More Praise for The Best of Us
“A meditation on the power of partnership to transform and sustain us. Like the marriage in its pages, it is romantic, brave, tender, and searingly honest—a book about loving, losing, being alive.”
—Dr. Lucy Kalanithi
“There isn’t a happy ending, but their journey is a beautiful one nonetheless.”
—Bustle
“Brutally honest and deeply loving.”
—Woman’s Day
“Maynard as caretaker is a revelation, both beautiful and heart-wrenching—a role she undertakes (as everything grows harder) with grit, grace and growth.”
—The Buffalo News
“Even at its darkest, [The Best of Us] strives to find meaning in calamity, heartbreak, and loss. A moving tribute to the evergreen lessons of the heart.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“Maynard’s heartfelt story will resonate with those who have lost loved ones.”
—Publishers Weekly
“This haunting story, penned by a master wordsmith, is a reminder to savor every loved one and every day.”
—Booklist (starred review)
“A love letter to a love story.”
—Library Journal
“Maynard shows us her flaws, her exuberance, her willingness to take risks, to fall in love, and happily, finally, to discover what a mature marriage and loving relationship look like—flaws, cancer and all. Her readers will do more than connect; they will laugh, cry and rekindle hope that the best of us just might be possible.”
—The Charleston Post and Courier
“Joyce Maynard has been through so many ups and downs in her life and she communicates her love, pain and everything in between through her life affirming experiences, written with great emotion and clarity in this beautiful memoir. I highly recommend it.”
—BookTrib
“The Best of Us is both heartbreaking and uplifting, a chronicle of unlikely, unexpected romance and personal tragedy, as well as a meditation on the nature of love.”
—Omnivoracious
“The Best of Us feels like a life come full circle, addressing a much more adult kind of love.”
—Signature
“[Maynard’s] is a story of genuine heartbreak and loss, paradoxically made bearable by the great love that made the loss so immense.”
—The Hippo
“Maynard’s fiction fans will be especially moved by their story, which, despite the sad ending, shows the promise of late-life love affairs. He, a lawyer, is the ‘catastrophiser’; she the ‘voice of wild optimism.’ He made her a kinder, better version of herself. This memoir remembers how.”
—Post Magazine
“[Maynard] brings to readers the beautiful but equally heartbreaking story of her second marriage to a wonderful man who she lost to an aggressive form of cancer after only three years of being together … The Best of Us could have been solely a testimony of hurt and despair, but Maynard injects her unique humor into it with a combination of Match.com disaster stories … to the joy of finding love with her second husband Jim at the age of fifty-nine.”
—Seattle Post-Intelligencer
“Filled with passion and humor and beauty and aching sadness, The Best of Us gets at the heart of what love is: a willingness to open your heart completely to another person despite the risk of heartbreak.”
—Christina Baker Kline
“Joyce has captured her all-too-brief time with Jim in The Best of Us with her characteristic honesty and with so much love that my heart broke and soared on every page. Everyone needs to read this book.”
—Ann Hood
“Maynard’s lyrical, moving, break-your-heart memoir will make you love a little harder, appreciate each second a little more, and shake your world in the best of ways.”
—Caroline Leavitt
“This fiercely honest book is as much about life as it is about death. We understand the magnitude of Maynard’s loss because she has shown us the magnitude of her gain: the transformative joy of finding love in her late fifties. I could not stop turning the pages.”
—Anne Fadiman
“Joyce Maynard’s memoir of life, death, and love is written with honesty, intimacy, and a generosity of spirit that left me weeping, and in awe. I loved it.”
—Abigail Thomas
“The Best of Us is shattering in the best possible sense. With exquisite honesty, bravery, and large-heartedness, Joyce Maynard gives us a love story that we read breathlessly, even though we know how it will end. This is a beautiful story about the complexity of ever daring to adore another human being. I was moved and transfixed.”
—Dani Shapiro
“Oh! This book! Tender, insightful, ruminative, soaring. To find such love and then to lose it, and to capture so much of its beauty on the meager page—Joyce Maynard alchemizes life-numbing pain into dazzling prose.”
—Hope Edelman
For Jim
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
FICTION
Baby Love
To Die For
Where Love Goes
The Usual Rules
The Cloud Chamber
Labor Day
After Her
The Good Daughters
Under the Influence
NONFICTION
Looking Back
Domestic Affairs
At Home in the World
Internal Combustion
Contents
Prologue
Part One: Before
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Part Two: After
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-One
Chapter Forty-Two
Chapter Forty-Three
Chapter Forty-Four
Chapter Forty-Five
Chapter Forty-Six
Chapter Forty-Seven
Chapter Forty-Eight
Chapter Forty-Nine
Chapter Fifty
Chapter Fifty-One
Chapter Fifty-Two
Chapter Fifty-Three
Chapter Fifty-Four
Chapter Fifty-Five
Chapter Fifty-Six
Chapter Fifty-Seven
Chapter Fifty-Eight
Chapter Fifty-Nine
Chapter Sixty
Chapter Sixty-One
Chapter Sixty-Two
Chapter Sixty-Three
Chapter Sixty-Four
Chapter Sixty-Five
Chapter Sixty-Six
Chapter Sixty-Seven
Chapter Sixty
-Eight
Chapter Sixty-Nine
Chapter Seventy
Chapter Seventy-One
Chapter Seventy-Two
Chapter Seventy-Three
Chapter Seventy-Four
Chapter Seventy-Five
Chapter Seventy-Six
Chapter Seventy-Seven
Chapter Seventy-Eight
Chapter Seventy-Nine
Chapter Eighty
Chapter Eighty-One
Chapter Eighty-Two
Chapter Eighty-Three
Chapter Eighty-Four
Chapter Eighty-Five
Chapter Eighty-Six
Chapter Eighty-Seven
Chapter Eighty-Eight
Chapter Eighty-Nine
Chapter Ninety
Chapter Ninety-One
Chapter Ninety-Two
Chapter Ninety-Three
Chapter Ninety-Four
Chapter Ninety-Five
Chapter Ninety-Six
Chapter Ninety-Seven
Chapter Ninety-Eight
Chapter Ninety-Nine
Chapter One Hundred
Chapter One Hundred and One
Chapter One Hundred and Two
Chapter One Hundred and Three
Chapter One Hundred and Four
Chapter One Hundred and Five
Chapter One Hundred and Six
Chapter One Hundred and Seven
Chapter One Hundred and Eight
Chapter One Hundred and Nine
Chapter One Hundred and Ten
Chapter One Hundred and Eleven
Chapter One Hundred and Twelve
Chapter One Hundred and Thirteen
Chapter One Hundred and Fourteen
Chapter One Hundred and Fifteen
Chapter One Hundred and Sixteen
Chapter One Hundred and Seventeen
Chapter One Hundred and Eighteen
Chapter One Hundred and Nineteen
Chapter One Hundred and Twenty
Chapter One Hundred and Twenty-One
Chapter One Hundred and Twenty-Two
Chapter One Hundred and Twenty-Three
Chapter One Hundred and Twenty-Four
Chapter One Hundred and Twenty-Five
Chapter One Hundred and Twenty-Six
Chapter One Hundred and Twenty-Seven
Chapter One Hundred and Twenty-Eight
Afterword
Acknowledgments
Reading Group Guide
A Note on the Author
What I am learning to give you is my death
to set you free of me, and me from myself
into the dark and the new light. Like the water
of a deep stream, love is always too much. We
did not make it. Though we drink till we burst
we cannot have it all, or want it all.
In its abundance it survives our thirst.
—Wendell Berry, “The Country of Marriage”
And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.
—Raymond Carver, “Late Fragment,” his last poem
Prologue
On the Fourth of July weekend three years ago, at the age of fifty-nine, I married the first true partner I had ever known.
We spoke our vows on a New Hampshire hillside with friends and children gathered, as fireworks exploded over us and a band backed us up for a duet on a John Prine song. That night we talked about the trips we’d take, the olive trees we would plant, the grandchildren we might share. We would know, in our sixties, the love we had yearned for in our youth. Each of us had been divorced almost twenty-five years. How lucky, everyone said, that we had found each other when we did.
Not long after our one-year anniversary, my husband was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. Nineteen months later, having shared a struggle that consumed both our lives in equal though different measure, I lay beside him in our bed when he took his last breath.
I had once supposed I was done with marriage. A few decades of disappointments and failures had left me reluctant to try again. Then I got married that second time—to Jim—but with the belief still that nothing, and no man—not even one I dearly loved—could alter my course of fierce and resolute independence. I came and went, always happy to see him when he picked me up off a plane, but happy to hop on the next one that would take me away again. I had my life, he had his. Sometimes we’d share them. That was my idea, though never my husband’s.
Not until we learned of his illness, and we walked the path of that terrible struggle together, did I understand what it meant to be a couple—to be a true partner and to have one. I learned the full meaning of marriage only as mine was drawing to a close. I discovered what love was as mine departed the world.
This is our story.
PART ONE
Before
1.
Ever since the end of my marriage to my children’s father I had wanted to fall in love. But if you had asked me—or if I ever asked myself—what it meant to fall in love, I doubt I could have told you. “Falling in love” was an idea I had picked up from a lot of rock-and-roll songs and movies and the fairy tales that came before them.
My own experience of love had not contained the happy ending, though passion was part of it, as was romance, and certainly drama. (Drama: an addiction of mine, maybe. To look at my history, at least, you would have had to consider that possibility.)
Age had changed me in many ways, but not in this one. Into my fifties, and closing in on the next decade—my children grown and gone, along with so much else I had held on to once and now let go—I still looked for that feeling of my pulse quickening, of holding my breath when a person walked in the door—my person. But when I tried to imagine what this falling-in-love thing would look like with the passage of time, my imagination—though it seldom failed me—provided no picture. Mostly what I had known of falling in love was that heartbreak followed soon after.
I had been, at the point our story began, a writer of fiction, and in the writing of fiction, it is well understood that for a story to hold the reader’s interest, conflict must exist. I might have told myself otherwise, but for years I think I carried that belief into my life off the page. Where was the drama in happiness? If there was no trouble present, what kept the story alive?
What did I know of love? What had I witnessed? My parents had started out with a big love affair, filled with extravagant emotion and conflict. The fact that when my mother met him, my father had been twenty years older than she was—and divorced—had not even been their biggest obstacle. He just wasn’t Jewish.
He had courted her for ten years—writing her poems, sending her drawings, swearing his devotion, taking a job under a made-up name as a radio host on the prairies of Canada so he could recite romantic poetry to her over the airwaves without her parents knowing it. He was handsome and funny, brilliant and difficult. But romantic—and in the end, irresistible.
Within days of the wedding, our mother told my sister and me later, their love affair was finished, though my parents remained together for twenty-five years—slinging barbs at each other across the dinner table and sleeping in separate bedrooms. This was what I saw of marriage, growing up, balanced only by a decade of situation comedies on television, in which romance between the parents never went beyond that moment when Donna Reed’s husband comes back after heading out the door to work, to plant a kiss on her cheek.
At twenty-three I married a man who was as unwise a match for me as I was for him. But he was handsome and talented and interesting, and his silences seemed to suggest mysteries I was ready to spend my life exploring. When I’d tell him a story from my day, he would say, “Cut to the chase.”
I was thirty-five when we divorced, and single for the two decades that followed. The phrase I employed to describe myself: “a
solo operator.” There had been a time when what I wanted most in life was to make a home with a partner and to raise our children together there, but after losing the home of my marriage, and the dream of what is referred to as “an intact family,” I had made good homes on my own, and watched my children move back and forth—brown paper bags in hand, containing their possessions—between the worlds of two parents deeply at odds with each other. I grew accustomed to doing things alone and doing them my way, and I discovered, as I did this, the pleasure of my autonomy.
As the years passed, less and less did the idea of marriage play a role in my picture of my future. Divorce, and all the sorrow surrounding it, had left me reluctant to go down that particular road again, and anyway, what I yearned for—big love, big romance—seemed to contradict what I’d known of marriage.
By the time I reached my fifties, I had lived alone—or alone with my children—for longer than I’d lived with a man. It was living with someone that got me into trouble, so why try that again?
Still I kept searching, without knowing what I was looking for. No surprise I did not find it. And then—though it took a while to recognize this—I did.
2.
I met Jim on Match.com. I liked his photograph—a rakish hat over a head of good hair, a smile that seemed to contain genuine delight in whatever it was that had been going on as the camera captured the moment. I liked the things he said about himself in that short profile, but I had learned long before that how a person described himself in a dating profile often bore little resemblance to the real person who had posted it.
I had studied Jim’s profile only briefly, anticipating (after years of this stuff) the inevitable red flag. I closed my laptop.
But the man in the photograph had taken note of the fact that I’d looked at his profile, and looked up mine. He wrote to me. “Maybe another time,” I wrote back. I looked at his photograph again, and the others he’d posted—one in which he was wearing a tuxedo.
“Probably a Republican,” I concluded.
There was another reason why I had been reluctant to find out more about the man whose online moniker (this alone would later indicate how little relationship exists between the man and his profile) was “Jimbunctious.” At the time he sent me that first message (sent to me at “Likesred shoes”) expressing an interest in meeting me, I had recently started spending time with a different man I’d met online just a few weeks before. And I was having a good time with him.