Love, loss and writing
Joyce Maynard chronicles late romance and becoming a widow
A boisterous puppy named Jolene beats her master up the driveway, greeting a visitor with a combination of jumps and face licks. Joyce Maynard, wearing a bright red tunic, her trademark Converse sneakers, jeans and a radiant smile, is as welcoming as her border collie-Lab.
Within minutes, the prolific author of “Labor Day” and “To Die For” is rummaging in her pantry for black tea amid a racket of rooster crowing outside her Lafayette home.
In her rambling house, Maynard has been catching her breath between weeks of appearances for her latest book, “The Best of Us,” in which she chronicles a Match.com-made romance with the man who became her husband and left her a widow after a harrowing struggle with cancer.
Though she moved to the Bay Area 20 years ago (first to a house on Mount Tamalpais in Mill Valley), when asked where she’s from, Maynard, 63, still says New Hampshire. She spent the summer in the
Granite State at a lake cottage she bought sight unseen because she enjoys swimming and prefers quiet when writing.
Her Hunsaker Canyon home in the East Bay was built in the 1970s and features an open kitchen and an expansive first floor lined with books and moody paintings by her father, Max Maynard.
But the land the house sits on is most seductive, 7 acres dotted with succulents, live oaks, flowerpots, patio, garage, barn and a second house, where her late husband had his office.
Jim Barringer, a San Francisco lawyer, professional photographer and astute bass player, died at home in June last year after battling pancreatic cancer for 19 months.
Pointing out the pergola where wisteria was blooming when the couple found the bucolic property in 2014 (just three months before Barringer’s diagnosis), Maynard says she’ll always love the place. Buying the house together “symbolized where we were. We felt young. We were just starting out.”
Beyond the chicken coop, set back on the sunny lawn, sits an old-time “gypsy caravan” trucked across the Rocky Mountains from New Hampshire. The tiny caravan, jauntily decorated with crystal lamps, vintage teapots, a hand-crank record player and patchwork quilts, is an example of impulsiveness that her husband did not contest. As with the BMW M3 he purchased when he was sick, Maynard encouraged it even if leasing was more practical. “It was my vote of confidence,” she says.
The two met online, each divorced with three grown children, and of a like mind-set to do away with pretenses. Though they were opposites (“I was this thrift-shop girl; he was a very elegant person”), the relationship was passionate and honest, and when they married in 2013, he was the “first true partner I had ever known.”
Maynard compares Barringer’s cancer diagnosis to “a grenade exploding.” The only writing she did after that traumatic moment was an essay for the New York Times about the day in a Boston hospital where he was undergoing a 14-hour surgery called the Whipple procedure. “We still had hope at that point, which wasn’t a completely rational position,” she says. “But it was what kept us going.”
Life was so packed with caregiving, medical appointments, medicine-taking and trips to the emergency room that “mold formed on my coffee cup because I didn’t go back to my desk.” Deadlines were missed. A book tour for “Under the Influence” (Maynard’s ninth novel) was canceled.
“That represented the first time in my adult life that I have not been writing. I didn’t know I was capable of not writing,” she says, adding that the change cut both ways. “This was as painful to Jim as any medical procedure, seeing what became of my writing life during the period of his illness. He said, ‘I’ve destroyed your career.’ ”
But even if there had been extra hours in the day, Maynard says all she could muster were Facebook posts. “My mind was elsewhere; my heart was elsewhere.”
When their doctor told them no more treatments were available, Maynard turned to her vast Facebook community, people she never met but who were sustaining her. “I tried to imagine the most magical potion . ... What I came up with was the breast milk of newly delivered women.” Three women responded, FedExing on dry ice vials of 72-hour colostrum. When one package arrived, Maynard “took a picture of Jim beaming, downing it like a shot of whiskey he would have had at Tadich’s in other days.”
It would be easy to drive oneself crazy going over all the forks in the road, choosing the Whipple, the fecal transplant, the seven rounds of chemotherapy, the three of radiation, hours spent in a hyperbaric chamber, Maynard says. “We were going through the densest forest. We were hacking through the brambles. And wherever we turned there was another complication.”
Being “a very dogged, pushy, tenacious person” might not have always been easy on the marriage, but worked in their favor in this case as she relentlessly researched treatments and clinical trials regardless of location or cost. They tried macrobiotic diets, herbal remedies, vitamin supplements, pot, organic vegetables grown by a Petaluma farmer and dropped off for her at Chez Panisse.
Maynard, who once resisted the label “wife,” said she’ll try to get used to the word “widow.” She speaks to audiences about looking death “square in the eye” and the painful fact that if you’re “lucky enough to live long enough,” you’ll lose people you love. The incessant storyteller believes in shining a light on difficult topics.
In her memoir “At Home in the World,” first published in 1998, she did just that, describing her “boot camp” upbringing with an overbearing mother — a Radcliffe doctoral graduate and journalist, who taught her to “write the way you speak” — and a creative, alcoholic father. Even though it was 45 years ago when Maynard lived that isolated existence with celebrated novelist J.D. Salinger in Cornish, N.H., he remains a subject of fascination for others. “My mother was a much more powerful force in my life. People say you must have learned so much about writing from him.” One thing she did learn from “The Catcher in the Rye” author was restrictive diets. Eating disorders are a theme in Maynard’s fiction. “If you read every one of my novels, you would know about every one of my obsessions.”
An emotional slideshow (found on JoyceMaynard.com) show “Jim and Joyce” singing at their New Hampshire wedding, and Barringer on their mountain-climbing honeymoon, with camera, with guitar, with cigar, with his Triumph Bonneville, admiring art, playing pingpong, lines in his handsome face becoming more defined before his death at age 64.
While Maynard mined her heartbreak for the chapters of her book, she also filled its pages with funny anecdotes about the dynamics of two set-in-their-ways people living together after so many years of being on their own. Her initial vision of marriage: “I’ll have my great life; he’ll have his.”
Eventually they merge households, argue over furniture styles, share closets or not, and go on road trips in France, Chile, Hungary, Guatemala (where Maynard teaches memoir writing), Mexico, New England, New York and the Owens Valley in the eastern Sierra (though by this time, they have an IV pole in tow).
She admits she probably was too independent and judgmental in the beginning. “If only you could have the lessons of cancer without cancer,” she says, hoping the new book is perceived as “a love story, an exploration into the meaning of marriage ... it’s not the worst thing to fall in love and lose the person. The worst thing is not to fall in love.”