Joyce Maynard, COUNT THE WAYS: A Novel

[1:08]Zibby Owens: This is Zippy Owens, and you're listening to the award winning podcast, Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books. I'm also the host of Moms Don't Have Time to Lose Weight, and I'm the editor of the anthology, which you should run out and buy, called Moms Don't Have Time to A Quarantine Anthology. All proceeds of that book go to COVID nineteen Vaccine Research. And I'm the editor in chief of Moms Don't Have Time to Write a New Publication on Medium, and we're accepting submissions, so please send your personal essays there. And if all that isn't enough, you can follow me on Instagram at Zibby Owens, and my website is zibbyowens.com. Okay. Now back to this amazing podcast. Listeners, if you enjoy this podcast, I promise you will love my new audiobook for moms don't have time to a quarantine anthology. It's not about the quarantine, but a lot of the essays were written during that time about other things that moms don't have time to do or other busy people, things like reading, eating, working out, breathing, having sex. And 60 bestselling and notable authors wrote essays. All those authors have been on this very podcast. So if you like to listen to my conversations, if you want to get to know these authors better, I read the audiobook myself. Check it out on Audible, Moms Don't Have Time to A Quarantine Anthology. Again, Audible audiobook. Go listen to it. It's like sixty minute podcasts. I hope you enjoy. Joyce Maynard is the author of Count the Ways, a novel. She's also the author of nine previous novels and five books of non fiction, as well as the syndicated column Domestic Affairs. Her best selling memoir At Home in the World has been translated into 16 languages. Her novels To Die For and Labor Day were both adapted for film. She currently makes her home in New Haven, Connecticut. Welcome, Joyce. Thank you for coming on Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books to discuss Count the Ways and I'm sure so much else. So Joyce, would you mind telling listeners what Count the Ways is about? Oh,

[3:06]Joyce Maynard: this really is the book. This is my tenth novel, Zibby, and I I said everything I wanted to say about falling in love and the great dream of making a family and a home. The characters are a pair of young, enormously idealistic artists who meet in the seventies. Same moment, probably not coincidentally, that I made the marriage to the father of my children. And they have three children, and they they make this sort of idyllic seeming life on a farm in the country. And they lose sight of each other, as as often happens, especially when you're raising one, two, three children and pulled in many directions. And a terrible tragedy occurs in the family, and I I won't say what it is. The the wife who is the central character, Eleanor, cannot see her way to forgiving her husband, and they they break apart, they break apart. So it's the story of a marriage and a family and a divorce and the survivors of that divorce. I'll never say that they stop being a family. They're always a family. And that's what I always felt in my own life after my own divorce when my children were quite young. I think that's an experience that you've known as well. So I really wanted, I had, my marriage ended thirty years ago. My children are very grown and out in the world. And I wanted with the distance of time, I wanted to look at what it meant. I wanted to honor that experience. I think so often we focus on the moment when the event occurs, but really for me, so much of the story lies in how we deal with it after. So it it goes from the novel starts in the late sixties when our character is a teenager, and it goes through 2009

[5:13]Zibby Owens: to the wedding of one of the children. Which by the way, I found so interesting that you had the wedding be a trans character and that Allie, her daughter, became Al. And the way you know, we don't read about characters who like that so much in fiction and certainly not necessarily from the point of view of the mother. So that I found that super interesting. And, you know, part of what I wanted to do, Zvi, was not write a book about

[5:39]Joyce Maynard: the experience of a child who transitions. That has not been an experience in my own life. I wouldn't feel qualified, but I want to populate my books with characters who have all kinds of situations and stories and not necessarily make the story be about that. So it's not about that. One of my children had, for his best friend in high school, a young woman who ultimately transitioned and became a really gloriously healthy and whole and and high functioning great young man, now a father of two children. So I'm not without some knowledge of this story. I wouldn't presume to write about it if I had none, and I was I talked a lot to him and his mother also, actually. But the book is full of all the kinds of things that happen over the course of a life. Parents who lose children, parents who drift apart, parents who have affairs with other people, Vietnam vets and opioid addicts. But it's about all of those things and none of those things. It's really about what we learn over time. I remember somebody saying to me once, if you live long enough, everything happens. Actually said it in Yiddish. I've lived long enough. I'm 67 years old. I was 23 when I married and those years are still very alive for me. I feel I have a lot to say to women who are still in it in that time of life from the perspective of somebody who was very much there and is now looking back. So what should we know? So much falls away. That's one of the things I want to say. I was, you know, in the days when I was raising my own three children, my daughter was born in 1978 and my youngest son in 'eighty four, there was no internet. I published for ten years a syndicated newspaper column called Domestic Affairs about the life of our family. And it's a piece of work I'm really proud of. It wasn't a sort of just cheerful funny stories about soccer moms and birthday parties. I tried to tell some essential truths about family life, many of which I revisited in Count the Ways. But over the course of those years, my marriage fell apart. My marriage ended and I had to keep telling that story. My mother died during those years. A lot happened. And at the time I was so raw. I actually stopped writing the column eventually because I had to be living my life, not talking about my life. But I was definitely angry and bitter and resentful of my children's father in all kinds of ways. And I look back now on that woman and I think she wasted way too much energy being, you know, being regretful about what hadn't worked. So this is very much Count the Ways is, is very much a novel about forgiveness. And as you might remember, it begins with a Hawaiian prayer that my, my daughter, my oldest child told me years ago. And she said, you know, if you're ever having difficulty with a person, I'm going just read it to you. I should just know it. But she said, say these four lines to the person with whom you're having difficulty in any order. You just have to mean it and there will be a shift. And the lines are, I'm sorry, I love you, thank you, please forgive me. I could not have spoken those words in 1989. I can say them now and I can recognize that I don't just need to forgive, I need to be forgiven, most of us too. So that's the wisdom of a 67 year old to a 35 year old, 40 year old, you name it. All the young women who were still in the midst of it and couldn't possibly have gotten to that place yet, but it would be my hope that you would, that they would.

[9:41]Zibby Owens: Well, thank you for the advice on behalf of everybody listening.

[9:46]Joyce Maynard: You know, I'm not a big advice When

[9:50]Zibby Owens: you said you had a lot to say, I thought I would ask you outright, but of course you do include so much of those insights in the book and in how you tell the story, how you even depict the different generations, the interactions, the regrets, the estrangement, even from the start with the grandmother who doesn't meet, who hadn't met her three year old daughter. And of course you're left wondering like, well, why? Like what's going on?

[10:14]Joyce Maynard: This is a story that I think hasn't been told and I'm seeing it more and more. One hat I wear is that I teach memoir. I mostly write. I've basically had one job for the last fifty years, which is writing books, writing books, essays, articles. But I do once a year teach a memoir workshop, a week long memoir workshop just for women in which they work with me on the stories of their lives. Women of all different levels, sometimes no previous writing experience. And more and more I am hearing the story. This is really painful. And I can't say that I'm without some personal experience of this too, of people who definitely weren't perfect mothers, but mothers who really tried, who did their best, who did all the stuff that, you know, we're told to do, who have become either somewhat or deeply or totally alienated from an adult child, usually a child in their late 20s, 30s. And it's not something that women typically talk because I think there's a lot of shame about that. What did I do wrong? It's always the mother's fault, isn't it? I've listening to these women and knowing, as I say, some of the struggles that I've gone through in my life as a parent of adult children now and children who were all, I'll say survivors of a difficult divorce, I don't know what an easy one is, I wanted to explore that situation too, among many others. I am the child of divorce,

[11:50]Zibby Owens: actually, and the grandchild of divorce, and now have been divorced So I'm I'm very well sort of steeped in the divorce rhetoric, if you will, and know some of the downfalls and the few perks that exist, having time to read more books and

[12:08]Joyce Maynard: Well, the other thing is that I think I mean, mothers get it in so many different directions as you know, but because we are responsible supposedly for absolutely everything, you know, if if our marriage failed, then whatever whatever bad things are gonna happen in our child's life is because of that. And the truth is bad things, difficult things, hard things are gonna happen no matter what. A big piece of this story is sort of, you know, the message of I mean, when I say forgiveness, forgive others, forgive yourself. During the years, the period when I was looking at square in the eye of divorce and terrified by what it would do, you know, would do anything for my children and I couldn't keep my marriage together, you know, what was that? And I would protect them from all these small hurts, you know, a lost Barbie shoe, I'd tear my house apart, which is something that I gave to my main mother character. Her daughter gets a crystal Barbie for her birthday and loses the shoe and the mother just kind of goes crazy. And I couldn't protect them from the worst pain they ever knew as children. During that period, there was a very popular bestselling psychologist who was on Oprah, Phil Donahue, all those shows at the time, who was basically setting forth the view that if you got a divorce, your children's story was written and it wasn't going to be a good one, not just immediately, but over years and decades. And that, of course, that was terrifying. That was like saying, you know, you're going to give your child cancer. I don't believe it. And when I look at the people that my own three children have become, I profoundly don't believe it. And I suspect you have some views on that too. Well, I remember,

[13:52]Zibby Owens: you know, the very moment when my parents told me they were getting divorced, I was 14, and they started citing all these statistics and that That's really helpful. I mean, they said at the time found that children of happy divorces were much more I can't remember exactly the term, but you're much better off being a child of a happy divorce than a than a child of an unhappy marriage. Wow. Was that helpful for you to use? I sure remember it.

[14:23]Joyce Maynard: Know, you probably remember one of the things that's very important to me in this book is the scene where the parents sit the children down on the couch and say they have something to tell them. And the children think they're gonna get baby goats. They think they're gonna have this wonderful adventure. And I, of course, remember my own true life experience of being the parent who delivered that news. You know, it's like, you know, you're going to throw cold water on their heads, but so much worse. But yeah, they're different people. They're stronger, more resilient people in some ways. And they're just, it's, and certainly they're two very distinct things. And one would be raising children in, you know, in a happy, loving household with a partner that you had a really good thing going with. And the other would be the, you know, the alternative of raising children in a household where there was enormous strain and tension and where love was not modeled very well. And when you said in the book that you hadn't even noticed,

[15:22]Zibby Owens: not you, sorry, Eleanor had not even noticed that her relationship with Cam had been falling by the wayside. Right? It was a side effect of the whole thing, and I think you referenced it a minute ago. But that she was so busy in the in the chaos, in the day to day that she didn't stop to see what was really lost. And then when you said a minute ago about all the busywork of Barbie Shoe, I mean, that's just so classic. Right? That we the perfectionism, you sometimes can't perfect a relationship, but you can perfect a playroom. Right? You can't protect.

[15:58]Joyce Maynard: I was I was the crazy woman who got, know, who in the middle of the night crept into my children's

[16:04]Zibby Owens: bedroom to sort the Legos into the bins, know, the things you can control. And so much is out of your control. Even the giant tree that sort of splits right in the center to, like, destabilizing the whole landscape. Things happen, and you can't do anything about them. And so what happens to I mean, people cope with uncertainty in all these different ways. And I think it's so interesting that you explore in fiction sort of this one particular mom and how she she deals with it. And oh my gosh. I don't know. There's like no right answer. Today's episode is sponsored by Quince. Summer always makes me rethink what I'm reaching for every day. Lighter fabrics, better materials, pieces that just feel good the moment you put them on and look effortless. That's why I keep coming back to Quince. They focus on high quality essentials. Think breathable linen, soft organic cotton, washable silk, but without the luxury markup. It's that rare balance where everything feels elevated but still easy. Quince has beautiful everyday pieces like 100% European linen pants, dresses, and tops with styles starting at $32. Their denim is soft and easy to wear. I wear my jean jacket all the time. And their organic cotton sweaters are perfect for layering on cool summer nights. Everything at Quince is priced 50 to 80% less than similar brands. Quince works directly with ethical factories and cuts out the middlemen, so you're paying for quality, not brand markup. And it's not just clothing. Quince has really become a destination for elevated essentials across home, kitchen, bedding, and beyond, making it easy to bring a more premium feel into everyday life. In addition to my jean jacket, I recently got a white tank top dress with a beautiful cotton skirt that is absolutely gorgeous, and I can't wait for it to be warm enough so I can wear it every day, but it has been a cool spring. Elevate your summer wardrobe. Go to quince.com/zippy for free shipping on your order and three hundred and sixty five day returns. Now available in Canada too. That's quince.com/zippy for free shipping and three hundred and sixty five day returns. Quince.com/zibby.

[18:17]Joyce Maynard: In many ways, I mean, were many very hard, sad things that I explored in this book and a few funny ones. There's a scene where the woman goes, and I had a version of this experience too. She's alone at Christmas, which I was every other year because you know. And she she decides, chooses that day to go on a blind date, blind first date with a man who is a single father. And of course, she's a person who's desperately trying to reclaim family. And here's this man, he has his own version of this. He's raising two sons alone and she shows up at his apartment on Christmas day with her pie and he's made this sort of deadly sweet potato marshmallow casserole and the children are holding, what's that plant where you kiss, you have to kiss Mistletoe. Under Mistletoe. Yeah, mistletoe, mistletoe. And they're holding mistletoe over her head, and it doesn't go well. They're not going to go off into the sunset together. I think ultimately what I came to and what my character comes to is that you carry on, you make your own new version of family and family can look lots of ways. But Eleanor also had her own trauma with her parents

[19:39]Zibby Owens: in the car accident, car accident, plane accident, what was it? And she finds out at boarding school and Yep. And I wanted to explore,

[19:47]Joyce Maynard: I know nothing of this kind of relationship because this was so not me, she is the daughter of two parents who actually were more interested in each Yes, other than I thought that was interesting too. And there are families like that. I was too interested in my children probably and lost sight of my marriage, but she was always the one who was sort of left out. And then suddenly she's in fact, that's why she wasn't in the car accident. She was left out. I know. I can't even imagine that sort of intensity

[20:16]Zibby Owens: and feeling like a third wheel in your own home, but then also being so young and being completely abandoned in the world the way that she was and feeling like the people that she would have gone to to deal with the loss were gone and that was it. I mean, it's hard to I mean, that alone been

[20:34]Joyce Maynard: very successful at addressing her issues had they been there. This is my tenth novel and it's my longest novel by far. It's over 400 pages, but it's a big, it's the biggest story that I've ever told. And a lot happens. Of the things that I wanted to do in the book and they're roughly, I think probably the aging generation of these children. So, you know, it might've resonated for you, I hope. I wanted to set it against the backdrop of so many of the things that happened during those years, not just the big events, but the odd small ones that, that, know, that were part of our lives and, you know, the toys and the music, for sure. It's a book full of the music of various eras and certain events. The Challenger disaster actually becomes, as you know, kind of a pivotal moment for the family. It's the moment that not only does the Challenger blow up, but so does the couple's marriage. And there is a child who very much like my own daughter in January 1986 when it happened, sort of pinned these huge dreams on Christa McAuliffe and the Reach for the Stars and everybody, every child of a certain age in elementary school during those years was sitting in front of the screen at school watching this thing happen. And I'm fascinated, I always have been, by the intersection of personal and the global and the ways that the experiences that we all share, but I've shared in our own very particular

[22:19]Zibby Owens: places, you know. I was homesick that day. I remember seeing it. Oh my gosh. Like it was yesterday. Like I can see where I was, where I was standing. Oh my gosh. Okay. So Joyce, fifty years of writing books, the only thing you can do. What is the secret here? So when Well, it's not wait a second. Give me a break. It's not the only thing you can I would never say that?

[22:41]Joyce Maynard: Yeah. I say It's the thing I can do that people will pay me money. Okay, okay. Would never presume to say that. Make a fine pie. And I actually increasingly, I love to help other women write. But yes, it is the one job I've held since I was 14 years old actually. I was writing for 17 magazine from when I was in junior high. Had that same thing by the way. Published my first essay in 17 when I was 14. I know, I read about Oh, you you're so sweet. Was a launching place for lots of people. I think Meg Wallitzer wrote for 17, Perry Klass, I mean, there's a list of, and it was, I feel very grateful for having had that opportunity. I was a small town girl from New Hampshire, and my dream was to get to New York City. And I would ride the bus to New York and meet with my 17 editor and pitch my stories. And sometimes I got the assignment, you know, I would, I think I was 16 when I got the assignment to interview Julie Nixon Eisenhower, daughter of the president then at the White House. And, you know, it was I he was not my idea of the president I wanted, but but I was going to the White House. And my mother and I got out of pattern and sewed a red, white, and blue dress. And, you know, I went to the White House that day. And because of of the years we're talking about, I was not allowed to ask Julie Nixon Eisenhower about the Vietnam war or impeachment, which was coming. I asked her her favorite recipes. That's what I was supposed to. And increasingly I was frustrated by that. I wanted to tell more serious stories and I kind of I outgrew Seventeen and moved on. But but that was a really important launching place for me. And then how did you go from there to

[24:33]Zibby Owens: writing 10 novels?

[24:35]Joyce Maynard: Well, actually, it's kind of a it is also a story about 17. I in one of these meetings with my editor, I suggested that I write about the Miss Teenage America pageant. I was myself 17, and they said, oh, well, we would only and no doubt I wanted to write a kind of catty, you know, sort of cynical piece about Miss Teenage America. Secretly, I I would have probably envied those girls, but I was never gonna be one. And they said we would only have a story about Miss Teenage America by somebody who was a participant in the pageant by which they definitely met like Miss Teenage New Hampshire. But I I don't know how I did this because I couldn't have talked to a boy at that age, but I called up the pageant offices. I got the phone number from information, and I called up the pageant offices in Fort Worth, Texas, And I kind of lowered my voice an octave, and I said, this is Joyce Maynard with 17 magazine. We, we, would like to do a story on your pageant, but I would need to be named a judge of the pageant. And I was. Oh my gosh. And once again, my mother took out her sewing machine and remade an old dress of hers from the forties. And I flew to Fort Worth and I was a judge and I filed my story and I was really proud of this story. And it had all kinds of like sort of a kind of detail that I don't now believe in so much of a bit, you know, making fun of those girls. But it was smart new journalism of the time. And they cut out all that stuff and they ran a very bland story. And I was so upset that I took the original version of the story. I was still just 17, and I mailed it to the editor in chief of the New York Times. And I said, I should write for you. And he wrote back and said, yes. So I got an assignment to write a story about the only story that I could tell at that point, what it was to grow up and be me in the 1960s. And I filed the story. They said we'd like to take your picture. They sent a photographer to the Yale campus. I was a freshman. And six weeks later, there I was in full cover color on the cover of the New York Times Magazine section. An image that if you were older and went were in a East Coast College in the spring of nineteen seventy two, you would remember because it was everywhere, that's the picture. That for good or ill and kind of both launched my career and launched some difficult personal things in my life and

[26:59]Zibby Owens: brought about my departure from college. Fifty years later, I'm back at college as an undergraduate. I just read that. I couldn't believe it. And you're back at Yale? That's I'm back at Yale. Oh my gosh. But that

[27:11]Joyce Maynard: was the beginning of my publishing life. And I published my first ostensibly memoir the following year, a book called Looking Back, in which I did not mention many of the truest things of my life, that I had grown up in an alcoholic family, that at the time I was writing that book, was suffering from pretty severe eating disorders, or that I, this youth spokesperson of America had dropped out of my Ivy League college to move in with a 53 year old man who happened to be J. D. Salinger. Those were some things I didn't get around to. Salinger had written to me after he saw that article, he'd sought me out. So that really formed the foundation of my belief in the importance of truth telling in writing. Whether it's memoir or fiction, and it took me years to be myself, that's a loon incidentally that you're hearing. You hear that sound? It's screaming. It's a loon. It took me twenty five years before I could tell the particular true story of what had happened to me when I was 18. But, and that was my memoir At Home in the World, a much debated and condemned by many book. But it also set me free, telling the truth. This novel, although it's not memoir, this is my truth. This is my hard truth about, marriage and about family. And I, you know, my children very often don't read my work and that's really okay. You know, readers can read my work. I'm not looking for my children to be my fans, but, and I don't need them to buy books when I'd actually give them one. I always record my books as an audiobook. In fact, this is a good tip for your readers because moms don't have time to read, but they might go to the gym and listen to the audiobook. I have to say, I make a great audiobook. Really love to read out loud to my children. Now I love to record my book. So my hope is that they will listen to this book. And if they do, I think it will bring them some comfort and resolution about our family. Right? May they maybe don't need comfort anymore. They're okay. But it's a very loving story about actually all the characters. First of all, I have to go back and read at home in the world, like, immediately. I wish I had read it before we talked, and I'm sorry that I haven't. It's a story that, you know, it was such an embattled book at the time. I mean, was pre Me Too. But the idea of a woman presuming to say that J. D. Salinger was not this ultimate hero spiritual guide, that he was a human being, just that, not, I said no terrible things, I simply told my story. I was regarded as so completely forbidden. I, you know, I Maureen Dowd called me a predator for called the girl a predator for telling the story. And that is, of course, what happens to women. Women get attacked for telling the truth about what men do.

[30:19]Zibby Owens: Wow. Alright. Well, I'm going to get that book immediately. So funny too because in two days, I'm interviewing Joanna Rakoff who wrote my Salinger year about reading his fan mail, and now here I am talking to you. So I mean, life is so crazy. But anyway What a wonderful rich opportunity you have to speak to this vast array. Yes. No. And, I mean, it's for everyone else to listen to. You know? It's like I'm not like hoarding it. What advice would you have for aspiring authors?

[30:44]Joyce Maynard: Oh gosh, well, one would be to read, of course, as you know. Interestingly, reading was always a challenge for me. I only learned when I went back to Yale that I have extreme ADHD. So reading is actually really hard for me, but yes, read and be fearless. The most common concern that women have when they come to my writing workshops, And I'll be teaching one this summer where I know I've already started hearing from women who say, I don't know how I could ever tell the story without hurting my mother's feelings, my husband's feelings, my children's feelings. Men don't raise these issues ever. Men seem, you know, men are just brave if they're telling the truth, but women are the caretakers and the protectors of everybody else. So I would say to women listening to this, is one thing you may not have freedom in so many other ways. You may not have time, money, space, health, I don't know, but you get to tell your story, your story you own. And if you tell it unblinkingly, honestly, and with compassion, not revenge, which I think I achieved in, in At Home in the World, it's not a bitter book. It's there are no villains in any of my stories. There are just a lot of flawed human beings and I'm one of them. If you do that, it will set you free. It will set you free. Wow. I love that.

[32:15]Zibby Owens: Joyce, thank you for this chat. I feel like we're only, we only like skimmed the surface and there was so much more. Oh,

[32:22]Joyce Maynard: there always is. Oh, I know, I know. And those are the best conversations when you have that feeling. So I've thoroughly enjoyed this, Divya. I knew I would actually. Really, I was looking forward to this. Oh, thank you. I was too.

[32:35]Zibby Owens: All right. Well, thank you so much, and I hope we can stay in touch. I would love. I would love. Alright. Well, I will talk to you soon, and thank you for this great read. Count the ways. Take care. Bye bye. Thanks for listening to this episode of Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books. Don't forget to follow me on Instagram at Zibby Owens and at moms don't have time to read books. Also, sign up for my newsletter at zibbyowens.com and sign up for my virtual book club and meet lots of authors on Zoom every other week. Thanks so much to Steve and Ryan at Texture Sound for the sound editing, and thank you to Morning Moon Productions for providing this fantastic intro and outro music.