Looking Back (2 page)

But on other fronts I did better: Before the week was out I had signed a contract to expand my
New York Times
article into a book, with the delivery date set for the following January and publication planned for exactly one year from the date of my original piece in the
Times.

From deep in those same stacks of mail, one letter emerged that would have more of an impact on me than any of the others. This one, like the rest, came from a reader of my
New York Times
article, but from the first sentence, it was clear to me this was the voice that mattered most. I can still remember how it felt, holding that letter—typewritten, with that slightly irregular spacing that revealed the use of a manual typewriter. The onionskin paper, the elegant handwriting on the envelope: “Miss Joyce Maynard.” The postmark, Windsor, Vermont—a town just over the border, by covered bridge, from my home state of New Hampshire.

 But it was the words themselves, not how they were laid out on the page, that moved me so that, reading them, I sat down on my bed and wept. I had the sense, reading this letter, that whoever had written it, though I had never met him, possessed a kind of knowledge and understanding of me that nobody on the planet—not even my parents—had ever achieved.

I felt this way even before I got to the signature, and in fact, it was never the name revealed in the signature that mattered to me. It was what his words suggested: that for the first time in my life, perhaps, I might not be, as I had tended to believe, alone on the planet—a solitary observer, clicking away on her typewriter.

There is no way to speak about the writing of
Looking Back
—the book you are now about to read—without saying a few things about the circumstances and the wrenching state of conflict I inhabited during the months in which it was written. Though I didn’t recognize this at the time, in many ways my struggle represented a form of conflict women have faced for generations, whenever the lure of making art or the pursuit of personal ambition flew in the face of the desire for love and family, the desire to please a man. The desire to be who the man she loves wants her to be and if she isn’t those things, to change.

In my case, the man for whom I transformed myself was the author of the letter that had showed up in the mail sack that day, whose words to me in that first letter—and all the ones that followed, and in our conversations over the next eleven months—had the effect of nullifying virtually all other voices in my ear for a very long time.

The author of this letter was J. D. Salinger: 53 years old at the time and living with his two children in my home state of New Hampshire, where he already enjoyed the reputation of a recluse who shied away from contact with the press in any form, a man who had turned his back on the whole idea of publishing his writing. Though it had been publication—and the spectacular success of his first novel,
The Catcher in the Rye
—that made his exit from the stage and life on that New Hampshire mountaintop possible.

The story of my relationship with Salinger is one I have recounted in another book—though it would take me another 25 years before I granted myself permission to tell it. Up until then I had adhered to Salinger’s prohibition never to speak of him and I honored that—with the belief I owed this man nothing less than my total silence about what had taken place between us—until the age of 42, when my own daughter reached the age I was when I came under the spell of his words to me and I read his letters with the eye of a mother, not a young girl any more.

For a girl whose aspiration since the age of six had been to achieve fame and fortune in New York City—a girl who learned to type at age six and received a mimeograph machine for her seventh birthday, so she could print her own newspaper—the chance to publish a book was, or would once have been, my dream come true. But in the spring of 1972, and the summer and fall that followed, I was a young girl in love—and more than that, a girl who believed that the man she loved was the possessor of all wisdom, all understanding, and that it was my role in life to do everything he said.

And so at the very point when the career as a writer that I had hungered for seemed not simply within reach, but firmly in hand, the man I worshipped told me that publishing a book was an inherently hollow and dangerous pursuit, that there was nothing good to be found at college, and that the only safe and good place for me to be was with him, in his house in New Hampshire, sealed away from everything that was wrong with the world, which was very nearly everything.

I corresponded with Jerry Salinger for the remainder of that spring at Yale. I first met him face-to-face two months after the publication of my story in the
New York Times
. Shortly after that—with college out of session for the summer—I took a job writing editorials for the
New York Times
, planning to spend the summer in a four-story brownstone just off Central Park that had been offered to me, free of charge, in exchange for my dog-walking services. The plan was that I’d write a little for the
Times
, write about the Democratic National Convention for
Ms. Magazine
, deliver an article titled “The Embarrassment of Virginity” for
Mademoiselle
, begin work on my book, walk the dogs, and visit Jerry on the weekends.

Within a few weeks, I’d quit my job at the
Times
, given up the brownstone and found other caretakers for the dogs, tossed aside a number of magazine assignments. Jerry Salinger had driven into Manhattan in his BMW for the purpose of picking me up and bringing me back with him to New Hampshire to spend the remainder of that summer. That August found me at a sewing machine store in Lebanon, New Hampshire, buying myself a Golden Touch ’N Sew.

A month or so after that I gave up my scholarship at Yale and my little off-campus apartment, abandoned my old blue Schwinn bicycle and my red record player, and moved the remainder of my possessions to Jerry’s house—believing I would live in that place, with that man, forever. That he was 35 years older than me and the father of a daughter just one year younger than I was (or that on the day I moved in, he pointed out with some disparagement that I was “acting like a teenager”) had no effect on my belief that ours was to be an unbreachable lifelong bond.

It was in his house, over the course of that fall and early winter—subsisting on a diet of mostly raw food, with a great many additional dietary restrictions, as well as other restrictions extending to the music I listened to and the clothes I wore and the people to whom I spoke, or was instructed not to speak, and above all, the ideas I embraced or rejected—that I wrote
Looking Back
.

I can still remember where I sat on Jerry’s velvet couch, writing this book—with a bowl of nuts on a TV tray table next to me, and his old dachshund, Joey, snoring on the rug. (Salinger himself would be in the next room, working on his own writing, though he never said precisely what it was.) Nights in that house, he’d set up a movie projector and (this being years before the advent of videos and the VCR, let alone DVDs) we watched old movies he owned in 16mm print form.
The Lady Vanishes. The Thin Man. Laurel and Hardy.
Other times we might tune in to reruns of
The Lawrence Welk Show.

Reading over now what I wrote all those years ago, I can hear my young self speaking: that sharp, precocious, slightly know-it-all voice, so well-trained by my mother from all our hundreds of evenings in the family living room, when I read my stories out loud from my yellow legal pads. Certain parts make me smile. Some could make me weep (like my cool assessments—written as if this were no more than a fascinating cultural phenomenon—of the kind of eating disorders that were, in fact, tormenting me). I wrote about the diving under my desk for air raid practice during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the Beatles’ first appearance on the Ed Sullivan show, and catching the first glimpse (via the cover of
Life
magazine) of what a human fetus looked like in utero. But I was not so adept at revealing my own inner self. That part of my story I kept off the page, mostly.

I had been offered the impossible assignment to write about my generation and I supposed the way to do this was to smooth over the rough edges of my life and create something of an Everywoman. (Or an Everygirl, anyway. White, middle class, and heterosexual.) I made liberal use of the third person plural in this book—spoke of “my generation” more than I spoke of myself. If there were odd and troubling—and very likely embarrassing—aspects to my experience, I kept those hidden, out of fear that to do otherwise would invoke judgment and disapproval in a reader and shame in my own self.

This is why, in the 160 pages of
Looking Back
, no mention can be found of the fact that I grew up in an alcoholic family—though my father’s nightly drinking was a central and formative part of my growing up and one I now understand I shared with so many of the very people at my school, and beyond, from whom I worked so hard to keep this hidden.

I spoke, in my book, about obsession with looks and body image, but only in the abstract, as if I were an anthropologist. In truth, the girl who wrote
Looking Back
lived in terror of gaining weight, stepped on the scale several times a day, and regularly made herself throw up (a skill taught to her by the man she loved). In a visit with the editors of a major national magazine that same year, I suggested that they assign me an article on the topic of bulimia, but was told by the editor-in-chief that this sounded way obscure and bizarre for a general audience. Ten years later, Karen Carpenter—whose voice provided the soundtrack to a thousand senior proms and weddings of the day—was dead of anorexia.

At 18, I couldn’t write about my difficult relationship with my mother, or the struggles between my sister and me, or the fact that my best friend at college had struggled with the knowledge that he was gay. I didn’t write about the social studies teacher at my high school who invited one of my best friends to move in with him during her junior year (and she did, though she never get over the habit of addressing him by the title “Mr.”). Nor did I write about the relatively common practice at my Ivy League college, in those days, for young girls (including my roommate) to get together with their graduate student teaching assistants and, on occasion, their professors—or the fact that when it happened, nobody seemed to view this as a problem. If anything, a relationship with an older person (as modeled by Mia Farrow with Frank Sinatra, and Margaret Trudeau with the Prime Minister of Canada) demonstrated a girl’s sophistication, success, and desirability.

Most strikingly absent, of course, from my 1972 account of my young life, is any mention of the first love affair I ever had, embarked upon, as an 18-year-old virgin, in the summer after the publication of that article in the
New York Times.
I do not say, in the book that purports to be the story of my life to date, that I have dropped out of college (never to return, though I didn’t know this yet) and moved in with a man 35 years older than I am. I do not say this man is J. D. Salinger.

Only one small clue exists in the pages of the book you are holding in your hand, suggesting what was actually going on in my private life at the time I was writing it. It appears on the second-to-last page of
Looking Back
, in the final chapter, that I wrote on the morning of January 1, 1973—which happened to be Jerry Salinger’s 54th birthday. I don’t say that it was his birthday, but I refer to having rung in the New Year “with popcorn and Guy Lombardo.” Talk about extinct phenomena: The only people watching the band leader Guy Lombardo on New Year’s Eve were people over 50, probably. But I was living with one of them and being the girl I was then, I listened to the music he liked and kept my Johnny Cash and Rolling Stones albums in the closet.

I kept a lot of my truest self hidden there too.

Certain parts of this book—the sense of the narrator as a perpetual outsider, sitting on the sidelines at every party she attended, watching everyone else get drunk, or stoned, or fall in love, while she herself kept scribbling on that infernal legal pad—strike me now as familiar, and touching, and sad. Sometimes the voice of the girl I was comes across as funny and wise, and sometimes terribly young. Her observations can be perceptive and compassionate—when she speaks about the power of
Seventeen
magazine to shape girls’ sense of themselves and their sense of who they should be, the fear of death, and the social structures of junior high.

As strongly as I did when I was 18, I can feel the humiliations described in these pages of a boy at my school (I remember him vividly still) whose voice never fully changed, so every time he spoke in class (and this happened with less and less frequency) you never knew what octave he’d be speaking in. (Years later, I heard he had committed suicide. No doubt there were other problems, and plenty of them, that accounted for this. Still I am struck—reading my description of him all those years before—by my recognition of how cruel the world can be, and was, to people who were different. And my own way of addressing that, which was to keep safely under wraps the evidence of my own greatest sources of discomfort and shame.)

There are times here where my assessments of my life, growing up in the sixties, strike me as overly grandiose and sweeping, for sure. There are also some moments in these pages when my 18-year-old self captured something that feels, all these years later, like truth—and sometimes, oddly enough, what I say shows less in the way of how much things have changed than it does how much has stayed the same. That happens when the voice of the narrator—me, at 18—writes of being “worldly not from seeing the world, but from watching it on television.” And when I speak of my television-occupied world as “a visual glut” that served to deaden the senses to the point where hardly anything seemed amazing or wonderful any more.

I can muster affection and sympathy for this girl who was me—for her yearnings for religion, her admission that sometimes she changes her outfit nine times before going out, her willingness to admit she doesn’t smoke marijuana and have sex. (Though she slips into the third person when she starts talking about this. First person is just too close to the bone.) But at other times—mostly when making pronouncements about youth and “my generation” she is maddening, to the point where I want to shake her.