When Henry and Adele take Frank in, they get more than they bargained for when they discover they are hiding a fugitive on the run. A mysterious man Frank is bleeding, and asks the boy for help.

13-year-old Henry has had a boring summer, but the long weekend makes up for it when he and his single mom Adele meet a stranger while shopping for back to school clothes on Friday.

I leave it to my readers – in possession of greater perspective, perhaps, than the readers of 20 years ago – to decide which person that was.Maynard’s novel Labor Day is aptly named, as it takes place over the holiday weekend. “Somewhere in this story there may be a predator. “It turns out that at least one of the recipients of these letters was carrying on her correspondence with Salinger during the very winter when I was living with him, so careful never to disturb his writing,” she wrote. She said that she had hoped that the unfolding of the #MeToo movement would lead her own experiences to be seen in a new light, but “it does not appear that enlightenment concerning the abuses of men in power extends retroactively to women who chose to speak long ago, and were shamed and humiliated for doing so”.īut since she published her memoir, she writes, she has been contacted by female peers who had, at around the same age, also received an “absolutely captivating letter … composed in a voice they recognised as that of Holden Caulfield, though bearing an even more familiar name at the bottom of the page and containing words I could recite, I know them so well”. Maynard reveals that, at the time, when she was invited to speak at a literary event, “an entire row of writers I respected greatly rose from their seats en masse and, as I took the stage, departed the room”. The book was received “with near universal condemnation”, and while “this did not destroy my career or my emotional well-being … it came close”, she says. Maynard decided to tell her story in At Home in the World after respecting Salinger’s privacy for years until her own daughter reached the age she had been when the Catcher in the Rye author first contacted her, she said.

One female critic, writes Maynard, “eviscerating a scene in my memoir in which I somewhat delicately describe the experience of forced oral sex with a man 35 years older, wrote of ‘that busy Maynard mouth’”. Photograph: San Diego Historical Society/Getty

Long week end joyce maynard