Joyce Maynard, a hack confessional journalist, was lucky enough -- when she was 18-years-old -- to have had an affair with J.D. Salinger, the reclusive author of Catcher in the Rye, and that brilliant collection of short stories titled simply 9 Stories.

When Maynard was a student at Yale University she was approached by the 53-year-old Salinger, who wooed her with love letters. Maynard quit school to live with him. Now, twenty years later, she's written a memoir about the "secret life of J.D. Salinger" and worse yet -- she's auctioning off his love letters.

According to the Associated Press: "After keeping mum about the relationship for years, Maynard now says she'd rather put her kids through college than hold on to Salinger's box of letters."

Well, gee, Joyce, you could always work for a living. Salinger's attorneys haven't commented, but the law is on Maynard's side. She owns the physical letters and can sell them legally. She can't publish them without permission, and the new owner or owners will not be able to publish them either.

Sotheby's auction house expects these letters will fetch $80,000, so they're likely to be protected as valuable collector's items. They won't be destroyed or lost. But I'm not sure how Maynard can do this without feeling a bit dirty.

Perhaps she feels victimized, a young girl (and writer) seduced by a great, older author. It's hard to feel sad for that kind of being victimized. What she had was the ultimate literary experience and what she was after, if we're to assume the older Salinger only wanted some young tail, was the heart and devotion of a great artist.

Now she has betrayed any trust Salinger ever offered. She's certainly betrayed any future friendship. Esquire magazine ran a cover story last year where the journalist searches for Salinger's home, finds it, and tries and fails to meet Salinger. Sometimes I think people want to bother him simply because he wants to be left alone. When someone wants to be left alone, we Americans feel it necessary to find out why.

Why do we want to know?

I don't believe Joyce is just doing it for the money. She's a working journalist, magazine writer, and book author, and she can afford to send her kids to college. I went to college and my parents (public school teachers) made a lot less than Joyce. I know, Joyce, Yale is more expensive than other schools. That's what loans are for -- my friends have them, so why not your kids?

What Joyce wants, in her own small way with her book and this auction, is to out a hermit. She is expressing an American belief that people don't have the right to be left alone, that all lives are public lives. Oh, we talk a good game about the "right to privacy" but forget about that notion whenever we want to cry "right to know!" She wants to show Salinger that he can't control what people think about him, that he can't control what happens to all of his work, that he's impotent against the motions of publicity machines, and maybe there's also a hint of revenge here -- the actions of a spoiled and heart-broken little girl who never learned to let go.

Salinger has aggressively defended his own right to privacy and control over his work -- even suing a poor college kid who put Catcher in the Rye quotations on his web page (not just a few lines, but a lot of the book) and while that seems mean-spirited, I can understand it because we live in an era where a writer doesn't control his own work, especially in New York and Hollywood. Remember in Catcher that Holden says his brother, a great short story writer, is living in Hollywood "prostituting himself." Losing control of his words like a whore loses control of her body.

Joyce Maynard, journalist, author, pimp.

Michael Maiello wishes he was having an exploitable affair with Elizabeth Wurtzel.