It has been said of me, in the pages of this newspaper, that I am a predator.
The author of those words was hardly alone in her assessment. In 1998,
nearly 20 years before the #MeToo movement, I published a book about my
relationship with a famous and revered writer who sought me out when he
was 53 and I was 18.
I won’t catalog here all the epithets — “stalker,” “leech woman,” “opportunistic onetime nymphet” — of
which I and my work (“a tawdry boudoir confession”) were the objects
that season. The story I told in my book, “At Home in the World,” was
received in the literary press with near universal condemnation. This
did not destroy my career or my emotional well-being, but it came close.
My
crime — which earned me the dubious distinction of being, in the
opinion of one prominent critic, the author of possibly “the worst book
ever written” — lay in my decision, after 25 years of silence, to write a
memoir in which I told the story of my relationship with a powerful
older man.
In the spring of 1972,
following the publication in The Times Magazine of an essay of mine
accompanied by a particularly guileless photograph of me (bluejeans,
scruffy hair, no makeup), I had received a letter from J.D. Salinger in
which he offered his admiration, friendship, mentorship and spiritual
guidance — and, in subsequent letters and phone calls, urged me to leave
college, come live with him (have babies, collaborate on plays we would
perform together in London’s West End) and be (I truly believed this)
his partner forever.
I gave up my scholarship and dropped out
of Yale, cut off communication with my friends and moved (with a
suitcase of miniskirts and record albums I was forbidden to play) back
to my home state of New Hampshire to be with him. Seven months later,
during a trip we’d taken to Florida, with words as devastating as they
had once been captivating and entrancing, he put two $50 bills in my
hand and instructed me to return to New Hampshire, clear my things out
of his house and disappear.
Believing
Salinger to be the most spiritually elevated man I would ever know, I
accepted his assessment of me as unworthy, and for the next
quarter-century I barely spoke of my experience, even to the man I
ultimately married, with whom I had three children. Still, word had got
out that I’d left Yale to be with Salinger, and during those years,
hardly a week went by when I was not asked about the great man. Each
time I said that I would respect his privacy.
But when my
daughter reached the age I had been when Salinger sought me out, I
reread his letters for the first time in more than two decades. Until
then, I had never been able to view my younger self as deserving of
protection and care. Yet when I imagined my daughter experiencing what I
had at her age, I saw my relationship with Salinger through an utterly
altered lens.
The publication of “At
Home in the World,” and my subsequent choice to sell Salinger’s letters
to me at auction — over 38 pages of what were definitely not love
letters but were without question valuable literary documents — inspired
an avalanche of disdain and outrage. (The letters were purchased by a wealthy man who said he would return them to Salinger.)
That
season, at a rare literary event to which I had been invited, an entire
row of writers I respected greatly rose from their seats en masse and,
as I took the stage, departed the room. I like to think that had they
stayed and listened to me that day, they might have questioned their
assumptions. ... [mehr] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/05/books/review/joyce-maynard-at-home-in-the-world.html
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