"Too much of At Home in the World takes the form of reconstructed conversations from more than twenty-five years ago and is narrated in a hazy dream time where past and present blur.... At Home in the World strikes me as a bit deluded, as though Maynard thought she could force Salinger to acknowledge her by blowing his cover. The attempt seems not only misjudged but grasping..."
--- The New Yorker, Daphne Merkin

"Although many readers will doubtless find the Salinger chapters the most compelling--and unsettling--part of this book, AT HOME IN THE WORLD is not a sleazy tell-all memoir about the author's affair with a famous (and famously reclusive) man. It's actually an earnest, if at time self-serving, autobiography that, in the course of tracing the author's coming of age, delineates her first serious love affair, one that happened to be with the author of CATCHER IN THE RYE... AT HOME IN THE WORLD demonstrates a marked leap forward in maturity and emotional candor. The sanctimonious world-weariness affected in "An 18-Year-Old Looks Back on Life"--in which Ms. Maynard presumed to speak for her generation--has been replaced by a more direct, uninflected voice.... In fact, Ms. Maynard writes in this volume with a sort of double vision, recreating the girl and young woman she was while at the same time looking at that younger self through the retrospective lens of middle age."
--- Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

"She's clearly trying to work things out in this memoir, to achieve self-understanding. She has some insight, but she should have thought longer and dug more deeply before she sent the manuscript to the publisher. "At Home in the World" is fascinating, the way certain disasters are fascinating. It's a mess, but a riveting mess. You really don't want to look, and yet you can't help wanting to see it all."
--- The Boston Globe, Diane White