First Chapter, First Paragraph, Tuesday Intros

Hello!  It is me---your very favorite, but always late, Pacific Time Zone, blogger!

Being a procrastinator and participating in memes sometimes is a problem.  I mean, it's only 8:00 pm here in the west,  but I think it's just about midnight in New England...where Diane of Bibliophile by the Sea, is hopefully waiting patiently for her last blogger to post  in  First Chapter, First Paragraph, Tuesday Intros.   That would be me!

Go to sleep now Diane.

But before you drift  off---think of this first sentence-first paragraph:

When I was eighteen, I wrote a magazine article that changed my life.  The piece was called, "An Eighteen Year Old Looks Back on Life."  It was published in the New York Times Magazine with a photograph of me on the cover.  In it, I described growing up in the sixties, expressing a profound sense of world-weariness and alienation.  I spoke of wanting  to move to the country and get away from the world.  "Retirement sounds tempting," I wrote.

What do you think? Would you keep reading?

I think I will!  The book is  "At Home in the World" by Joyce Maynard, the author of Labor Day (which has just been released as a movie starring Josh Brolin ).    This is a memoir of her life and her affair with JD Salinger when she was 18  (he loved her article, wrote, told her so and they began a correspondence which later evolved into a love affair) and he was 53.
I just love memoirs.  And authors.  And correspondences.  (I am a huge letter writer).    I will read this one very soon  (before the library makes me give it back!)

This is what Goodreads has to say about it:

When it was first published in 1998, At Home in the World set off a furor in the literary world and beyond. Joyce Maynard's memoir broke a silence concerning her relationship--at age eighteen--with the famously reclusive author J.D. Salinger, then age fifty-three, who had read a story she wrote for The New York Times in her freshman year of college and sent her a letter that changed her life.

With what some have viewed as shocking honesty, Maynard explores her coming of age in an alcoholic family, her mother's dream to mold her into a writer, her self-imposed exile from the world of her peers when she left Yale to live with Salinger, and her struggle to reclaim her self of sense in the crushing aftermath of his dismissal of her not long after her nineteenth birthday. A quarter of a century later--having become a writer, survived the end of her marriage and the deaths of her parents, and with an eighteen-year-old daughter of her own--Maynard pays a visit to the man who broke her heart. The story she tells--of the girl she was and the woman she became--is at once devastating, inspiring, and triumphant.