“The Best of Us is so candid, so deeply moving, so powerful . . . a testament to human resilience. Joyce Maynard is unfathomably heroic.”
PROLOGUE of THE BEST OF US
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 only learned the full meaning of marriage as mine was drawing to a close. I discovered what love was as mine departed the world.
This is our story.
AUDIO CLIPS
This book is the story of how I came to learn, late in the game, what it is to be married, and to love a person in a way that has nothing to do with what he has to give you. It’s not about grand passion or extraordinary sex or the exciting, wonderful future you’ll create with your amazing, handsome, dashing partner. With my husband Jim, I found my amazing, handsome, dashing partner, but when illness stripped all of that away I learned what it meant to love without asking anything back, because the act of loving was, itself, the gift.
REVIEWS
"I love this new work. I think it is the most important writing of her life--profound, heart wrenching, inspiring, full of joy and tears and life."
~ New York Times bestselling author Anne Lamott
"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."
~ New York Times bestselling author 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, author of The Knitting Circle
"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."
~ Pulitzer Prize winning author, 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."
~ New York Times bestselling author 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."
~ New York Times bestselling author 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, author of Motherless Daughters