EVER SINCE SHE was 18 years old and a freshman at Yale, Joyce Maynard has made a career out of writing about herself, earning both applause and intense derision. Jonathan Yardley of The Washington Post once stated that, encountering Maynard’s work, “you may . . . find yourself struggling to comprehend self-infatuation so vast and reckless that the victim cannot imagine a detail of her life so minute or trivial as to be of no interest to everyone else on this planet.”

In 1972, Maynard debuted as an autobiographical writer with her essay, “An Eighteen-Year-Old Looks Back on Life,” which appeared in The New York Times Sunday magazine and was instantly hailed as an important statement from the baby boomer generation. The piece did contain witty and perceptive insights, and was indeed reflective of its generation, especially in its probing of the personal for larger meaning. Many were charmed by her precocity, a mirror image of the girlishness Maynard possesses as she now approaches old age.

After dropping out of Yale, Maynard wrote her first memoir and had an affair with the writer, J.D. Salinger, a subject she would later publicly explore to more applause and derision.

In the words of The New York Times writer Larissa MacFarquhar,  in the 25 years after her first memoir, “Maynard bought a house, nearly had a nervous breakdown, lost her virginity to the soundtrack of “Pippin,” met Mary Tyler Moore and Muhammad Ali, was raped, got married, appeared on TV, had three children, emptied her breast milk into the Atlantic, planted a garden, went broke, had an abortion, clawed through a heap of garbage looking for a lost retainer, wrote three novels, watched her parents get divorced and die, got divorced herself, bought another house, got breast implants and took them out again, took tennis lessons, sold most of her possessions and moved from New Hampshire to California.”

More recently, Maynard has written extensively about her divorce, revealing decades after the fact that she had an affair with a friend of her husband’s before her husband had an affair with his babysitter, the presumed cause of their divorce; about her purchase and refurbishing of a house on a lake in Guatemala, where she sometimes holds writers’ retreats for women, when she is not holding them in other exclusive locations; and about her relationship with her sister, Rona.

In addition to all this, as I discussed at this site before, Maynard wrote last year about her decision at the age of 55 to adopt two Ethiopian girls and bring them to live with her in California.

Since then, we find something uncharacteristic: Silence. An autobiographical void now exists where these children once were.

Maynard recently wrote in her latest letter to her fans:

And here I am, just over a month away from my 58th birthday, with all manner of losses large and small behind me, and no doubt more to come I cannot even envision. Still firmly an optimist.

Sometimes a person’s bright dreams explode. Sometimes they fade quietly. Unexpected joys emerge, that you never even planned on, even as the losses mount up, and sometimes it’s the sorrows that make way for the goodness after — the costly lessons of failure, that teach us more sometimes than success ever did.

I’ve had more than a few of those. Generally, when they happen, I talk pretty openly about them, though on rare occasions there have been times — and this year has been among them — when a certain quiet space and privacy has been necessary, not only for my own sake, but for the protection of others too. I appreciate the sensitivity and kindness that so many of you in this group have demonstrated in quietly recognizing that.

And life goes on. This time of year, I’m always filled with ambitions about learning new things. (This September’s list: work on playing my new banjo ukelele. Attempt to retrieve my long-dormant French-speaking abilities. Sign up for a zydeco dance class, or Lindy lessons. Finish my novel.)

There is no mention of her Ethiopian daughters. An anonymous source has informed me that Maynard has given them up. Whether this is true or not cannot be gleaned from Maynard’s writings.

“And life goes on,” she writes. One wonders. In what way does life go on for two children uprooted in the course of a vanity adoption? Maynard writes later in the letter by way of closing:

What interests me most these days, as a writer, is telling the truth. That won’t spare me the judgment of others. But I’d rather be criticized for who I am than celebrated for who I am not.

Joyce Maynard now owes it to her readers to tell more about her Ethiopian adventure and to write about these girls as she has written about her own childhood – her years at Exeter, the love of her parents, her joyful experiences playing with other children – and about her own children’s lives.

                                                                     — Comments —

Charles K. writes:

Joyce Maynard announced her double adoption in an article in MORE magazine. I visited the magazine’s website and searched the archives for all articles by Joyce Maynard. Links to several Maynard articles, including the adoption item, appeared, and all of the links worked except — well, you can guess which one didn’t work. 

Unless my experience with the website was a fluke, Miss Maynard appears to have persuaded the publisher to drop this story down the memory hole. Not a happy ending, I guess.

Laura writes:

I don’t think your experience was a fluke. I noticed the same thing.

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