Joyce’s Comments (group member since Aug 23, 2013)

Joyce’s comments from the Ask Joyce Maynard - Friday, September 20th! group.

Chrissi wrote: "Hi Joyce, I'm Chrissi and I'm a novelist too. I first read your book "At Home in the World," then picked it up again recently, around the time I published my own first novel. I really enjoyed you..."

Hi Chrissi

I love Marilyn Robinson , Alice Munro, Lorrie Moore. Joan Didion. Ann Beattie was an important early influence. And for the classics: Always Jane Austen.

Amy wrote: "Really enjoyed "After Her" and loved your memoir, "At Home in the World". Such a brave book. A question re: your most recent book in particular. You used the story of the murderer, the detective an..."

I didn't discuss the details with the sisters, in advance, but they gave me their blessing to write as I chose. The important part, for me, was remaining true to the spirit of their relationship with each other and with their father--a lovable but flawed man they adored. And to what it felt like to be eleven and thirteen, in that family, during those times.

Amy wrote: "Elyse wrote: "such beautiful comments --& questions --

I can't to read "After Her". You sure make it sound good, *Ti*! (I just ordered it from Amazon).

Does anyone know where to find the movie 'L..."

Opens Christmas day. Wide release in January. I love this movie.

Obsidian Blue wrote: "I really did enjoy Labor Day and The Good Daughters. Have you thought about revisiting any of these characters in future books?"

Hello O. B. : I miss all of my characters, once I'm finished with a novel. ANd maybe one day I'll revisit one or two of them. But my guess is that you can't go home again. I have these very intense times with my characters, and in most cases it's probably best if I didn't try to replicate that feeling again. I will definitely keep writing , though.

Elyse wrote: "such beautiful comments --& questions --

I can't to read "After Her". You sure make it sound good, *Ti*! (I just ordered it from Amazon).

Does anyone know where to find the movie 'Labor Day' in t..."

The Labor Day movie comes out on Christmas Day in some cities, and will be released more widely in Jan 2014. It's a terrific movie.

here's a trailer:

http://www.comingsoon.net/films.php?i...

Billur wrote: "Hi joyce.. First of all sorry for my english, because i am from turkey..but i thing it will be enough to describe my feelingss.. When i get this invitation, i get so very suprised and appreciated t..."

Hi Billar

You are the very first Turkish reader I ever heard from . So, thank you for writing to me. And your English is MUCH better than my Turkish. (I understand you perfectly. )

It's always a frustrating thing with translations of my work that I can't read the books myself to know whether the writing still sounds like my voice. (Though I HAVE read some of the french translations, and love them.)

I am consulted about the title in translation, however. In the case of Labor Day, the title had to be changed because the Labor Day holiday does not exist in many other countries where the novel was translated. With Good Daughters, I'm not sure why the title had to be changed, but i believe i did give approval to the one they chose.

Which one do you prefer?

Ti wrote: "Hello!! I just finished After Her and what struck me, is the genuine closeness of the two sisters in the book. Their fierce love of one another is something that still resonates with me and I finis..."

Hi Ti

I'm the younger of two sisters. We love each other a lot, but have never been close like the two sisters in my novel (who are based on two real women, as you may know.)

I chose to write about the sister relationship here specifically because what these two sisters have struck me as so moving and beautiful--and rare. I wanted to get to live with that for a while,and every day when I got up and started writing about these two girls, it was as if I got to know their lives for a while. I loved that part of After Her.

My own sister, Rona Maynard, is also a writer, in Canada. You can read an interesting article we published together in MORE magazine a few years back about our relationship. We were each asked tow write about our sister. Writing this --and reading what my sister had to say --actually brought us a lot closer, I think. Because our relationship has not been easy.

http://www.more.com/relationships/att...

And if you'd like to hear from the real women whose story inspired After Her, here they are:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SZmyOr...

Elyse wrote: "I was deeply emotionally invested in the story 'Labor Day'...
Then again in, "The Good Daughters". (I've a desire to read more books by you).
I love your writing, your stories, your heart, your pa..."

I do sometimes teach in the Bay area, Elyse. Nothing scheduled at the moment, but there probably will be soon, and if you register your email address at my website (www.joycemaynard.com) you'll receive an announcement next time it happens. And just so you know, NONE of my workshops , including the week at Lake Atitlan in Guatemala every winter, and in Maine in the summers, and at my bay area home, is designed just for longtime writers with professional aspirations. I love to work with writers of all levels. (Always on memoir . I like to begin with the story you know better than anyone.)
And if you are an old fart, so am I. I will turn 60 in November. But I don't feel like an old fart so i bet you aren't one either.

Ann wrote: "Hi, Joyce! One of the things I love about your writing is the pacing--you're able to discuss characters doing day-to-day things without rushing off to the next bit of "action," but those casual mom..."

Oh, Ann. You've identified a central issue in my writing life. I am always so interested in what's going on in the world it's hard to remove myself long enough to write.

Sometimes I do this by just leaving home , renting a little cabin somewhere and holing up all by myself. A number of times in recent years I've been lucky enough to be accepted for an artist's residency (in NH--where I wrote Labor Day, in Wyoming--where I wrote The Good Daughters, and in Virginia--where I started After Her.

And I have a house on a lake in Guatemala where I go to write. (And once a year, I teach writing there for a week, to students who come to work with me on their own work. You can learn about this on my website, by the way. www.joycemaynard.com

Tara wrote: "Hi,Joyce,I have enjoyed reading your novels as well as seeing the film versions of them such as To Die For and the upcoming Labor Day. Are there plans for After Her to become a movie as well?"

I think After Her would make a terrific movie, Tara. No plans yet, but let's hope. (My novel The Usual Rules just got optioned for a film by the way. )

Pam wrote: "Have read your latest book (as I have those before it); am glad to be part of this book discussion, because there was one burning question I kept wondering: why don't we learn more about the moth..."

The mother is a fascinating character to me. You know they tell us to write about what we know, but in this case, I wanted to write about what I did NOT know. My own mother was a brilliant, inspiring, deeply loving woman who was so involved in my life that it sometimes seemed no boundaries existed between us. This was not a good thing, by the way--though not an uncommon one.

When I met Laura and Janet, the real sisters whose story inspired my novel, it was so clear that their own experience of growing up had been entirely different from mine in nearly every way. Their mother is not the mother in my novel. But one part that is has to do with the way their mother let them discover, for themselves, who they were and what they might want to become. Theirs was a childhood--like that of my characters, Patty and Rachel--with surprisingly little parental intervention. (One of the real sisters calls their experience "a Charlie Brown childhood"--meaning, parents not much in evidence, if at all.)

It's easy to view this as neglectful. And certainly, the characters in my novel get into some big trouble as a result. But they also possess this wonderful courage and sense of themselves, that took me a few more decades to acquire.

I will add here , though I don't say this outright in After Her, that the mother in the novel is proably suffering from clinical depression. People didn't talk about that in those days. But even in her sadness, the mother did something very wise: she let her daughters discover themselves.

There's a place near the end of the novel where Rachel bikes past a tennis court at a country club, where she watches a group of girls around her age, whose mothers are all over them--carrying their rackets, taking care of their water bottles, planning the next event in their lives. And she feels this sudden rush of love for her own mother, back home holed up with her library books, that she wasn't a mother like those women, though she so often longed for one like that.

This is what I believe too.

Cara wrote: "I absolutely love your writing. Your characters are so real to me and I enjoy how lyrical your prose is. I'm curious whether you follow a particular structure or use an outline before beginning eac..."

Many of my good friends who are writers DO outline their novels, Cara--or plan them out in a very detailed way. I don't. I like to create believable characters, put them in a situation, and see what they're going to do. I think I generally write pretty fast because I can't wait to find out, myself, what's going to happen. This is the truth.

Cordelia wrote: "Good evening, Joyce.

I really enjoyed reading Labor Day. I loved the 1980s setting in it and I just loved reading every minute of it. My question for you is were you surprised that a book you writ..."

Well, Cordelia, of course I was very happy the book was made into a movie, and even happier when I got to see the movie recently, and saw what a great job the director and cast have done bringing my novel to life. In one way, it wasn't surprising, because when I was writing Labor Day, it almost felt as though I was describing a movie I saw in my head already. Jason Reitman (the director) just made it real. Beautifully. I've seen the movie three times now, and I 've cried every time.

Labor Day opens on Christmas Day . The character of Adele will be played by Kate Winslet. The convict on the run is Josh Brolin. The way he makes pie in the movie is the way I make my pie. No coincidence there. I flew to the set and taught Josh how.

Hi wrote: "was writing your first book "looking back" difficult to write because of your young age? how did you get published so darn early? also, could you tell us more about your life in the 60s?"

Well, to understand how I wrote that book so young (I was 18) you'd have to know about the family I grew up in. We didn't play sports. We didn't take vacations to Disneyland, or anyplace else for that matter. We WROTE. From the age of three or four, even before I could physically write, I was making up stories and my mother was typing them. and then....EDITING. I've worked with some brilliant editors in my 40 years as a writer, but none to equal my mother.

This was a pretty high pressured way to grow up. But it definitely made me a writer. I was submitting my stories to Seventeen Magazine from around age 13. And at 17, I wrote a letter to the New York Times, suggesting that I should write for them. Interestingly, the editor in chief wrote back and gave me an assignment. That led to my first book.

I did NOT replicate this kind of training with my own three kids, by the way. And I do not recommend it, though I am grateful to my parents for giving me the tools to do something I love.

You can read the story in At Home in the World. And I hope you do.

Cathie wrote: "Hi Joyce. You just met my son at a publisher's event up here in Toronto and he got you to sign a copy of your book. I wanted to say Thank you in your genoristy of taking the time and the effort y..."

Hi , Cathie. Different books of mine have presented different kinds of challenges. After Her, for instance, had the most complex STORY of any novel I've written. It took me months of waking up in hte middle of the night and pacing around , standing out on my deck looking at the mountain, to figure out how my two young girl characters, Rachel and Patty--who I came to love--would get out of that confrontation with the killer on the mountain. (I knew I didn't want some big strong man with a gun to come along to rescue them. I wanted them to save themselves. And when I finally came up with my solution--which was inspired by a game the two real sisters actually used to play, by the way--I just burst out laughing, it felt so funny, and so perfectly like what those two would actually have done.

But the hardest book to write--emotionally--was definitely my memoir, At Home in the World. It tells a painful story from my own young years--one I have been much criticized for telling. I'm deeply proud of At Home in the World , and it has just been re-released , with a new preface by me. I think readers of my novels would like this one a lot, and hope you take a look.

(And say hello to your son for me!)

Claudine wrote: "Hi Joyce, I really enjoyed After Her. I was curious about two things: Did the My Sharona song really have the hidden meanings that you bring up in the book? If that was common knowledge, I misse..."

Hi Claudine. When I'm writing a novel, I like to choose music to play as I write (or BEFORE my writing day begins) to get me in the mood for my story, and since this novel begins in the summer of 1979, I decided to seek out music my characters would have listened to . That summer , My Sharona was #1.

Now, I never really thought much about the lyrics of My Sharona until I revisited the song when I was writing the novel. I was a little surprised , myself, at how sexual it felt. There's something driving, obsessed, hungry about those lyrics that seemed to conjure the mood I was looking for.

I will tell you a story about the song. Early on in my writing, I had included lyrics in my novel, but my editor suggested that I take them out, because purchasing the rights to quote the lyrics would be prohibitively expensive. I kept on resisting taking out those lyrics. They just BELONGED there.

Meanwhile, I had gone away for the winter, to write, and rented out my house. (This house sits on Mt. Tamalpais, by the way. The setting for my novel). The man who'd rented my house turned out to be a musician. It was the day I was supposed to take out the song lyrics, but I was standing in my kitchen with my tenant and we got to talking about music, and I asked him what kind of music he played and if he'd played with anyone I might have heard of . He said "Well, I sometimes played with The Knack." Meaning, the band responsible for My Sharona.

"Did you know Doug Fieger?" I asked him. (This was the band's lead singer, who died a couple of years earlier. Way too young.)

"He died in my arms," said my tenant. "I'm having dinner with his sister tomorrow night."

So he put me in touch with Doug Fieger's sister, and with Berton Averre, the lead guitarist for the band. I wrote them a letter about my novel, and why the song mattered so much. And they let me use it in After Her.

It's a wonderful song. Simple and unforgettable. And it brings you right back to 1979.



Rob wrote: "Hi, Joyce. I'm curious about the process you go through in writing and revising your work. Are you a meticulous first-draft writer, or do you just try to get your ideas on the page? How many rev..."

Rob wrote: "Hi, Joyce. I'm curious about the process you go through in writing and revising your work. Are you a meticulous first-draft writer, or do you just try to get your ideas on the page? How many rev..."

Hello Rob. Depends on the novel. My novel , Labor Day, seemed to come out in a single breath. I wrote it in twelve days and changed very little after that, and it felt almost as if I were taking dictation from my narrator, the thirteen year old boy. But writing After Her was a much longer process. It took me almost two years. Not so much because I was revising the writing, as because the story and the plot required so much thought.


Cynthia wrote: "Welcome to the group! Joyce will be answering questions throughout the day on Friday, September 20th in this thread only. In the meantime if you have a question for Joyce or just want to introduce ..."

Hello, Elyse. As a writer, one of the things I always wish is that I could SEE a reader reading one of my books. (That's one reason why I love to give readings. ) So it's a particular pleasure hearing this from you. The line you quoted is a favorite of mine, too. I feel I can say this without being full of myself because, honestly, it feels as if the one who wrote it was the character of Rachel, more than me.