When Salinger projects himself into her life, Maynard was living outside her troubled, claustrophobic family for the first time , and despite her annoying precocity, she was starting to make friends at Yale. Her writing receives a phenomenal success, which, however fluky, she enjoys. Salinger draws her wholly into his world. His attraction is a stream of fantasy projections that stops without any explanation when her presence becomes demanding and too real. Discarded and adrift at 19, she finds her self utterly derailed.
Confidence is the most precious asset, and the first one lost by teenage girls.
In the ensuing years she rethinks everything. I take Joyce Maynard at her word when she states clearly in the introduction that she was moved, around her daughter's 18th birthday , to write about her own experiences as a girl. Every review of this book I've read in the avalanche of press that's surrounded it is a review of Maynard's person. Invariably, Maynard is compared to Monica Lewinsky. Maynard lurches out of her icky , masturbatory eroticon shrieking only Me, me, me.