as a divorced woman, Joyce Maynard is no longer qualified to write about family.”

For a lot of years after that the primary focus of my writing life lay in supporting my family. I did that by writing for women’s magazines, mostly. To some, back then, writing for those meant you weren’t a real, serious writer. But you could pay the bills.

In all those years, I never spoke about my time with Salinger. But when my daughter turned 18—the year I appeared on the cover of the Times and a powerful and revered 53-year-old man began sending me letters—I took those letters out again and reread them with the eyes of a 44-year-old woman. That’s when I finally told the story of what happened to me when I was 18.

The memoir I published then was called At Home in the World. When it came out, in 1998, critics and a majority of the most respected literary figures of the time condemned me for what they called my betrayal and exploitation of a great man. In the pages of the New York Times—the paper that once conferred on me the title of “voice of a generation”—I was called “a leech woman” and “a predator.” The National Review called me “an opportunistic one-time nymphet.” The chief critic for the Washington Post called At Home in the World “the worst book ever published.”

The terminology for being “cancelled” didn’t exist back then, but that’s what happened to my career. Some hard years followed, in which I made the choice to become a fiction writer. I was told nobody would publish my novel Labor Day, though one editor (to whom the novel was submitted without my name attached at the suggestion of my agent) chose to publish it despite my infamous reputation.

In 2018, on the one-year anniversary of the Me-Too movement, I wrote an essay not simply about my experience with Salinger, but, more so, about the equally brutal experience of what happened when I published a book in which I told about it. That story, titled “Was She J.D. Salinger’s Predator, or Prey?”, ran in the New York Times. Twenty years after the publication of At Home in the World, people were finally ready to see my story through a different lens.

These days I write novels, mostly. Now and then, when I’m giving a talk about my work, some man in the audience will ask the question “What was J.D. Salinger really like?” and I will remind him, with as much good humor as I can muster, that it is not my role to offer tidbits about a man I knew for a year of my life, half a century ago. But it’s over now.

I still write for the New York Times now and then, though I do this mainly for the Travel section. This Sunday a piece of mine appears there. It’s about a road trip I took last fall with a longtime friend—a man I’ve known for over 50 years, married to a good friend of mine—when the two of us found ourselves both in France with four days free and decided to rent a car and head out on a spontaneous adventure together.

I won’t say more. I’ll leave it to you to read my story and discover what we found there, including a highly unusual Airbnb. Here’s a link that gets you past the firewall.

I’ll simply add that I’ve come a long way from that 18-year-old, sitting on the floor of the Yale library in her jeans, who evidently hadn’t seen fit to brush her hair that day, and believed she knew so much more than she did.

Fifty-three years and counting. A few hundred stories, more than a dozen novels, a couple of memoirs, and more besides.

I’m still here.