Domestic Affairs
Maynard, Joyce
Joyce Maynard is not popular with the journalism set. All the reviews I've read of her book were unfavorable, and that's not the half of it. Reporters, columnists, editors—practically everyone who...
...Feminist assertiveness training isn't what she has in mind...
...The truth is, I like and feel at home in kitchens, I enjoy stitching doll clothes and sewing colored plastic animal buttons on children's cardigans—and certainly I love to cook...
...Your independence vanishes overnight, and so does much of your free time and discretionary income...
...This wasn't just the normal journalists' envy of someone who's more famous, either...
...Sometimes I focus on all the ways they've made my life harder, all the things they keep me from doing...
...The next day, she takes her daughter by her old apartment in Manhattan...
...She gets to run off to England to interview Elvis Costello for an article or spend a day with Christa McAuliffe, the schoolteacher who was later killed in the Challenger disaster...
...Maynard and her husband drive to New York for the wedding of friends...
...You could stand on the balcony and see the Empire State Building, in red, white, and blue that year, for the bicentennial," she writes, as if yearning for her unmarried days...
...Women tend to be even harsher critics of Maynard...
...At 23, Maynard quit her job as a reporter for the New York Times, got married, and moved to New Hampshire to raise a family...
...And her attention to the meaningless details of family life—the brand names of toys, for example—is often cloying...
...She doesn't use the word "unfashionable" lightly...
...Only the recognition, felt, I think, by anybody who's been married a while, of how hard it is for two people to build a life together and how much more than love is required to make it endure...
...At the reception, a dressed-for-success woman of 30, who is a top account executive for an advertising firm, pulls Maynard aside and asks, "How do you do it...
...drive her from the kitchen and garden...
...Maynard has been writing about herself since her teens, starting with a spokeswoman-for-her-generation piece in the New York Times Magazine twenty years ago...
...The first is that having children alters your life dramatically and in ways you don't expect or even desire...
...And she defends the change...
...She joined a protest movement, and it changed her outlook...
...Nevertheless, she adds, "I wasrelieved to discover how nearly painless it felt to get into our old car and head for home...
...At times, she seems downright obsessed with herself and her feelings...
...I concede there is a lot to dislike...
...How much children put one through, and how much their presence in one's life enlarges one's capacity to withstand it," Maynard says...
...When the truth is, of course, they also make possible everything that's best...
...Maynard makes a startling confession that will get her no brownie points with Gloria Steinem...
...Her best vignette—vignettes from Maynard's life with her husband and three kids is what this book consists of—reveals how untrendy she is...
...Worse, by the end of this chronicle of motherhood, she'd gotten political...
...What I feel when I hear the story of those marriages, is never the lofty superiority of one who has it all sewn up herself," she writes...
...No wonder serial monogamy is so popular...
...But "having a child changes everything," Maynard writes...
...DOMESTIC AFFAIRS: ENDURING THE PLEASURES OF MOTHERHOOD AND FAMILY LIFE Joyce Maynard/Times Books/$17.95 Fred Barnes U.S....I Stamm THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 1987 47...
...This was real hostility that transcended ideology, politics, gender, and religion...
...The third theme is that holding a marriage together, one marriage for life, is enormously worthwhile but very difficult...
...She turned out her autobiography at 19 (she's in her mid-30s now...
...W hat I admire about Maynard is that she bravely cuts against the grain of our culture...
...Moreover, life in the fast lane is tempting...
...A liberal political writer told me he wouldn't let her book in his house...
...They want kids, but only as an accoutrement...
...At least battling against nuclear testing and SDI didn't Fred Barnes is a senior editor of the New Republic...
...She has, Maynard writes, "a pretty unfashionable longing for family and home...
...She still writes, mostly for women's magazines...
...I will never become one of those people prepared to fast to the death for world peace, and I'll never make my children sit out in the rain all day with antinuclear placards, because it seems to me there's nothing left to fight for if, in the name of the cause, you sacrifice everything you love about your kids," she writes in a postscript...
...Hard to explain, she found, since the usual answers ("to enrich one's own existence through parenthood," etc...
...Okay, she's not a full-time mother...
...She was talking about my having made the choice of motherhood at the expense of career...
...The woman, says Maynard, "might have been talking about conquering Everest or kicking heroin, but in fact what she meant was having children, being a mother...
...I still bake pies and I will grow zinnias, only now I think those small pleasures seem more precious to me...
...aren't adequate...
...They want everything else to stay the same—no inconveniences...
...An editor for a conservative magazine said he quit reading Maynard's book in disgust when he got to the part about her grandmother...
...Maynard tells the sad story of another woman whose teenage son turns bad...
...Her second theme is that rearing children isn't easy, but that sacrificing for them makes your life better...
...Whew...
...She prefers "the rocky road, with no one book offering all the answers...
...Reporters, columnists, editors—practically everyone who noticed I was reading the book (I carried it around for several weeks) had unkind words for Maynard and her writing...
...Maynard, by the way, specifically rejects the Biblical idea that the husband is the head of the family...
...And she wasn't talking about the elaborate balancing act pulled off by so many successful New York professional women who manage to have children and a high-powered career too...
...Department of Energy plan to put a nuclear waste dump near her house in rural New Hampshire...
...What touched her off was a U.S...
...But that case is the exception...
...It's hard to find yourself living under the same roof with a person you'd have nothing to do with (I've heard her say) if you hadn't happened to give birth to him...
...She uses the word "I" with total abandon...
...For many couples, the rocky road means divorce...
...This is hardly news, but it's a notion that gives lots of people the willies...
...A perilous journey" is how she describesbringing up her kids...
...But her chief commitment is to being a mother and a wife...
...These two are male...
...What's it like...
...aynard explains three large themes in Domestic Affairs...
...The danger comes when a person invests too much of her identity in her pie crust (or her sewing, or, I suppose, her backhand) so that without these performances, at the stove or on the tennis court, she ceases to exist...
...That came on page 10...
...Her politics may be trendy, but her life-style is not...
Vol. 20 • November 1987 • No. 11
