Word: maynards
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Both in person and in the pages he produced each week, Newsweek editor MAYNARD PARKER had an edgy energy that was rooted in a passion for the news. Often tightly coiled and always ready to spring, he had the gleeful ability to rip up his magazine as it was going to press in order to make it more exciting. Every Monday I felt the special kinship that comes from having tried to pull off the same feats; I could admire the smart way he had packaged a cover, spotted a trend or elicited a nugget of reporting...
...tells it in her newest book, Joyce Maynard received a mimeograph machine from her mother for her seventh birthday. Not lacking in initiative, young Maynard began producing a newspaper and selling it door to door. "It would never occur to me that our neighbors wouldn't be interested to read what I write. Or that I shouldn't charge a nickel for it. Later a dime," Maynard notes. "My mother schools me young to view my writing as valuable. She conveys another lesson too: whatever happens in my life, I can look at it as material...
Call it the gift that just keeps on giving. Maynard, now 44, published her first memoir at 19, and since then has earned her living doing little besides writing about herself. She has a website www.joycemaynard.com of course) plastered with snapshots of herself and her children, on which she solicits financial contributions and provides links so that people can buy autographed copies of her books, tapes of her commentary for NPR and a CD she's created to go with one of her novels; subscribe to her newsletter; read reprints of her syndicated column; and peruse rambling letters about...
...hell with all that, the browser, the literary gossip and even the Maynard fan must think at some point: tell us something we really want to know. And now, Maynard has tried to oblige. In At Home in the World (Picador; 352 pages; $25)--yes, it's another memoir--she lifts the veil on the devastating affair she had with J.D. Salinger when she was 18 and the reclusive author of Catcher in the Rye was 53. Maynard's recounting is full of all those key details sympathetic girlfriends require. He made her eat frozen Birds Eye peas for breakfast...
Flatly written, with detail piling upon detail like so much slag on a heap, Maynard's memoir returns repeatedly to the idea of emotional and literary honesty. "Some day, Joyce, there will be a story you want to tell for no better reason than because it matters to you more than any other," Salinger tells her. "You'll simply write what's real and true." Maybe this is it. But where Salinger, or many a better writer, would have fictionalized his truths, opening up new universes for the reader, Maynard sheds no light on anything beyond the little spotlight...