Joyce Maynard embarks on a new reading tour to Marin – Marin Independent Journal

Novelist Joyce Maynard’s new book, How the Light Gets In, is a sequel to her 2021 novel Count The Ways. Both books tell the sprawling story of Eleanor and her family over nearly 50 years. (Photo by Joanna Eldredge Morrissey)

Joyce Maynard never thought she would write a sequel to her 2021 novel Count The Ways.

“It ends in 2009 at the wedding of one of her three children,” Maynard said recently in a phone call from her home in Northern California. “And she meets her ex-husband, the father of her children, for the first time in years. He is divorced, she is on her own.”

“If I were writing a romantic comedy or a fairy tale, this might be the moment when they put their palm to their forehead and say, ‘What were we thinking?’ and fall into each other’s arms,” ​​she says. “But they don’t.”

In Count The Ways, readers follow Eleanor’s life over three decades as she fell in love with and married Cam, had three children with him, and then divorced him after he had an affair with the babysitter. Yet a deep bond remains, especially through their children Al, Toby and Ursula.

At the wedding, Cam tells Eleanor that he is dying of cancer. “And she says something extraordinary: ‘I’ll take care of you,'” Maynard says. “That’s how it ended.”

At least that’s what she thought.

“I got tons of letters from readers,” Maynard says, laughing. “Some of them were very angry letters. I probably got 10 letters from women who said, ‘I threw the book on the floor halfway through; I was so angry.’ But they kept reading, and that’s what counts.”

“They were angry with Eleanor for sacrificing herself for her husband or her children – for everything but herself,” she says. “Everyone else’s needs came first. To that I would say, you know, it’s not my job as a novelist to portray life the way we want it to be. That’s just the way life is, and that’s what women do.”

“But some of them were very angry that after her husband had hurt her so much, Eleanor made this offer to take care of him,” Maynard says. “So I felt like I couldn’t leave readers like that. Basically, they were telling me I couldn’t do that.”

“They told me unequivocally: ‘We need to know what happens next.'”

“How the Light Gets In,” which hits stores Tuesday, continues the story Maynard finished in “Count The Ways.” Her book tour takes her to Corte Madera’s Book Passage on Wednesday at 6 p.m. The book is also available to view online. For more information, visit bookpassage.com/events-calendar.

The new novel follows Eleanor after Cam’s death as she tries to build a life on her New Hampshire farm as a mother to three very different adult children: Al, a technology entrepreneur in Seattle, Toby, who never fully recovered from a childhood brain injury, and Ursula, who is largely estranged from her mother.

In an interview condensed for length and clarity, Maynard talked about how Eleanor’s life is similar to her own, why she likes to incorporate real events into her stories, and the role music plays in writing her books.

Q Tell me how and when the story of Eleanor began to arise in your imagination.

A Oh God, I think we’re going back to when I was 23. This is not a thinly veiled autobiography. She’s a fictional character. But she happens to be my age at every stage of her life. She was a young woman, a young wife, mother. Unable to maintain her marriage. Single mother during all the years I was going through these things. And now she’s 70 and so am I.

So I know her world and the times she lived in. And I would say that my understanding of her has been enormously expanded and shaped by the hundreds and hundreds of women who write to me or who I have met over the course of 30 years of teaching memoir workshops for women. At the core of her themes and obsessions are the mind, and I would never claim otherwise.

She is a person who strives to create a happy family, whatever that may be. That was the case with me too. And like me, she did not come from such a family. I always said I would create a happy family even if it cost us our lives – and it practically did (laughs).

Q In the new book, she struggles with how to be a mother to her adult children and often ends up feeling like she has let someone down.

A Over the decades that the two books span, she grapples with questions that are always central to my work. What is a good parent? What is a good mother? There is actually a chapter that I believe is called “The Definition of a Good Mother” that I shared on Facebook in honor of Mother’s Day. And the bottom line is that there is no such thing.

Or who can say? No mother is good enough. Whatever we do, there is so much we haven’t done. It’s a kind of failure that’s built into the job.

Q What inspired you to draw on so many of your own experiences when writing your first book?

A In a way, it’s a story I’ve told over and over again at different stages of my life, and each time it’s changed. Marriage, parenting, family, love, relationships between parents and children, men and women. That’s always been in my books. So what’s changed is not so much my themes, but myself.

I actually published a book called “Where Love Goes” in the ’90s, 30 years ago. It was about a divorced woman who was a single mother in a small town in New Hampshire. A lot of the same problems, but that was me at 40. I saw things very differently, I think. I wrote the book that I would have loved to read when I was 35 or 40.

Q What has changed for you in recent years that has influenced the Eleanor books?

A After my marriage ended, I had a really good marriage in my late 50s, with a man who was also divorced and had raised three children. We had only been married a year when he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. We fought with all our might to save him, but it was impossible. He died almost eight years ago.

It was only after Jim died, I think, after I had experienced the great fire, that I was able to look back at the things that had previously seemed like troubles to me. And that seemed insurmountable or simply unbearable. And I saw them quite differently.

I didn’t start right away. It’s not like Jim died and I started writing Count The Ways. Jim died and I started writing my memoir The Best of Us, which is about finding and losing my very good partner. But that was really the genesis of my reconsideration – you could say an old story, but I would say just a classic story of love and loss and surviving life in a very different stage of life. With forgiveness.

Q How soon after “Count the Ways” did you start “How the Light Gets In”?

A I actually spent a whole year thinking about what should happen next in her life. I didn’t want the answer to be some wonderful man, some perfect guy, to come galloping along on his stallion and save her. She had to go her own way. I knew I wanted to give her a really great love affair, but I didn’t want the love affair to be the be-all and end-all.

Q They take the book up to the year 2024 and make reference to numerous real-life events.

A I didn’t know that Donald Trump would be put on trial, but I could already guess some things.

Q Tell me how you incorporate current events into your work, something you did with The Die For and more recently with your novella The Influencer.

A I think I could go back even further, over 50 years to my very first article about my childhood that I published in the New York Times. I have always been fascinated by the intersection between our personal lives, our individual stories, and what is going on in our world, and particularly in the United States of America.

That piece became my book, “Looking Back,” you know. I see the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan Show, a night I remember. And of course the Kennedy assassination. And of course the Vietnam War. Every now and then someone criticizes my work and says, “I love your work, but why does it have to be political?”

Our lives are political. How could I have let Eleanor live her life in the fall of 2016 without addressing the election? Whatever her views were? It was an event that shaped our lives. Or COVID, or the January 6 insurrection.

Q I was impressed by the empathy you show for Ursula’s husband Jake, who drifts into a conspiracy theory and shows up at the Capitol on January 6th.

A I think that’s crucial, not just for Jake, but for every character. It’s my sacred duty, so to speak. My job is to develop empathy for every single character. Part of the function of memoirs and novels is to help us understand the world better.

I’ve been thinking a lot about Alice Munro (the Nobel Prize winner who died in May) in recent days. These stories have expanded our understanding of what it means to be human. So, yes, I didn’t want to put up a cardboard Trumpster. That would have been very easy. But I wanted to imagine what got him to that place, and I think if you read the book you’ll know what it is.

Q I wanted to ask you how important music is in your books. I have a CD with the soundtrack to Where Love Goes, which was the first book I can remember that had a playlist printed in it, 30 years ago, and a CD soundtrack with Townes Van Zandt, Steve Earle, Aimee Mann and people like that. I still have it.

A I love listening to that! It was an idea whose time hadn’t come yet. When I write, I regularly play music that puts me in the right mood for the book, and I even create a sort of playlist for each of my characters. I don’t play music when I write; I couldn’t possibly do that. I play it beforehand. In the case of Where Love Goes, it’s this heartbreaking novel, so I played these heartbreaking Americana songs. I lost my shirt off on that project, but I had a good time.

There’s a lot of John Prine in this book, who I loved. Musicians that I love become characters in my life too. They’re in my house too, and when John Prine died, which was in April 2020, when COVID hit, it was very real to me. And of course I reacted like Eleanor. She had lost a friend.

Q In the author’s note on the music you also mention the deaths of Sinead O’Connor and Leonard Cohen.

A If I had the choice, I probably would have been a singer-songwriter. But I tried to make my books my songs.

Q You can use more words than in a song.

A I use more words, but I want to make you cry (she laughs).