I found myself developing a love/hate relationship Joyce
Maynard’s At Home in the World. My
Advanced Memoir Workshop had picked it for our April reading. 

First of all, At Home in the World is such a
compelling read that whenever I opened it, I found myself reading way more than
I had time for. And yet I did not particularly like the main characters, nor
was I mesmerized by the story, nor is the writing, while smooth and swift, the kind
of prose that I enjoy and admire. I wasn’t thinking, “I wish I
could write like that,” and I didn’t underline a single phrase. And yet, I knew
I was in the hands of a forceful and skilled writer.

Some of the power of the book comes from the amazing pace
Maynard keeps up; her entire childhood is covered in one chapter, and the affair
with J.D. Salinger takes up less than half the book. It’s the kind of book that
sweeps you up, twirls you around, and when you land, you blink for a while,
wondering what a strange place you’ve been to.
Some of my bias probably comes from me having no appreciation of J.D. Salinger’s statue – The Catcher in the Rye seems to be a typically American coming-of-age
story that was not on the reading lists in Germany, where I grew up (unlike, for instance, To Kill a Mocking Bird). And it seems to me you’d better
read it before you turn twenty, unless you haven’t grown up yet. So I’m way too
old to get into it now.
The one thing I appreciated, though, is that Maynard had the courage to write this memoir. I know many have accused her of simply wanting to profit from Salinger’s allure, and certainly that has not hurt her book sales. And yet, the point she makes in the introduction of the 2010 edition is, in my opinion, commendable: “More important, at least to me, was exploding the myth that any human being owes another human being her silence, at the expense of her ability to know and be her own true self.”