At Home in the World: A Memoir [Paperback]

New York Timesbestselling author ofLabor Day
With a New Preface

When it was first published in 1998,At Home in the Worldset off a furor in the literary world and beyond. Joyce Maynard's memoir broke a silence concerning her relationshipat age eighteenwith J.D. Salinger, the famously reclusive author ofThe Catcher in the Rye,then age fifty-three, who had read a story she wrote forThe New York Timesin 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 laterhaving become a writer, survived the end of her marriage and the deaths of her parents, and with an eighteen-year-old daughter of her ownMaynard pays a visit to the man who broke her heart. The story she tellsof the girl she was and the woman she becameis at once devastating, inspiring, and triumphant.

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 testlĂ&