What if you could learn the lessons of cancer without cancer? Novelist Joyce Maynard shares the love, loss, and lessons of her marriage to husband Jim Barringer, who died of pancreatic cancer just three years after they became husband and wife. Joyce Maynard first came to national attention with the publication of her 1972 New York Times cover story, “An Eighteen-Year-Old Looks Back on Life,” when she was a freshman at Yale.

Since then, Joyce has been a reporter and columnist for The New York Times, a syndicated newspaper columnist, a regular contributor to NPR and national magazines and a longtime performer with The Moth.

She is the author of seventeen books, including the novels To Die For and Labor Day, both adapted for film. She has a best-selling and controversial memoir, At Home in the World, and, more recently, The Best of Us, the story of meeting her husband when the two were in their late fifties, and losing him four years later to cancer.

Joyce has been hosting workshops for aspiring writers of memoir for almost twenty years. She is currently working on her tenth novel and the screen adaptation of an earlier work.

https://www.joycemaynard.com/ This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at https://www.ted.com/tedx