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MILL VALLEY, Calif. -- By the unspoken rules of California real estate duels, Joyce Maynard should never have landed this rustic house nestled on the shoulders of Marin County's Mount Tamalpais.
A decade back, Maynard, just divorced and with three children, uprooted from New Hampshire in search of a new life. She had cashed in when her 1992 novel To Die For became a Nicole Kidman movie, but flush she wasn't.
"I had the lowest bid by far," she says with obvious pride. "The real estate agent said telling the sellers about myself wasn't done, but I did anyway."
The result? A thunderclap moment when Maynard gushed about the depth of the kitchen counters, "so perfect for making pies." Not long after, the pie-loving sellers forked over the keys.
"My mother made pies," Maynard says. "When she was dying, I'd invite people over and teach everyone how to do it, a way to carry on her legacy.
"I still have pie parties. And, yes, I do write on the side."
When Maynard, 53, does put fingers to keyboard, it's in a cozy writing alcove stuffed with papers, photos and a washer/dryer. "I can write or do laundry," she says.
Cobbled together in the middle of the last century, the house has cottage overtones, with its warren of modest-sized living areas and loft-like sleeping quarters upstairs.
If the decor boasts a unifying theme, it is the absence of one. In the living room, 24 masks made by a friend keep company with paintings done by her late father, Max. One features two figures: "I like to think that's him and me."
Maynard is between stops on a book tour for Internal Combustion, a new non-fiction work that dissects a Detroit murder born of a rotten marriage. Her research trips to Michigan proved so disturbing -- the deed was done with a hatchet -- that Maynard baked for therapy.
But there's no place like home. Here, the the white-and-green tile counters are double deep. Her appliances have seen better days, but the whole area shouts untouched-since-the-'70s, an appealing contrast with today's stainless-and-granite monuments to domesticity.
Not far off the kitchen, a wooden desk is home to a carved crouching tiger and Maynard's books, "to remind me I really can do this," she says with an explosive laugh.
Maynard grew up in a household "where you wrote, that's just what you did." A famously reflective magazine piece in 1972 won her a pen pal in J.D. Salinger. When she moved in with the reclusive legend, she was 19 to his 53. "Let's just say, now that I'm that age, I can't imagine sending letters off to 19-year-old boys," Maynard says flatly about the affair she wrote about in 1999's At Home in the World.
But that's in the past. These days, Maynard revels in being "a party girl," she says, often summoning friends to her home. She strolls into the dining room, which is dominated by a fireplace flanked by a 3-foot ceramic sculpture of a Oaxacan woman and a Rock-Ola jukebox.
Two strides take her to an expansive deck. From that perch, the valley below extends to the bay. But for all this splendor, Maynard may not stay. Her three children are grown. She may return to New England, or retreat to her small home on Guatemala's Lake Atitlan.
"A little house, a comfortable chair, peace and quiet -- retirement sounds tempting." That was Maynard writing at 18.
Today? "I used to think a home required a house," she says. "Now I realize I bring a little bit of me everywhere. I really am at home in the world, wherever I am." Wherever the counters are wide.
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