Joyce Maynard came to national attention in 1972 for her New York Times cover story, “An Eighteen Year Old Looks Back on Life,” published when she was a first-year student at Yale. She has since established herself as an illustrious writer, with stints as a reporter and columnist for the Times and as a syndicated newspaper columnist whose “Domestic Affairs” column appeared in more than 50 papers. She has written 18 books, including fiction, memoirs, essay collections and true crime. In her latest novel, “How the Light Gets In,” Maynard writes about protagonist Eleanor’s journey back to the New Hampshire farm, after her former husband Cam’s death, where they raised their three children. Al lives in Seattle with his wife, Ursula in Vermont with her husband and two children and Toby, who suffered a traumatic brain injury in childhood, at home. “How the Light Gets In” is a sort-of sequel to “Count the Ways,” Maynard’s book about the family decades earlier, though it stands independently, taking place between 2010 and 2024 against a uniquely American backdrop. “How the Light Gets in” came out June 25, and Maynard speaks at Porter Square Books on Wednesday. We interviewed her Tuesday; her words have been edited for length and clarity.
What made you want to write a sequel to “Count the Ways?” Was a sequel always the plan?
It was absolutely not the plan! I have never written a sequel to a book before, and when I finished “Count the Ways,” I thought I was saying goodbye to my characters, same as I always do. But I started to get letters from readers, and there was a common thread that while people loved the book, it also made them angry. At least 11 people spoke of throwing the book on the ground because they were just so frustrated by the main character Eleanor’s repeated sacrifice for everyone else in her family and her failure to meet her own needs as a result. They weren’t wrong, but it’s not always the job of an author to portray characters making wise choices and doing what they should; I try to portray life as it is, and what Eleanor did in prioritizing everyone but herself is something women in marriages and women raising children often do. But they didn’t want me to leave her there, so I decided that I would carry her into the next stage of life. She’s exactly my age, and while she’s not me, we certainly bear some similarities. I’m at the same place as she is: children gone, husband gone, and no choice but to look around and ask, Who am I? What might I need? It’s a new concept for her, in a way. That’s where the idea for the sequel came from, and after I decided to do it, I spent a whole year thinking about what I wanted to have happen in Eleanor’s life, which dovetailed with the questions I was asking myself about my own life. So no, no initial intention of writing a sequel. I actually almost don’t call it a sequel, but rather another stage in the story of a family, since you don’t need to read the first one to read the second.
What was it like to pick up with these characters again?
I loved it. This might sound a little crazy, but my characters are very real to me; they are like people in my family. I spend a great deal of time alone, but I don’t feel alone because I’m with my characters. Of course, there’s some characters I especially love, and one that’s top of that list – maybe my favorite character I ever wrote – is Eleanor’s youngest son, Toby, who suffered a brain injury in “Count the Ways” when he was not quite 5 years old. When we meet him in “How the Light Gets In,” he’s in his late 30s, and I love the man he is. His brain works differently, but he has the biggest heart and he has a kind of wisdom that I really honor. It was wonderful to get to tell the rest of his, and everyone else’s, stories.
Music is extremely present in this book: The title comes from a lyric in Leonard Cohen’s “Anthem,” and there’s a special nod to John Prine and Sinéad O’Connor, whose deaths coincided with the period in the novel. Why did you give music such a major role?
Music is just a big part of my life, and I think it’s a big part of lots of people’s lives. All kinds of cultural references populate my books, always, because as much as I think about my books as family stories, domestic stories, stories that take place in kitchens and living rooms and bedrooms, there is a cultural setting for all of that. There’s the stuff of our lives happening inside our houses, but what’s happening outside filters in, and music is certainly one example of that. Every book I’ve written has a different soundtrack, and when I get home from this book tour, I will finally get around to making a Spotify playlist of all the songs mentioned in the book and the songs that inspired me as I was writing it. I hope people can enjoy that alongside the book.
Likewise, there’s an injection of politics and cultural moments: The characters live through the 2016 election, the Jan. 6 insurrection attempt, the Covid pandemic, school violence.
In the same way the music filters into the stories I write, so too does America. I’m lucky that most of the reviews on Amazon and Goodreads and the like are really positive, but there have been people who say, “I love this book, but why did Joyce Maynard have to be so political?” My answer is that I cannot imagine writing a book set between the years 2010 to 2024 and not mentioning the presidency of Donald Trump, the Jan. 6 insurrection and all these other things that have rocked our world recently. It’s been a big part of our lives, so it’s been a big part of these characters’ lives too. I never want to make it too political, but I also can’t imagine making it nonpolitical.
How do you hope readers apply this lesson – of needing to have cracks to allow the light in?
I never set out to teach a lesson in my books, I set out to tell a really great story and to keep you up later than you intended. But that said, “Anthem,” and that lyric by Leonard Cohen – “There is a crack, a crack in everything/That’s how the light gets in” – really speaks to me at the age and stage of life I’m in now. When I was young, I sought a kind of perfection. I was always trying to throw the best birthday parties for my children, to be the best mother I could possibly be, to make the best pie or cake or whatever it was. I had this vision of trying to match my real life with the way I thought my life was supposed to go. In this fictional family, Toby does not turn out to be the son that Eleanor imagined he would be; neither does her oldest child, Al, who goes through a gender transition; and she has an extraordinarily painful estrangement from her beloved middle child, Ursula, which, of course, she did not expect either. These things weren’t in the plan, but like the Leonard Cohen song says, we can find beauty in imperfection, and actually maybe our greatest lessons lie there. Maybe the moments that make us the most human, the most compassionate and the most wise are not our moments of glory and triumph, but rather our moments of loss and challenge. Although some very hard things happen to Eleanor and her family in this story, I think it’s actually my most hopeful book. It’s a book about forgiveness, more than anything, so I hope readers can take that with them. And I hope it’s just plain a good story, too.
Joyce Maynard reads at 7 p.m. Wednesday from “How the Light Gets In” in conversation with Andre Dubus III at Porter Square Books, 25 White St., Porter Square, Cambridge. Free. Information is here.
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