Shadow of Salinger

`J.D. Salinger is a man with extraordinary emotional power. You only have to see the effect of those books he wrote, particularly Catcher in the Rye, on young people. He has a unique ability to reach young people and what they tend to say is `He knows exactly what I feel'. With me the impact was even more intense as here was Holden Caulfield's voice, sending letters to my college mail box telling me `You're the most wonderful girl, we're soulmates, you're a great writer we will spend our lives together'. Pretty heavy stuff."

Heavy is not the word. Twenty-six years ago, when Joyce Maynard was 18, she wrote a cover story for the New York Times magazine describing what it was like to grow up in the late 1960s. It was accompanied by a kooky picture of Maynard, all big eyes and red sneakers and, not surprisingly, letters flooded in. There were immediate offers of marriage, book deals, assignments for Mademoiselle magazine and even an audition for a starring role in The Exorcist. However, the one letter that really did change Maynard's life was not offering anything but advice and, astonishingly, it came from the reclusive author J.D. Salinger. From that first letter, Maynard felt as though there was a special connection between them, a notion nurtured by Salinger.

"It was about emotional attachment, an almost spiritual attachment . . . Jerry Salinger is the closest I ever got to a religion. I did not question anything he said. I was a person who had grown up without a church, without a sense of belonging and without a sense of something greater than me. Here was something large enough to attach myself to, that would define the meaning of life to me. I mean he actually said to me `I am in possession of enlightenment'."

Four months after the publication of the New York Times article, Maynard left Yale university and a summer job writing editorials for the New York Times and moved into Salinger's house in New Hampshire. She was 18, he was 53 - his daughter Peggy was just two years younger than Maynard. Perhaps inevitably, the affair ended badly a year later as Salinger shifted from being supportive, optimistic and adoring to dismissive, bitter and non-committal. He was fanatical about healthy eating and showed Maynard (who already had a tendency to anorexia) how to make herself vomit. When she found she was physically incapable of having sex with him, he refused to discuss it and instead tried, without success, to find a homoeopathic remedy.

The unconsummated affair finally ended during a holiday at Daytona Beach in Florida, when he turned to her and told her to get the evening flight home and have everything out of his house by the time he returned. To say Maynard was devastated is an understatement. In time, she went on to get married, have three children, write several books (including To Die For which was made into a film starring Nicole Kidman) and many syndicated columns, but she still claims that the affair with Salinger cast a shadow over everything in her life. Last year, aged 43, she decided to write her memoirs, and this month At Home in the World was released both here and in the US.

That's when the trouble started. Of the 345 pages, more than half of them deal directly with her affair with Salinger, while much of the rest of the book is a comment on the damage caused by him. Any writer who describes an affair with a famous person will naturally be accused of writing a kiss-and-tell expose, but when the famous person is J.D. Salinger the cries are particularly loud and venomous. Salinger is not only hugely renowned for his cult novels and short stories, he is equally famous for his near-mythical demand for privacy; a privacy he now believes is even compromised by publishing his own work.

"It's extraordinary that in this day and age you can tell a story like this, and the person who is perceived to be exploited in this situation is the 53-year-old man who wrote letters to a teenage girl and who appears to have a bit of a pattern of behaviour like this. But because of who he is and what he wrote, he will be viewed as exempt," Maynard exclaims indignantly.

Sitting in a Dublin hotel, she exudes a youthful air with her huge eyes, blue suit, platform sandals and bulging tote bag. She fiddles constantly with things - her feet which are tucked up under her, the edge of the table, the strap of her bag - and talks 19 to the dozen with an air of frankness that, like her book, is honest but not particularly perceptive. She has a solution for every question and answers every accusation with a counter-accusation of a hidden agenda. She describes the reaction to her book as "fantastic" from "my readers, who I can't bullshit", and "astonishing' from "the literary establishment".

"I didn't feel I was going against J.D. Salinger, I felt I was just telling my story. But I was perceived as coming up against God and God wins . . . There are those who pay lip service to the notion of intellectual freedom and artistic expression, but give them a picture that's not what they want and they get very indignant. I think that my critics who say they're outraged that I told this story really just don't like the story I told. "I regard it as an extraordinary comment on how people still view women. I mean can you imagine this fuss if Salinger decided to write a book about me? Not, God forbid, that I suggest that we should wait around for that to happen, but would they be so indignant?"

There is a fundamental problem with this reasoning. A book about a failed love affair would have a fairly limited market. It is only when that affair is with somebody famous, like a celebrated and reclusive writer, that it becomes news that is sensational and, most importantly, news that will sell. She constantly describes the book as "my story", a comment that comes across as unbelievably naive. It takes two to tango and, unfortunately, this book's focus and main interest lies in the rather prurient details of the Salinger/Maynard relationship and in the insight into his previously unknown way of life.

Maynard points out that the book contains other stories too - descriptions of her marriage breaking up, how she watched her mother die and how she felt after having her children - but that the critics never mention this when they talk about her book.

"To read the press on this book, you'd think that my sole value on this earth was that I'd briefly known J.D. Salinger. Not that I'd raised three children, written five books and supported my family." However, the problem with this argument, and indeed with the whole book, is that in some way, Joyce has reduced her own importance to a bit-part-player in J.D. Salinger's life. The shame of this is that there is indeed more to her life than just the Salinger episode. Her parents practically deserve a whole book to themselves.

Her handsome, artistic and unfulfilled father, Max, was an alcoholic who never got promotion from his post as an English lecturer, and her fiercely intelligent mother, Fredelle, gave up her academic career to marry him and raise her family. The atmosphere described in At Home in the World is of a hugely claustrophobic home life where Fredelle would still give baths to her 17-year-old daughter, where family entertainment consisted of sessions of criticism of the young Maynard's early manuscripts, and where Fredelle read her daughter's diary and left notes correcting her on certain points. When Maynard decided to throw everything away and move in with a 53-year-old man, her parents quite literally drove her to his arms.

"Were my parents shockingly naive? I adored my parents because they gave me so much but they were deeply misguided on this one. I can only attribute it to their own sorrows. My father was on a downward spiral, my mother was a hugely passionate woman who was denied so much and like so many women chose to live through her children.

"As much as anything else, this book is about secrets and shame. I've done my job sufficiently well with my children and my family and the people to whom I do owe protection. I don't feel I owe J.D. Salinger protection." At the end of the interview I ask Maynard what she will do next and for the first time, the effects of the publicity whirl start to show and she looks tired. "I'm going to go home and write something that has nothing to do with J.D. Salinger. I wish I could say I was going to write something that has nothing to do with my life but I've learnt that everything has to do with your life whether or not it's autobiographical. I'm tired of J.D. Salinger. I have many other stories to tell. I have had my fill of this rather cranky old man."

At Home in the World by Joyce Maynard is published by Doubleday, price £15 in the UK. Mary Maher will review it in this Saturday's Weekend supplement.