Joyce Maynard has written 16 books over the course of a noteworthy career, but her latest is one of her most personal and powerful. The memoir “The Best of Us” details her falling in love — at age 59, after being “a solo operator” since her first marriage ended 25 years earlier — with Jim Barringer, a trial attorney in San Francisco. They met on match.com in 2011 and developed an immediate, deep connection. In “The Best of Us,” Maynard writes, “I never fully understood the phrase ‘he has my back’ until I met Jim” and “We’d waited a long time to find each other.”

They wed. Just after their first anniversary, Barringer was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. Within 19 months, after the duo fought to do whatever they could to beat back the cancer, he succumbed to the disease in 2016. But during that time, Maynard writes, she learned what it meant “to be a true partner and to have one.”

Among the people who have praised “The Best of Us” is author Joyce Carol Oates, whose recommendation is included on the book jacket: “‘The Best of Us’ is so candid, so deeply moving, so powerful … a testament to human resilience. Joyce Maynard is unfathomably heroic.”

Maynard has penned fiction as well as memoirs before, and two of her novels have been made into movies. “To Die For” starred Nicole Kidman in a story inspired by the Pamela Smart case. “Labor Day” dealt with a single mother battling depression (Kate Winslet) who takes in an escaped convict (Josh Brolin).

Maynard has been writing since she was very young. She was publishing articles in Seventeen magazine when she was a teen. At 18, her piece “An Eighteen Year Old Looks Back on Life” ran in New York Times Magazine. That caught the eye of reclusive author J.D. Salinger. The 53-year-old Salinger wrote a fan letter to Maynard, then a freshman at Yale. Salinger romantically pursued Maynard, who left school and lived with Salinger for 10 months before he unceremoniously broke it off. Maynard wrote about that relationship as part of her 1998 bestselling memoir “At Home in the World.”

During a recent phone interview with The Day, Maynard — who was open, expressive and eloquent in conversation — was in the midst of a massively busy schedule. She had been on the road for three weeks for her “The Best of Us” book tour and, the following day, she was heading to France to promote the release.

While Maynard writes about her experiences and her grief in “The Best of Us,” the book is much more than that:

“I always have to say, when I’m asked about that, that nobody should have to pay $20 for my personal catharsis. I’m very conscious of the difference between personal catharsis and offering something to a reader that nourishes and supports her or him as well. That’s my hope with this one. I never set out to teach a lesson, but, in the course of telling my story, I hope that it provides a point of connection and opportunity for self-examination ... not just for people who have had a crushing loss or a loss to cancer specifically, but certainly that’s one of the things that brings people to this story.”

Maynard thinks that, more than anything, the book is a love story and an examination of the nature of marriage:

“For me, it was a painful lesson that came with the loss of my partner, but I, as you know from reading the book, I was not a person who had a great attitude toward marriage (she laughs). When I met Jim, I knew I loved Jim, and I wanted to be with Jim, but I didn’t feel any particular need to marry Jim. That was his idea, not mine. Even the day that we got married, I think I had a very incomplete and somewhat superficial idea about what marriage would be. I was going to just carry on with my existing life, with the addition of this wonderful, smart, funny, handsome, endlessly fun companion who would pick me up at the airport.

“I had a hard time just saying the word ‘husband.’ It did not come easily. And then it wasn’t a conscious decision, changing that. It just happened without my even noticing it. Suddenly, I found myself speaking of “We are getting this surgery,’ ‘we are getting this chemotherapy.”

Maynard is forthright about various events in her life, including her ill-fated 2011 adoption of two Ethiopian sisters, ages 5 and 9. Maynard, who has grown children, had long been interested in an international adoption. But when she did it, the situation was terribly fraught. "At home, dark clouds enveloped us," she writes. She also writes, "We started every day, often before sunrise, with battles — over hair, over clothes, over food, but they were never about any of those things, really." She eventually had to make a heart-wrenching decision she felt was best for the girls: to let them be adopted by a couple who had taken in another Ethiopian child.

“I used to think that was going to be the most painful thing that I ever dealt with. I know, incidentally, it was not the most painful thing or even in the top 10 that my Ethiopian daughters went through, just because their lives had been so hard. You know, it’s a story I never told before, and even now, there are parts of it that I cannot, would not tell because they belong to the girls. But I felt that was really important to tell because that’s who I was at the moment that I met Jim. And also, in a completely different way, it’s not a story that most people have ever heard. I was utterly condemned, as I say, for having done this; there are people who used to be my friends who are not anymore because of that. ... It’s not a story you can tell quickly and, when you do reduce it to a few sentences — you know, she adopted two Ethiopian orphans and then gave them up — it’s pretty horrifying. I‘m always hopeful that if somebody writes about it … that more be said. …

“But the other thing that really means a lot to me is that people who have had this experience ... they may be hugely comforted by (that part of the book) because my experience was far from unique. I will never be a voice condemning all international adoptions, but I do think it is a profoundly complicated and complex and difficult undertaking. I’m not blaming anybody. I had thought I had done my research. I had read, I had taken classes. But I had no understanding of what that meant, really. … I know what my motives were. I certainly went into it with a loving and open heart, but you could say I was idealistic or ignorant or you could say arrogant. I thought I could do everything. And I was humbled by that.”

In 2013, “At Home in the World” was re-released at the same as a documentary about Salinger debuted; Maynard was interviewed for the documentary. At the time, she told the Los Angeles Times, "I do, of course, hope my book (‘At Home in the World’) will be better understood now than when it was first published, when a chorus of critics pronounced me a traitor for having told the story of what happened when I was young." Asked if the book is, in fact, better understood now, she replies:

“No … You know what it is? Well, first of all, I think if people read the book, they might be very surprised and astonished even. But we live in the culture of the sound bite and the quick Google hit. People don’t read a book anymore; they read what was said about the book. And that takes on a life of its own …

“So, no, I don’t think that that book has been particularly widely read in these years. It’s a source of some frustration for me when I go on a book tour, I always ask the book seller, ‘Do you have “At Home in the World”?’ And when people read that book, they are often very moved and shaken by it and not just for the Salinger stuff. I think it’s very much a story for our times — and for those times as well. (It’s) a woman’s story, about the attitude which prevails in our culture still that it is somehow a woman’s responsibility to remain silent to protect the great man. The same kinds of choices that would be celebrated in a man will be condemned in a woman. Hillary Clinton is a prime example.”

On what she loves about writing:

“I love readers. I love language. I love the poetry of language, I love being able to move a person with words … All I need is my laptop, and I can make something happen. I can make a movie in your head.

“If I had my choice, the thing I’d be particularly good at is making music, but I’m not. I always have the image of trying to do with language what musicians that I love accomplish with music, with sound. … I love giving readings. I recorded the audio book of (‘The Best of Us’). I love it when somebody experiences the book that way because that’s my performance, that’s my song.”

On adjusting to being single again after being married to Jim:

“I had gotten very good at being independent (before Jim). Then I discovered how nice it was to have someone else to do some of the things. I loved being — this is both a literal answer and figuratively — the passenger. Then I became the driver again. … I spent a lot more years alone than I did with a partner, so I know how to do this thing. I’m not lonely; it’s not that I want to fill my life up with people. I’m lonely for him — I miss him.”

If you go

Who: Author Joyce Maynard 

Where: Bank Square Books, 53 West Main St., Mystic

When: 6:30 p.m. Monday, Oct. 16

What: Reading and booksigning

Contact: (860) 536-3795, banksquarebooks.com

Visit: www.joycemaynard.com