Few things get old quicker than a literary spat. Hearing the hip debate whether writers should use their advances for dental work makes even my eyes roll back in my head. But there's something particularly nasty about the debate over whether veteran...

From staff reports Portland Press Herald (Maine) 11-19-2006 JOYCE MAYNARD Byline: From staff reports Edition: FINAL Section: Audience Column: Signings, etc. Memo: WHEN: 7 p.m. Monday WHERE: Book Etc., 38 Exchange St., Portland HOW MUCH: Free On Mother's Day in 2004, fourth-...

It is more than eight years since Joyce Maynard wrote "An Eighteen-Year-Old Looks Back on Life," her wry New York Times magazine article about growing up among the jaded youth of the 60's. "Baby Love," her first novel, is an entirely different sort of work … but there's much in it that recalls "Looking Back." The tone is the same: right on target, cued to the rangy, slangy rhythms of modern life, though lacking the embarrassing archness that cha...

The issues in Baby Love—babies, love, sex, youth, music and television—have always been Maynard's favorite subjects, but it is here in this shift to the novel form that she finally deals with them best. Fiction has taken away both the cutesiness and preachiness that a young memoir-writer is liable to. Gone, as well, is the kind of misspent world-weariness that would prompt a 19-year-old to talk about "growing up old." Nothing about Maynard is weary here. It's a new ...

[In "Looking Back" Joyce Maynard] tries to be both exemplar and critic, to trace her own and her contemporaries' lassitude and precocious world-weariness to the common experience of "growing up old in the sixties." That meant not only the profound trivializing influence of the media…. In school and out, it [also] meant regimentation by insecurity, relentless pressure toward refuge in a group mind, toward the illusion of an averaged-out "we" with which ...