Salinger's teenage lover challenges her 'predator' reputation

 

Joyce Maynard

JD Salinger's teenage lover challenges her 'predator' reputation

This article is more than 3 years old

Joyce Maynard, now 65, has published a new essay that asks if the #MeToo movement will allow her to tell her side of the story

Alison Flood
Thu 6 September 2018

Joyce Maynard, who was wooed as a teenager by the late JD Salinger, has spoken out about how the literary world condemned her as “a predator”.

Maynard was 18 when an essay of hers was published in the New York Times, along with a photograph. The piece led the then 53-year-old Salinger to contact her and, as Maynard writes in the New York Times, urged her to “to leave college, come live with him (have babies, collaborate on plays we would perform together in London’s West End) and be (I truly believed this) his partner forever”.

Salinger’s Women

J.D. Salinger’s Women

by Deanna Schmidt

It’s no secret that J.D. Salinger was attracted to a certain “type” of woman: young, innocent, and sexually inexperienced. Even though these relationships tended to raise eyebrows from disapproving onlookers, Salinger’s intentions were arguably pure. He never wanted to hurt or take advantage of these women; he was, as I see it, simply looking for companionship. Salinger wasn’t the slighted bit interested in having sex with the women he pursued. His desires were, rather, focused on one thing: the innocence of his female companions. Salinger had succumbed to his own disease— the “Catcher In the Rye complex.” His biggest wish was to find a young girl to love, protect, and live out the rest of his life with. Salinger went through a myriad of women in search of his perfect match, struggling to find a woman who could meet his high standards. While Salinger was waiting to discover his young lover, he crafted stories filled with older men who lusted over them— an outlet that allowed him to fulfill some of the desires that he could not realize in his own life. His writing, however, was not enough to quench his thirst, and Salinger continued to search for this illusory innocent throughout his adult life.

Salinger’s Pursuit of Teen Girls Gets Renewed Attention After ‘Allen v. Farrow’

Actress Michelle Williams arrives at the 2012 Independent Spirit Awards clutching a 'Catcher in the Rye' accessory. (Photo by Frazer Harrison

 

JD Salinger’s Pursuit of Teen Girls Gets Renewed Attention After ‘Allen v. Farrow’

Rae Alexandra

April 2, 2021

Yesterday, Vanity Fair published a compelling essay by prolific author Joyce Maynard. In it, she drew a parallel between Woody Allen and J.D. Salinger, saying both men harbored obsessions with very young women. Maynard was inspired to write the piece after watching recent HBO documentary series, Allen v. Farrow. But her motivation was born from the fact that, when she was a teenager, she had a relationship with the then-53-year-old Salinger.

46 Years Ago, I Left Yale for J.D. Salinger—This Fall, I’m Returning

The author in 1972

 Alex Gottfryd

46 Years Ago, I Left Yale

for J.D. Salinger

—This Fall, I’m Returning

BIOGRAPHY

By Joyce Maynard

September 13, 2018

In the fall of 1971, I set out from the small New Hampshire town where I’d spent the first 17 years of my life and rode a Greyhound bus to New Haven. I had a trunk of clothes, a portable stereo housed in a red Samsonite suitcase, and a couple dozen vinyl albums—Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen, the Rolling Stones—that I hauled up three flights of stairs to a fourth-floor dormitory room. Yale had gone coed two years before, but ours was the first class in which women would complete the full four years. 

Most did. I didn’t.