Gone too soon
When Joyce Maynard meets her second husband Jim on Match.com (her username, “Likesred shoes,” his, “Jimbunctious”), she is in her late 50s and has been living alone for more than 20 years. She’d grown accustomed to her autonomy, she recounts in her poignant new memoir, “The Best of Us,” and it takes her a while to fully open her heart to Jim, to commit to the idea of a serious relationship. Still, it’s clear there is a connection between the two from the start — their first conversation lasts 4½ hours over the phone, during which Jim talks about “real things,” not sticking to the usual Internet-dating scripts Maynard has become familiar with. “From the first day we spoke,” writes Maynard, “he told me the truth about himself. I did the same.”
Maynard’s truth-telling has made her a polarizing figure over the years, both adored and reviled. Upon the release of her 1998 memoir about her relationship with J.D. Salinger (whom she never names in “The Best of Us”), Maynard writes, “just about every critic in America condemned not just my book but me.” After she made the agonizing decision to relinquish her two adopted Ethiopian daughters in 2011, she discovered online that her last name had been “employed as a verb whose meaning appeared to be ‘to abandon an adopted child.’ As in, ‘she Maynarded her “daughters.’ ” About a third of the way into the book, a year into their marriage, Jim is diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, and Maynard devotes herself full time to finding the best possible outcome. In a moment of overwhelm, she posts a long, heartfelt note on Facebook about her struggles as a caregiver, and receives many messages of gratitude from people who had been in her position, but also messages from people “who expressed shock and anger over what I’d written. For a woman whose husband was suffering a life-threatening illness to admit to resentment or even just frustration was unacceptable.”
Maynard does her best to brush off such vitriol, confident that sharing her most painful stories will help others feel less alone in their own dark times, but she can be equally hard on herself. Jim’s acceptance and love soften her, and their arduous journey through his cancer make her “a sadder but kinder person, and certainly a more forgiving one.” She also finds that some of the traits that been her “least attractive in some other context” — her tendency to be “pushy, demanding, relentless” — serve her and Jim well as she doggedly searches for the best doctors and treatments for her husband.
“Husband” is a word Maynard finds hard to embrace early in their marriage, but she comes to cherish it, to allow Jim into the very center of her heart. “I — the woman who had called herself a solo operator for twenty-five years, now saw myself as so inextricably linked to the man I had married that there was no way he could suffer from cancer without my doing the same,” she writes. Many words in her lexicon change definition over the course of Jim’s illness — “good news” comes to mean being well enough for major surgery; “normal” means something very different in stage four than it did at the time of diagnosis. Maynard’s desires change over time, as well. “All the things we’d hungered for at other stages in our lives — success, money, beauty, passion, adventure, possessions — were immaterial,” she writes. “Breathing would be enough. Getting to walk down our road together, and come in after to share a meal. That, and ending up in the same bed every night with our arms around each other. What more did two people need?”
Maynard writes that she would often say, “If only ... you could learn the lessons of cancer without having cancer.” “The Best of Us” offers those very lessons, reminding readers to let go of superficial concerns and embrace a deeper appreciation for our lives and the people in them. This book will also, as per Maynard’s hopes, help others feel less alone on their own journeys of illness and loss. Perhaps with “The Best of Us,” “Maynard” will come to have new definitions: Maynard (verb) 1. To find love later in life. 2. To do anything possible to help a loved one in crisis. 3. To let oneself be changed by love. 4. To write movingly about it all.
Gayle Brandeis’ memoir, “The Art of Misdiagnosis: Surviving My Mother’s Suicide,” will be published by Beacon Press in November. Email: books@ sfchronicle.com