Literary Birthday – 5 November – Joyce Maynard

Happy Birthday, Joyce Maynard, born 5 November 1953.

Quotes

1. I do not outline. There are writers I know and count as my friends who certainly do it the other way, but for me, part of the adventure is not knowing how it’s going to turn out.
2. Those who rhapsodise about the ease and joy of childhood have perhaps forgotten what it’s like to be 12 years old.
3. To share our stories is not only a worthwhile endeavour for the storyteller, but for those who hear our stories and feel less alone because of it.
4. You write about what you know, and you write about what you want to know.
5. It’s sad but true that if you focus your attention on housework and meal preparation and diapers, raising children does start to look like drudgery pretty quickly. On the other hand, if you see yourself as nothing less than your child’s nurturer, role model, teacher, spiritual guide, and mentor, your days take on a very different cast.
6. The big dramas that fascinate me are the quiet ones that happen behind closed doors in so-called ordinary families.
7. A good home must be made, not bought. In the end, it’s not track lighting or a sun room that brings light into a kitchen.
8. There was so much to remember, sometimes the best thing was to forget.
9. It was as if I’d been in the middle of a book that I had to put down when I got too tired to keep reading, or a video put on pause. I wanted to pick back up with the story and find out what happened to the characters, except that the characters were us.
10. The silence was part of the story I wanted to tell.
11. The painter who feels obligated to depict his subjects as uniformly beautiful or handsome and without flaws will fall short of making art.
12. It troubles me that people speak about writing for money as ugly and distasteful.

Joyce Maynard is an American novelist and journalist. She began her career in journalism in the 1970s, and her career as a novelist with the publication of her first novel, Baby Love in the 1980s. Her second novel, To Die For was adapted into the 1995 film of the same name.  She has also written a memoir, At Home in the World.  Other titles include Labor Day, which was  adapted for film, After Her, and Under the Influence.

Source for image

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Joyce_maynard_2010.jpg

Larry D. Moore, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

 by Amanda Patterson

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