Joyce Maynard: The One Good Man

Summary

Podcast Summary: The Moth – "Joyce Maynard: The One Good Man"

Episode Overview In the July 2, 2013 episode of The Moth podcast titled "Joyce Maynard: The One Good Man," author Joyce Maynard shares a deeply personal and harrowing true story about unexpected correspondence that evolves into a complex and dangerous relationship. Set against a backdrop of personal turmoil, Maynard's narrative delves into themes of loneliness, vulnerability, and the thin line between connection and obsession.

Story Context and Personal Turmoil [04:08 – 05:00] Joyce Maynard begins her story by painting a vivid picture of her life during a particularly dark period. She recounts the simultaneous losses and upheavals that left her feeling isolated and vulnerable:

• Family Tragedy: Her mother had recently died from a brain tumor.
• Marital Breakdown: She discovered her husband’s affair with their babysitter, leading to the dissolution of her marriage.
• Legal Struggles: Faced with legal battles over her mother's will and custody of her three children, Maynard found herself sinking deeper into debt due to exorbitant legal fees.

Quote:
"It was a bad time in my life... I was spending most of that money on a lawyer trying to defend myself."
[04:30]

The Unexpected Correspondence [05:00 – 08:00] Amidst this turmoil, Maynard starts receiving letters from a man incarcerated in Folsom Prison, who signs himself as "Grizzly." These letters stand out to her for several reasons:

• Personal Touch: Grizzly references intimate details about her family and children, such as which child plays the baritone horn or acts in school productions.
• Emotional Support: He portrays himself as a surrogate family member, expressing heartfelt connections and offering support during her bleak winter nights in New Hampshire.

Quote:
"He had come to regard me and my children as his special family."
[04:50]

Developing Relationship Through Letters [08:00 – 12:00] What begins as sporadic and manageable correspondence quickly escalates:

• Escalating Commitments: Maynard’s initial brief replies are met with increasingly lengthy and intimate letters from Grizzly.
• Deep Emotional Bond: She finds solace and a sense of connection in his writing, which becomes a lifeline during her struggles.
• Affection and Trust: Gradually, Maynard confides in Grizzly, sharing personal anecdotes and life details, believing she has found a genuine and trustworthy companion.

Quote:
"I was falling in love with him... there was a kind of purity and honesty about his writing."
[10:15]

Realization of Danger and Attempts to Sever Ties [12:00 – 14:30] As the relationship intensifies, subtle red flags begin to emerge:

• Inconsistencies and Secrets: Despite the growing bond, Maynard remains unaware of the true nature of Grizzly’s crimes until prompted by a friend’s advice to uncover his background.
• Legal Barriers: Attempts to discover Grizzly’s criminal history are thwarted by uncooperative social workers, heightening her sense of vulnerability.
• Warning Signs: Grizzly’s aggressive threats towards her unfaithful husband and his menacing portrayal contrast sharply with the supportive facade he maintains.

Quote:
"She [the social worker] said, 'Why do you ask?' I said, 'Well, I'm in a kind of a relationship with this person.'"
[12:45]

The Shocking Truth and Aftermath [14:30 – 16:00] The revelation of Grizzly’s true identity and the severity of his crimes abruptly shatters Maynard’s perception:

• Grizzly’s Past: She discovers that Grizzly is serving life without parole for the gruesome murder of his parents, a fact that starkly contrasts with the heartfelt letters.
• Emotional Turmoil: The juxtaposition of his tender correspondence with his violent history leaves Maynard feeling betrayed and terrified.
• Lingering Hauntings: Despite severing contact, Maynard is haunted by the relationship, symbolized by the lingering letters and the fear of Grizzly’s potential actions.

Quote:
"I am haunted by the knowledge that somewhere in a maximum security prison in Southern California, there is most assuredly the Christmas photograph of me and my three children taped to a cinder block wall."
[16:00]

Conclusion Joyce Maynard's poignant narrative in this episode of The Moth encapsulates the complexities of human connection and the unforeseen dangers that can lurk beneath seemingly sincere interactions. Her story serves as a cautionary tale about the vulnerabilities we face during times of personal crisis and the importance of seeking help beyond unconventional avenues.

Notable Quotes with Timestamps

• "It was a bad time in my life... I was spending most of that money on a lawyer trying to defend myself."
  [04:30]

• "He had come to regard me and my children as his special family."
  [04:50]

• "I was falling in love with him... there was a kind of purity and honesty about his writing."
  [10:15]

• "She [the social worker] said, 'Why do you ask?' I said, 'Well, I'm in a kind of a relationship with this person.'"
  [12:45]

• "I am haunted by the knowledge that somewhere in a maximum security prison in Southern California, there is most assuredly the Christmas photograph of me and my three children taped to a cinder block wall."
  [16:00]

Final Thoughts "Joyce Maynard: The One Good Man" is a gripping episode that underscores the unforeseen repercussions of seeking connection in isolation. Through her eloquent storytelling, Maynard invites listeners to reflect on the nature of trust, the impact of personal loss, and the fine line between refuge and vulnerability.

Transcript

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[Dan Kennedy]

Welcome to the Moth Podcast. I'm Dan Kennedy. This podcast is brought to you by Audible.com, the Internet's leading provider of audiobooks with more than 100,000 downloadable titles across all types of literature. For the Moth listeners, Audible is offering a free audiobook to give you a chance to try out their service. You might like listening to let's Explore Diabetes with Owls. It's written and read by David Sedaris. To try Audible Free today and get a free audiobook of your choice, go to audible.comthemoth that's audible.comthemoth so you might remember a few A few months ago we auctioned the opportunity to co host an episode of the podcast with me as part of our Mothball celebration that we had here in New York. Well, Frank Messina, a poet, actor and visual artist, was the lucky winner and he's here with me today. Frank, welcome to the Moth Podcast.

[Frank Messina]

Thank you. It's great to be here.

[Dan Kennedy]

Tell me a little bit about your writing. Like I know you obviously are a poet and you've written a couple books.

[Frank Messina]

That's correct. My book from 2002 was called Disorderly Conduct.

[Dan Kennedy]

Cool. And then your other book, well, the.

[Frank Messina]

Next book is Full Count the Book of Mets Poetry, but it's not all about the Mets and it's not all poetry. There are two short stories in there, but it's really about being a Mets fan in a Yankee town, father passing away, crazy relationships, and how baseball helps heal but also create some type of mayhem.

[Dan Kennedy]

I am impressed with the fact that not only do you understand baseball, but you understand poetry. Two things that I can not grasp. So how long have you been listening to the moth?

[Frank Messina]

About a year now.

[Dan Kennedy]

And do you have, like, a particular story that you connected with or that like, popped out at you?

[Frank Messina]

Yeah, there's so many really pleasurable to listen to. But one particular one that really struck me was the gambling story by Josh Axelran.

[Dan Kennedy]

Oh, yeah? Yeah.

[Frank Messina]

The mania involved in gambling and the desire to get out of that world. I think he captured that really well. I really enjoyed listening to that.

[Dan Kennedy]

I loved that story and also his book. That book was amazing. Now, speaking of stories, it's time for this week's story. So here's where I turn the co hosting controls over to you. Take it, Frank.

[Frank Messina]

Thanks, Dan. The story you're about to hear by Joyce Maynard was told live in New York back in 2000. The theme of the night was babes in the big house. Stories of daring escapes.

[Joyce Maynard]

This is the story of an escape, an escape through letters. I have to add, it's not just me. I think many of us escape this way. Men in prison are a good example. A man in prison who cannot touch a woman anymore often develops a particular kind of brilliance at letter writing. And this is the story of one such man who, I will tell you, wrote the best letters I ever received. And I've received some good letters. It was a really bad time in my life. My mother had just died of a brain tumor. I discovered that my husband was having an affair with our babysitter. Our marriage had ended. Our marriage actually ended the week that my mother died. But my mother died first, which did allow my husband to take me to court for half of the small amount of money that my mother had left me in her will. So I was spending most of that money on a lawyer trying to defend myself, also against the suit for the custody of our three children. It was, as I said, a bad time in my life. And about the only person that I seemed to have to protect me, I had my friends, of course, was this $125 an hour lawyer to whom I was rapidly becoming so deeply in debt that I couldn't imagine ever getting out and into this very dark moment in my life I was living. I should Say, in a small town in New Hampshire, and it was winter, came a letter. As I say, I get lots of letters and I've come to recognize what a letter from prison looks like. The address on the front of the envelope is usually written in pencil. That's one giveaway. And, and the return address has a very long code number. And this letter came from Folsom. The man who wrote the letter said that most of the time when the mail came to the cell block, the kind of reading matter that really got the men going was the monthly delivery of Playboy or Penthouse. But what he really loved were my weekly columns in the newspaper about my children and my family that, you know, melted my heart. He knew all the little information about, you know, which of my children played the baritone horn and which one wanted to be a pitcher and which one was acting in Annie that season. He followed us all very carefully. He knew my recipe for apple pieces. And he said that in the absence of any family of his own, he had come to regard me and my children as his special family. It was a very sweet and touching letter signed Grizzly. And so of course I had to write back. And I sent him first a kind of businesslike four line note saying, dear Grizzly, it was really nice to hear from you and, and I'm glad you like my work. And here's one of my favorite cookie recipes. So I sent him my four line note. He sent me a ten page letter written very tiny letters in pencil. I sent him a five sentence note. He sent me a 20 page letter. I sent him a one page letter. He sent me a 50 page letter back. That was the first week of my correspondence with Grizzly. Now I would like to be able to tell you, it would be the more mature and sophisticated thing if I could say that I put this all in its proper perspective. But in fact, over the days and weeks that I began to hear from Grizzly with more and more frequency and sheer volume, I found myself being pulled into his story. The story that I'm telling you will no question give you abundant evidence of my poor judgment in life. But one thing I will attest to, and I will stand on this to my last breath, is that I know good writing and Grizzly knew how to do it. I have seldom read stories more powerful than the ones that he spun out in the growing stack of pages that were accumulating on my bedside table. I had started saving these letters till I went to bed those long cold New Hampshire winter nights when I felt so alone in the world and as if really my one friend and protector was this man 3,000 miles away in prison. He told me he didn't talk about prison life. He talked about his life before prison. He grew up on a citrus farm in the San Fernando Valley. His parents had both died tragically when he was very young. And he was raised by his grandmother. He wrote about women, the women that he had loved. And he loved hard. Grizzly. That was one thing that I recognized about him. I have to say at the point that in my own defense here, at the point that Grizzly came into my life, I had been single, single out in the world of dating a little bit. And I know there are women here tonight who will understand this, that if you have been a single woman out in the world of dating, the fact that somebody's a senior partner in a law firm, or they work for Charles Schwab or they. Or they have tenure at NYU is absolutely no guarantee that the person won't be a true sociopath. So I actually came to believe that maybe I had found the one good man. I really believed that I had found the one good heart. There was a kind of purity and honesty about his writing, about his grammar, about his spelling. When major holidays came around, he had coloring book pages that he'd color in for me and put stickers on. And he wrote poems for my children. He knew when all their birthdays were. He would describe to me, you know, it came to be Little League season. And there was nobody to warm up my pitcher son for the games but me. And he kind of threw the mails, give me advice on how to throw a knuckleball, you know. And he didn't think much of my $125 an hour lawyer. He told me in no uncertain terms, powerful language. What he would do to my husband if he was there. He would make him eat his underwear. And I almost felt that he could just break through the bars to do it. He was a man of so much power. He was not really a particularly physically big person. He'd sent me his picture. And, you know, it wasn't that he was a particularly handsome person. In fact, I guess you'd have to say he was ugly. But I had married, in fact, a very handsome person. So I knew about the lie of that one, too. Grizzly sent me a picture posed very carefully in front of the cinder block cell wall behind him, wearing a bandage around his head. I never found out why that was. And a cowboy hat on top of that, a long beard and his best shirt. He said that it Was misbuttoned. I remember that well now it was worse than winter even. It was mud season in New Hampshire, which is a really hard time of year. And I just finished my winter car accidents. And now I was into my spring, getting stuck in the mud. And he would send me advice about how to fix my car and how to check the rotors on my brakes. I don't even remember what all the parts were anymore. But he'd draw little diagrams and tell me what I should look for. And I guess I'd have to tell you that I was falling in love with him. There were a couple of moments when I recognized that this really didn't make sense. And I tried to cut it off. And every time that I would send him a letter saying, you know what? Really Grizzly, I don't see a future here, he would send back another story that would just break your heart. One was the time that he told me about his first wife. That was the woman. His first wife had died in childbirth with their daughter. About two months later, I tried to break it off again. And that time he told me the story of his second wife. And she had been the most beautiful woman in the state of California. And they used to ride Harleys together. And she got horribly disfigured in a motorcycle accident. He told me he was getting out. He told me he was getting out of prison. And my friend said, you've got to find out what he was in for. I had thought that was a really rude thing to ask him. And it showed a kind of lack of trust. And I didn't have the kind of good heart that he did. But when I knew he was coming out and he was coming to play catch with my sons, I thought I'd better do it. So I called up the police. I called up the prison. I asked for the social worker. The social workers told me to another social worker, another social worker. I got the social worker. I said, I've got to know what he's in for. She said, we don't do that. There are many procedures, I said. She said, why do you ask? I said, well, I'm in a kind of a relationship with this person. She said, you know what? I'm going to break the rules. Sit down, honey. Do you know why they call him Grizzly? He's in Folsom for the grisly murder of his parents. They were beheaded. He will not be getting out anytime in the next 300 years. She added that, please not to break it off quick because he could do violence to her, and she was a little afraid of that. But I found it absolutely impossible to write back to him. Although his letters began to pile up and up and up, and for over a year the thick packets of letters continued to land in my mail slot. I read them for about a week, but they were so truly toxic and poisonous and the same kind of power to create beauty now created the most ugly, vicious, bitter, scary writing that I have ever read. And I've read some of that too. I never threw out his letters. I keep them in a folder in the back of my closet. And I must tell you that I am haunted by the knowledge that somewhere in a maximum security prison in Southern California, there is most assuredly the Christmas photograph of me and my three children taped to a cinder block wall.

[Frank Messina]

Joyce Maynard's most recent novel, after her, will be published this August. Her best selling memoir, At Home in the World, will be reissued with a new preface in September. The film adaptation of her novel Labor Day, directed by Jason Reitman and starring Kate Winslet and Josh Brolin, will be released on Christmas Day. Her website is joycemaynard.com well Frank Messina.

[Dan Kennedy]

You have officially co hosted an episode of the Moth Podcast Podcast, my friend. Great job. Thanks for coming by, Frank. It was really fun.

[Frank Messina]

I really appreciate it. It was my pleasure and an honor to be here too as well.

[Dan Kennedy]

Hey listen, I have. I think I'm actually going to get a vacation in 2023, which is just, just about a decade from now and we'd love to give you a call then maybe.

[Frank Messina]

That sounds great to me.

[Dan Kennedy]

Come back and do another episode.

[Frank Messina]

If I'm here. I'll be here.

[Dan Kennedy]

All right. Thanks man.

[Frank Messina]

Cheers.

[Joyce Maynard]

See you.

[Dan Kennedy]

This podcast is brought to you by all audible.com the Internet's leading provider of audiobooks with more than 100,000 downloadable titles across all types of literature and featuring audio versions of many New York Times bestsellers. To try Audible free today and get a free audiobook of your choice, go to audible.com themoth Also, here's something you want to put on the calendar for August. The Moth main stage is returning to Martha's Vineyard on on Saturday, August 3rd. That'll be at the Tabernacle. For information on tickets and for all of our upcoming tour stops, visit themoth.org.

[Joyce Maynard]

Our podcast host, Dan Kennedy is a writer and performer living in New York and author of the new novel American Spirit.

[TurboTax]

Available now.

[Dan Kennedy]

Thanks to all of you for listening and we hope you have a story worthy week. Podcast audio production by Paul Ruest at the Argo Studios in New York. The Moth Podcast and the Radio Hour are presented by prx, the Public Radio Exchange, helping make public radio more public at prx. Org.