Joyce Maynard 1953–

American novelist and memoirist.

While Maynard was a student at Yale, she wrote Looking Back: A Chronicle of Growing Up Old in the Sixties, a serious social document and, concurrently, a humorous personal memoir. Generalizing from her own experience, Maynard presents her generation as media-blitzed people who have low resistance to peer and social pressure.

The idealistic young mothers who are the protagonists of Maynard's recent first novel, Baby Love, are also products of the media and the materialism of smalltown America.