Where are the grown-ups?

Zoë Heller

  • At Home in the World by Joyce Maynard
    Anchor, 345 pp, £7.99, August 1999, ISBN 1 86230 067 4
  • Dream Catcher by Margaret Salinger
    Scribner, 436 pp, £20.00, November 2000, ISBN 0 671 04281 5

J.D. Salinger, who is now in his early eighties, has spent the greater part of his life hiding out from the world on a hilltop in New Hampshire. Over the last half century, he has continued to write steadily, it seems, but to protect his reclusion he has refused to publish any of his work since 1968. Then – at the last minute, as it were – a former girlfriend, Joyce Maynard, a woman with whom Salinger had a nine-month relationship twenty-five years ago, decided to write a memoir of their affair – a memoir in which she details, among other things, his domestic, sexual and dietary quirks. And hard on her heels, his daughter Margaret has felt compelled to write a memoir also, indicting her father for the ‘cult-like’ conditions of her childhood.

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