How I Got to Be a Magazine Cover Girl (Without Any Makeup)

Joyce Maynard on the cover of the New York Times Magazine in April of 1972. Photo: Ted Croner

Because I’m lucky enough to have worked as a writer all my life—it’s been my profession since I was 18 years old—I’m often asked how I got started.

The first part of my story is simple enough: I started writing and my parents encouraged me. A lot. I wrote stories and poems, and when I was 7 or 8 I started a newspaper that allowed me to be editor in chief, reporter, cartoonist, and advice columnist. I sold this newspaper door to door in our neighborhood for 5 cents a copy.

I was a small-town girl who longed to go to New York City and see the world. My family lived in New Hampshire, where not a whole lot happened (not on the surface, anyway; I now know that interesting, odd, important things happen everywhere—even in the places that appear quiet and boring).

The house in New Hampshire in which the author grew up.

I read a lot, but I paid close attention to what was going on around me in my own world, too. I asked a lot of questions, and though I was a shy person (the kind of girl who buried the tampons in her basket with five other items to make my purchase seem less obvious to the cashier), I also believed that no experience should be off-limits to write about. The things that felt the hardest to explore in my writing were exactly the ones I should be writing about. Even then I knew this.

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When I was 16, a car accident killed four boys in the senior class at my high school. I rode my bike to the garage where the mangled remains of their car, along with the one they’d hit, sat out back. I wrote a story about that accident and what it had done to the young people in the town, to drive by the place on the road where the crash had taken place. And about the boys, and the practice of so many kids in our town who would get an illegal six-pack and drive around on a Friday night.

The author as a child.

More than that, what I wanted to write about was my first close experience of death. I think I understood from the beginning that a piece of good writing is always about something, and that it should take a reader on a journey, so she discovers something, and feels something on the last page that she didn’t know or feel on the first.

Around that same time, I sent a story I’d written to Seventeen magazine—my Bible as a teenager—and they published it. Once I had the name of an editor, I sent her a letter with a dozen ideas of other topics I could write about for the magazine. One of these was the proposal that they send me to the annual Miss Teenage America pageant to cover the event for Seventeen.

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The editor wrote a short note back: “We’d only run a story about the Miss Teenage America Pageant if you had a personal experience of being involved in it,” she told me. “If you were Miss Teenage New Hampshire, for instance.” I knew I was not going to become Miss Teenage New Hampshire. But I really wanted to write about that pageant. So I got the phone number of the national office of Miss Teenage America and called them up.

“This is Joyce Maynard from Seventeen Magazine,” I said. “We’d like to do a story on your pageant, but you would need to make me a judge.”

They did.

I was 17 years old when I flew to Fort Worth, Texas, with an evening gown my mother and I sewed together by taking apart an old dress she’d had at college and reconstructing it in my size. At the pageant, I was introduced as “Joyce Maynard, of Seventeen Magazine.”

I learned something from this. The 50 girls up on stage were all about my age, and they were the kind of girls I’d always felt jealous of: very pretty and seemingly full of confidence, with perfect hair and cute bodies. (I had one too; I just didn’t know it.) But those girls were relying on their perky smiles and how they looked in their evening gowns to get someplace in life.

As much as I might have wished, in the past, to be more like one of those girls, I also recognized that my typewriter would take me further than that. (It was blue, with its own traveling case. This was years before the first Apple computer, and even more years before the release of the first laptop.)

Seventeen ran my story, but not the way I’d written it. A lot of the most interesting parts, in my opinion, had been cut out: my reflections on beauty pageants, my interviews with a number of the girls about their goals in life.

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I was in college now, my freshman year. I put together a collection of my writings and mailed them to another magazine editor. This time it was the editor in chief of the New York Times. I said I’d like to write for his publication.

Now, you could call a girl who would do something like this pushy. (“Chutzpah” was the word my Jewish mother would have used; she had plenty of it herself.) You might conclude that a college freshman who thinks she should be writing for the New York Times would be more than slightly arrogant, or full of herself.

What I was was a young person who knew what I wanted—and didn’t have a problem saying I was good at what I did. I wanted to see the world (not only Texas, but all the other places a writer may get to go if she’s lucky and works hard).

How was anyone supposed to know I existed if I didn’t tell them?

I was also, incidentally, a person so shy with boys at this point in my life—having kissed exactly one of them, ever—that on the rare occasions I’d need to call one up about something, I had to practice and write out the script of what I’d say to him.

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The editor in chief of the New York Times wrote back to me with an assignment: to write about the only topic I was equipped to write about at this point in my life—my own life. “I’d like to see a 3,000-word story from you about growing up in the sixties,” he told me. Deadline: six weeks later.

I delivered my story. The New York Times sent a photographer to take my picture. I was smart enough not to try and make myself look like a contestant for Miss Teenage America. I wore my blue jeans for this photograph, and I looked like myself. Not particularly glamorous, but real. The article, “An Eighteen-Year-Old Looks Back on Life,” ran in the New York Times Magazine in April of 1972, with a full-color photograph of me on the cover.

The following morning, my phone wouldn’t stop ringing, and within a couple of days I’d received so many letters it took three enormous canvas mail sacks to hold them all. Inside: offers to write more articles and go on television and model clothes for Mademoiselle magazine. A woman in Hollywood wanted me to audition for a role in a movie she was casting called The Exorcist.

I didn’t get the role part in the movie, but I did receive an offer to write a longer version of my article, as a book. This was not, to me, the most important piece of mail in the sack. In among those thousand or so letters, there was one letter unlike all the others. It was a one-page letter that began “Dear Miss Maynard,” typewritten on what looked to be a very old typewriter.

The cover of the author’s first book, Looking Back: A Chronicle of Growing Up Old in the Sixties.

The writer of this letter said he liked my writing a lot. He said he could tell I was “a real writer.” He said a number of very witty and insightful things about my article and about his own life as a writer. He went on to say that he knew a thing or two about early publication, and early success, and then urged me to be careful. “You will be exploited,” he said.

I got all the way to the bottom of the page before I saw the signature. By that time, I already understood—or felt that I understood—that this person was the wisest, funniest, most spiritually enlightened person I’d ever met, and that he understood me as nobody else in life ever had. How I felt, reading this letter, was not unlike how a few generations of teenage readers of Catcher in the Rye have felt, as if here, at last—and for the first time ever—was a person who understood what it was like to be a teenager who doesn’t fit in all that well in the world.

The signature at the bottom of the letter belonged to J.D. Salinger.

And so, two things happened to me in April of 1972, when I was 18 years old: I published an article and signed a book contract that launched my career as a writer. And I fell in love with a very famous reclusive 53-year-old writer, who would go on to tell me that just about every single thing I’d aspired to do—go to New York City, publish articles and books, become famous—was wrong.

I left college and gave up my scholarship to be with him. I cut off communication with my friends, and just everyone else in my life. And I moved in with Salinger.

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But I did write my book. When, 11 months after moving in and three weeks before the publication of my first book, he told me to move all my belongings out of his house and disappear from his life, I believed, for a time, that there was no place in the world I could ever feel at home again. I believed that I must do as Salinger instructed me: never to speak of him. For 25 years, I didn’t.

The cover of the author’s memoir, At Home in the World.

As for my lifelong dream to be a writer: The man I admired above any other person on the planet had told me I would never do anything of substance or worth in the world. At the age of 18, I believed this. And I continued to believe this for some time.

But I didn’t stop writing—first more articles, then more books. In the 42 years since that day, I have never stopped doing this thing I love. And I slowly learned a valuable lesson, though a painful one: to let no one—however revered and famous, however celebrated and important—tell you who you are, or what you can or cannot do or become. Let no one tell you that the story you have lived is a story you cannot tell.

That’s what I do now. I tell mine. And I challenge anyone who says a person—man or woman—doesn’t have the right to tell hers.

Your experience. It’s the one thing no one can ever take away.