Critical Essay by Annie Gottlieb
[In "Looking Back" Joyce Maynard] tries to be both exemplar and critic, to trace her own and her contemporaries' lassitude and precocious world-w...
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Critical Essay by Caroline Moorehead
[In Baby Love Joyce Maynard shows,] with humour sometimes verging on farcical, wryness, and a great deal of perception, what it is like to be young, American and ...
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Critical Essay by David Tipmore
Prepare yourselves. [In "Looking Back",] Joyce Maynard introduces a whole new angle into the Gap Game. Remember the Generation Gap and the Credibility Ga...
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Critical Essay by Catherine Tennant
[In Looking Back Joyce Maynard] is concerned not so much with personal experiences—she uses these to illustrate her points—as with the common influen...
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Critical Essay by Ann Grimes
[With Baby Love, Joyce Maynard] makes her debut as a novelist by telling the story of a group of young women in rural Vermont who are compelled to have, raise, abort, or ...
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Critical Essay by Michelle Green
Maynard's prose is sparse, her characters are deftly drawn, and her pacing is brisk. But there's a queer hollow quality about [Baby Love], as if the aut...
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Critical Essay by Anne Tyler
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 am...
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Critical Essay by Jean Strouse
Maynard has a fine ear for idiom, but she constantly undermines the poignancy and humor of ["Baby Love"] with the condescension of her fake-dumb tone ...
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Critical Essay by Suzanne Freeman
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 shif...
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Critical Essay by Barbara Wilcox
Edgy and incisive, [in "Looking Back" Maynard] stated, no, proved, that the most difficult task facing the teenager today was to keep from growing up ol...
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Critical Essay by Annie Gottlieb
