Looking Back

by Joyce Maynard

  I grew up wanting to have babies. I reject what would be the feminist attitude that TV and baby dolls and the male-dominated American culture brainwashed me. I did play with baby dolls and watch TV (and am appalled now, watching old reruns, to see the notions of A Woman’s Place they uniformly presented), but it wasn’t those things that gave me my dreams of motherhood, and what sexist notions they exposed me to I think I rejected. (Desi’s tyranny over Lucy, and her sly wheedling always seemed—more than anything else—dumb.) I wanted to have children (and, if I’d been a boy, I’d have felt the same way) not because I had a low opinion of myself and considered myself good for nothing else or because my own mother presented an oppressed housewife image in our family (which she never did) but just because I like kids.

  But something new seems to be happening. Friends of mine announce now that they don’t intend to marry or that, if they do, they won’t have children. Often they are children of divorced parents or parents who, they tell me casually, don’t like each other much. It all seems strange and sad and unromantic, this lack of faith in families and permanence, the short-attention-span notion of finding lifelong companionship a bore and any kind of ties and restrictions a slur on that sixties ideal we grew up with, that what mattered more than anything else was freedom. It was a time when discipline and even simple regimen seemed unfashionable. When we wrote at school, we were encouraged to forget about grammar and concern ourselves with free self-expression—maybe not to write at all, but instead to nonverbally communicate.

  At home we were not spanked or given heavy chores, most of us. And by some obscure route I think all that has brought us around to doubts about families and order in general. We are suspicious of anything that seems too rigid, anything that seems to endanger the carefree, don’t-think-ahead life. It has been said, and it’s true, that the future seems too uncertain for us to make plans, that the specter of The Bomb and ecological disaster hangs over us. The feeling many of us have about marriage and children comes from a kind of Peter Pan feeling about Youth—a stage of life so glamorized in our time that we no longer eagerly anticipate being grown-ups (as teen-agers used to, when growing up meant escaping the strict rule of parents). Now it is Youth, not adults, who wield the power. Getting married and having children means that, if you are not old, at least you are no longer young.

  THE WORDS AMBITIOUS, UP-AND-COMING, go-getting used to be the highest compliment awarded to a bright young man just starting out on his career. Back in those days, the label businessman held no unfortunate connotations, no ring of war-mongering or conservatism or pollution. The future may have been uncertain, but it was certainly considered, anyway, and the goals were clear: a good marriage, a good job, a good income—that was a good life.

  My generation’s definition of The Good Life is harder to arrive at. Our plans for the future are vague, because so many of us don’t believe in planning, because we don’t quite believe in the future. Perhaps we make too much of growing up with tension, from as far back as the Cuban Missile Crisis, but the fact is that the tension of the sixties put us in a kind of suspension. There were always fallout shelter signs, always secret servicemen and always, when the words “we interrupt this program to bring you …” flashed on the screen, the possibility of an assassination. When a plane flies low I wonder (just for a second)—is it the Russians? The Chinese?

  So we don’t plan. We make a thing of spontaneity and informality. (Parties just happen; couples hang around together—no more going on dates.) Looking ahead to the future, planning, and pushing are seen as uncool (“take it easy … no sweat”), aggressive.

  It’s impossible not to wonder where the young hip kids of today will be twenty years from now. Their parents say they’ll settle down (“We were wild in our day too …”) and some of them will—some will later join their parents’ establishment world just as, for now, they’ve joined a group that is itself a kind of establishment. But there’s another group, involved in much more than a fad, and their futures are less easy to predict. They’ve passed beyond faddishness, beyond the extreme activism of the late sixties and arrived at a calm isolationist position—free not just from the old establishment ambitions and the corporate tycoon style, but from the aggressiveness of the radical tycoon. The best thing to be, for them isn’t go-getting or up-and-coming, but cool. Broad social conscience has been replaced by personal responsibility, and if they plan at all, their plans will be to get away. The new movement is away from the old group forms of moratorium crowds and huge rock concerts and communes. Young doctors who once joined the Peace Corps are turning more and more to small-town private practices, Harvard scholars are dropping out to study auto mechanics or farming. Everybody wants to buy land in Oregon and Vermont. If we have any ambition at all now, it is not so much the drive to get ahead as it is the drive to get away.

  When my friends and I were little, we had big plans. I would be a famous actress and singer, dancing on the side. I would paint my own sets and compose my own music, writing the script and the lyrics and reviewing the performance for the New York Times. I would marry and have three children (they don’t allow us dreams like that any more) and we would live, rich and famous, (donating lots to charity, of course, and periodically adopting orphans), in a house we designed ourselves. When I was older I had visions of good works. I saw myself in South American rain forests and African deserts, feeding the hungry and healing the sick with an obsessive selflessness, I see now, that was as selfish, in the end, as my first plans for stardom.

  Now my goal is simpler. I want to be happy. And I want comfort—nice clothes, a nice house, good music and good food, and the feeling that I’m doing some little thing that matters. I’ll vote and I’ll give to charity, but I won’t give myself. I feel a sudden desire to buy land—not a lot, not as a business investment, but just a small plot of earth so that whatever they do to the country I’ll have a place where I can go—a kind of fallout shelter, I guess. As some people prepare for their old age, so I prepare for my twenties. A little house, a comfortable chair, peace and quiet—retirement sounds tempting.

  I’m almost twenty now—two decades gone. I know now that I will never be a ballerina. That’s not because of any conscious choice, because of anything I’ve done, but because of what’s been neglected. It isn’t that I ever longed to be one, but the knowledge scares me, that I can’t—there’s nothing, absolutely nothing I can do about it. I am too old to be a violin prodigy, or to learn championship chess; I’m closer to Ophelia now than Juliet. The word woman embarrasses me a little. (Why is that? Some leftover scrap of unliberation, that boys are men, while I remain, and will till I am fifty, always a girl.)

  Once, I guess, youth was a handicap and coming of age an exciting, horizon-broadening time for long pants and freedom. For us, today, youth—while it lasts—is a time we greedily hold onto, a fashionable, glorified age when, if we don’t quite swing, at least we’re told that’s what we do, that these are the best years of our lives—it’s all downhill from here.

  But I’m basically an optimist. Somehow, no matter what the latest population figures say, I feel everything will work out—just like on TV. I may doubt man’s fundamental goodness, but I believe in his power to survive. I say, sometimes, that I wonder if we’ll be around in thirty years, but then I forget myself and speak of “when I’m fifty.…” Death has touched me now—from Vietnam and Biafra and a car accident that makes me buckle my seat belt—but like negative numbers and the sound of a dog whistle (too high-pitched for human ears), it’s not a concept I can comprehend.

  1973

  IT IS THE NEW YEAR now. (I rang it in with popcorn and Guy Lombardo, sad to see that even the seemingly ageless Royal Canadians had compromised to sound contemporary, with-it.) I’m sitting by a window in New Hampshire—I have left Yale, Chaucer classes and dormitory bunk beds for the mountains—watching the evening grosbeaks crowded at the bird feeder. They are ugly-natured birds who scare away the chickadees, but nice to look at, fight
ing over sunflower seeds and suet, winging away at the least sound or movement from me in my chair. The wind is strong right now—just about sunset; the temperature reads eight degrees below zero. In here, though, I am warm. The fire is laid, although not burning (old TV Guides, this morning’s New York Times and dripping, snowy logs), the dog wheezes in a back room (old and asthmatic, he hibernates in winter, dreaming of a badger-hunting spring) and a tangerine peel, filled up with seeds, sits on the table next to me. The television set is off—nothing but golf tournaments and football games this Sunday afternoon—so I have played Monopoly, putting hotels on every property I owned, and won. The winning matters still. I count my paper money like a miser, rejoice beyond all reasonable proportions when I take in another hundred. I’m thinking what I’ll have for dinner, scribbling in the margins of my yellow legal pad, examining the split ends of my hair, watching the sky change colors, checking my watch, the TV Guide, the temperature again. The bird feeder is empty now.

  I have just finished reading my manuscript. I’ve come out here, to this chair, this window, with this yellow pad, to write the ending to this book. Before me is a list of topics to tie up in some fine and final-sounding paragraph. Now is the moment, maybe, to quickly, deftly plug in gaps—things about my parents that should be here and aren’t, about my best friend, next-door neighbor Becky, my one real high school boy friend, the year at Exeter I barely mention. I should perhaps temper my statements with apologies, for saying “we” all through this book, when there are so many people I’ve no right to speak for (where are the blacks? the teen-age dropouts? the people of my generation who read—really read—books? I cannot speak for them). I need an ending, something that will tie in air-raid drills and Dr. Kildare shows and fifth-grade facts-of-life talks and college board tests and debutante balls, some statement that will make my scattered thoughts seem pointed all in one direction, toward a single, nineteen-sixties summing-up conclusion, some idea that will conceal the fact that when I wrote this book I had no notion of what all the pieces would add up to. But any generalization I make now would be more than a bit contrived because, like yearbooks and Sears catalogues, one’s memories rarely have shape and form and (high school English) Main Ideas. Ten years can’t be summed up; a generation can’t be generalized about.

  So I’ll say one more thing, just for myself, about the dog and the red-breasted nuthatch and the chickadees and even the grosbeaks, also the home-grown summer squash and peas I’m about to thaw from the freezer for dinner, and the fields where, last August, I picked them. The plants and animals are the telling omissions in my recollections of the decade—too many passing fads, too little that is lasting. I will resist my debater’s instinct to end with a ringing phrase. It’s suppertime.

  A Biography of Joyce Maynard

  Joyce Maynard is the bestselling author of eleven books of fiction and nonfiction. She is best known for her memoir At Home in the World and her novel Labor Day, both bestsellers. Since launching her writing career as a teenager, Maynard has been a commentator on CBS radio, a contributor to National Public Radio’s “All Things Considered,” and a reporter for the New York Times, as well as a speaker on parenthood, family, and writing. She has published hundreds of essays and columns for publications such as Vogue; More; O, The Oprah Magazine; and the New York Times; in addition to many essay collections.

  Born in Durham, New Hampshire, in 1953, Maynard began publishing her stories, essays, and poems when she was fourteen years old. She won numerous awards for her work before entering college at Yale University in 1971. During her freshman year, Maynard sent examples of her work to the New York Times, prompting an assignment: She was to write an article for them about growing up in the sixties. In April 1972 that article, “An Eighteen-Year-Old Looks Back on Life,” graced the cover of the magazine, earning her widespread acclaim and instant fame.

  Maynard’s story also caught the eye of reclusive author J. D. Salinger, then fifty-three years old, who wrote her a letter praising her work—launching a correspondence that ultimately led Maynard to drop out of college and move to New Hampshire to live with the author. Their relationship lasted ten months.

  Maynard never returned to college. In 1973 she published her first memoir, Looking Back, a follow-up to her New York Times Magazine article published the year before. Having lived alone in New Hampshire in her early twenties, in 1976 she was offered a job as a reporter for the New York Times and moved to New York City. She left the newspaper in 1977 when she married Steve Bethel and returned to New Hampshire. The couple went on to have three children: Audrey, Charlie, and Wilson.

  Maynard’s first novel, Baby Love, published in 1981, earned the praise of several renowned fiction writers including Anne Tyler, Joseph Heller, and Raymond Carver. Her next book, Domestic Affairs (1987)—a collection of her syndicated columns, which had run in newspapers across the country—reflected on her experiences as a wife and mother and further cemented Maynard’s status as one of the best-loved modern American memoirists.

  In 1986, an area in Maynard’s home state of New Hampshire was selected by the US Department of Energy as a finalist to become the first-in-the-nation high-level nuclear waste dump. Maynard was one of the organizers of the resistance to that project, and she wrote a cover story about it that was published in April of that year and was widely believed to have contributed to the government’s decision to suspend the nuclear waste dump plan.

  Maynard’s marriage ended in 1989—an experience she wrote about in her “Domestic Affairs” columns. Many major newspapers discontinued the column abruptly at this point, citing Maynard’s impending divorce as indication that she was no longer equipped to write about family life. Maynard continued writing—though for a much smaller audience—in the Domestic Affairs Newsletter.

  In keeping with her practice of communicating actively with her readers, Maynard established a website in 1996; she was one of the first writers to do so, and she was a regular and visible presence through the brand-new technology of her site’s discussion forum.

  Forbidden by Salinger to speak of him, Maynard chose to remain silent about their relationship for twenty-five years, until her daughter turned eighteen. Her decision to write about the experience in her 1998 memoir At Home in the World resulted in an avalanche of criticism, but eventually led to further disclosures by other women who had been in his life. Salinger died in 2010.

  Maynard has also written two children’s books and two young-adult novels; of these, The Usual Rules was named by the American Library Association as one of the ten best young-adult novels of 2003. Her literary fiction includes To Die For (1991), Where Love Goes (1994), Labor Day (2009), and The Good Daughters (2010). To Die For was adapted into a film of the same name starring Nicole Kidman. Labor Day is currently being adapted for the screen by director Jason Reitman, and is set to star Kate Winslet and Josh Brolin.

  The mother of three grown children, Maynard now lives in Northern California where, in addition to continuing her career as a writer and speaker, she performs regularly as a storyteller with the Moth and Porchlight. She also runs the annual Lake Atitlán Writing Workshop in a small Mayan village on the shores of Lake Atitlán, Guatemala.

  Maynard in 1955.

  Maynard and her sister Rona with their mother in Durham, New Hampshire.

  Maynard at age eight with her sister Rona in 1961. The two stand before a window painted by their father, artist Max Maynard.

  At age fifteen, Maynard won the Scholastic Magazine Writing Competition for one of her short stories. She continues to support the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards, which over the years have recognized such young artists as Truman Capote, Joyce Carol Oates, Sylvia Plath, Robert Redford, and Andy Warhol.

  Maynard with (left to right) her father Max, husband Steve, and daughter Audrey in 1980 in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada.

  Maynard with her two older children, Audrey and Charlie, in New Hampshire in 1982.

  In 1986, a large portion of the state
of New Hampshire was nominated by the Department of Energy to become the first-in-the-nation nuclear waste dump. An active organizer and vocal opponent of the project, Maynard published a cover story on the issue for the New York Times Magazine. Shown testifying at hearings in spring of 1986, Maynard names the defeat of this project as among the proudest moments of her life.

  Maynard with her mother, Fredelle, at Fredelle’s wedding to her longtime partner shortly before her death. In 1989 Maynard’s mother was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer. Maynard documented the story of her last months in her syndicated newspaper column, “Domestic Affairs.” That same year, Maynard’s marriage ended and she moved with her children from her rural home to the town of Keene, New Hampshire.

  A 1991 photo of (left to right) Audrey, Charlie, Willy, and Joyce in the kitchen of their Keene, New Hampshire, home. During this period Maynard was a frequent speaker on family and parenting, and continued to write her “Domestic Affairs” column.