Joyce Maynard, At It Again
Categories: Mystery & Suspense , Nonfiction
Joyce Maynard is only five years older than I, but unlike me she's published a whole lot of good books, starting with the memoir she wrote when she was 18, Looking Back; A Chronicle of Growing Up Old in the Sixties. Later she wrote a memoir of her affair with J. D. Salinger; the darkly funny Baby Love, about three teenaged mothers, a deranged escaped killer, and an equally deranged though less violent grandmother. Before they divorced, she wrote children's books with her ex-husband, and a syndicated column about the joys of family life. She probably portrayed family life as more joyful than it was in her case, and it's clear in Internal Combustion that she has still not completely moved on from that divorce.
Later she wrote the engrossing To Die For, a novelization of the Pamela Smart case. Finally, she's crossed the line into serious True Crime, with Internal Combustion: The Story of a Marriage and a Murder in the Motor City.
The murder is pretty much what you'd expect. Mrs. Seaman was always a bit troubled and cranky, and it was no wonder her husband started spending more time with his friends, the Dumbletons, than with her. Their relationship deteriorated to the point that neither one would take out the garbage, because each thought the other should do it. Finally, Mr. Seaman said he wanted a divorce, and Mrs. Seaman killed him. The older son sided with his father's family, and the younger son with his mother. The only remaining question is how the wife, a small woman, got her heavy husband into the trunk of her car without help. She said she used an inclined plane, and that she'd gotten the idea from teaching her fourth grade class about simple machines.
Joyce Maynard is a literary writer, and there's a lot of meta-true crime in the book. She herself doesn't get to the trial until the day of the verdict, and then she spends a lot of time trying to get interviews. Mrs. Dumbleton readily hands over the notes she had been keeping about Mrs. Seaman for years before the murder, but most people are unwilling to talk to her. She has two conversations with the older Seaman son. Mrs. Seaman initially agrees to an interview but then changes her mind. The younger son never responds to her requests. Joyce Maynard then starts trying to get the Dumbleton children to talk with her, and Mrs. Seaman's teaching colleagues, and even that proves difficult. So the book is as much about the difficulties of True Crime writing as it is about the Seaman family.
The book is also about Joyce Maynard's personal journey; she came to Michigan assuming she would feel some kind of rapport with Mrs. Seaman, given her own continued anger over her difficult divorce. She buys a cheap car and stays at the vacation cabin of a Detroit reporter. Often the only person she sees for days, it seems, while she waits for friends or family of the Seamans to return her phone calls, is a brain-damaged man who wanders around in the forest. She thinks about her relationship with her own children, who blame her for keeping them away from their father. She drives to inner-city Detroit and thinks about American cars.
As Joyce Maynard leaves the story, the two Seaman sons are barely speaking to one another. The Dumbleton son emails her a copy of a paper he wrote for an English composition class, describing his heartbreak on the day he learned Mr. Seaman was dead. Joyce Maynard realizes the story she has written is nothing like the story she had imagined; her final thoughts of Mrs. Seaman are anger, disgust, and revulsion.
You can read more about Joyce Maynard on her Web site.
