Few writers have had more personal experience with holding on and letting go than bestselling author Joyce Maynard. Commissioned by The New York Times Magazine to write a cover story when she was still a freshman at Yale, she then dropped out to live with iconoclastic literary hermit J. D. Salinger. Over time, she bought a farmhouse in New Hampshire; reported for The New York Times; wrote a nationally syndicated column on families; married twice; moved to San Francisco; produced three memoirs, 10 novels, four children’s books and a true-crime thriller — and went back to Yale as a sophomore 48 years after she quit.
In her latest novel, Count the Ways, Maynard explores the struggle between the forces that connect and those that repel through the story of a marriage fractured by a horrific accident. In depicting a single family confronting the painful if essential truths of their past, she has produced an achingly poignant novel about home, love and forgiveness . . . of holding on and letting go.