at home in the world
Tuesday 21 November 2006 | I like a cookie
Joyce Maynard’s autobiography may be the fucking saddest book I’ve ever read. It’s like Tolstoy, or Jean de Florette; it’s almost worse than Lear; the graphic tragedies just keep piling up, and the plummeting falls from acme never seem to end. It wasn’t bad enough that Jerry Salinger was a 53-year-old child-molesting wingnut who’s apparently never heard of foreplay and who teaches Joyce how to have a full-blown eating disorder—or that their horrific “relationship” lasts the first fourth of the book, and its lasting effects permeate the rest of her young life—but wait that’s not all there’s more! Every time the dark-circled-eyed one seems even close to catching a break (a magazine article, a book contract, a New Hampshire farmhouse and garden and babies), she’s kicked back down again—literally: her fed-up husband knocking her grasping hands off the heel of his boot as she’s at that moment giving birth to his second child, its head crowning while she’s screaming and begging him to stay with her and he says no, he’s going outside to have a cigarette. And the most hair-raising thing of all is that the tone of the prose is just way too flat for any of this to have been concocted. No, it’s all too sucker-punchingly real. I felt queasy, only partly glad I’d read it, grateful that things seem to have settled down for Ms. Maynard a little, and very relieved to be done with her book.
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