THE BEST OF US
By Joyce Maynard; Bloomsbury USA (448 pages, $17.81)
Joyce Maynard has built much of her literary career on the subject of her own life. “The Best of Us,” her most recent memoir, is the most moving chapter of that life yet.
Half fairy-tale romance, half a grim record of devastating grief, “The Best of Us” recounts how Maynard met and married the man of her dreams decades after she gave up on love—and then, less than two years after their wedding, lost him to pancreatic cancer, one of the most savage varieties of that disease.
Maynard’s life has been well-examined. She gained fame early with an essay in the New York Times called “An Eighteen-Year-Old Looks Back at Life.” For years she wrote a popular syndicated
newspaper column based on her experiences as a wife, mother, reporter and novelist. In 1998 she published “At Home in the World,” a hugely controversial account of her brief relationship (she was 18, he was 53) with “Catcher in the Rye” author J.D. Salinger.
“The Best of Us” finds her in her late 50s. She had married in her 20s, raised three children and made a home she loved, but the marriage ended in a bitter divorce. Focused on her professional life, she has had a number of relationships over the years, but she doubts she’ll ever feel lightning strike again.
She meets many of the men she dates in that most 21st century fashion: on Match. com. Some of them are disasters (as she comically recounts), but then there’s Jim Barringer. A San Francisco estate lawyer, a long-divorced father of three children he aches to be closer to, a handsome guy who loves fast cars and rock ‘n’ roll, he sweeps her off her feet, and the feeling is mutual.
Early in their relationship, Maynard writes, they celebrate her 58th birthday. “Jim took me out for dinner in San Francisco. Driving across the Golden Gate Bridge in his silver Porsche past the palace of the Legion of Honor, the gold dome of City Hall, the Opera, I saw our life before us like the glittering waters on San Francisco Bay, dotted with sailboats. Here was the life I had dreamed I would know one day—the picture I’d constructed over my many years alone of what a perfect relationship would look like. Music and dancing, good meals and a drive home with the top down, to climb into bed. We were tourists in the country of love.”
They move in together, and it’s great. They marry, and it’s better. And then Jim sees a doctor about a nagging back pain and is diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. Maynard writes, “How does a person describe the moment her world ends? I felt it in my heart, as real as a knifepoint going in.”
The mostly joyful tone of the book’s first half pivots as the realities of cancer overwhelm them. Pancreatic cancer is extremely difficult to treat; even when it’s discovered early, which is rare, the fiveyear survival rate is about 12 percent. Barringer’s cancer is found relatively early, which makes him a candidate for something called the Whipple procedure, a grueling and extremely complex surgery (his will take 14 hours) that itself has a high rate of complications and death. But for Maynard and Barringer it becomes their greatest hope—even if simply getting him well enough to have the surgery requires a regimen of chemotherapy and other treatments that leaves them reeling.
For Maynard, finding a way to beat the cancer becomes a full-time job. She obsessively researches doctors, hospitals, medications and clinical trials. She finds a pancreatic cancer survivor group (a pitifully small one) for Jim to attend; she finds herbal treatments and macrobiotic diets; they even take one doctor’s advice to “eat good dirt.”
Barringer, with her help, tries to cram as much living as he can into what time he has left. They travel, they ride his motorcycle, they spend time with friends and family. But the sicker he gets, the more often that pursuit of great experiences has dire consequences. A climb up a mountain in Chile is exhilarating, but a sip of creek water on the way back leads to infection with the bacteria cryptosporidium. For her it’s a day of stomach upset; for him it’s a life-threatening event that could delay or cancel the Whipple. And it’s just one of multiple severe infections to come.
As the book descends into the nightmare world of Barringer’s hospitalizations and side effects and physical and mental decline, Maynard does not spare the reader. She describes it all in detail, as vividly as she described their golden romance. But amid all that darkness and pain, she shows us her husband’s courage and humor and determination.
Just weeks before his death, failing fast and in hospice care, he insists on attending a Bob Dylan concert at the Greek Theatre, an outdoor venue in Berkeley. “I’m taking Joyce on a date,” he tells friends. He has to watch Dylan’s performance from a wheelchair, but he dresses to the nines and stays for the whole show, monitored by nurses. Then Maynard takes him home: “He did not leave his bed again.”
“The Best of Us” is not a romance with a fairy-tale happily ever after, but it is a love story, bravely lived and told.