Man of my heart, I'll string along

J. D. Salinger's one time teen heart throb has her latest novel made into a movie, and she's still walking the walk;

Many of the details in Ms. Maynard's book were drawn from her own life. For example, she was a single mother living in a small New Hampshire town for many years, experiencing "the romantic yearnings of a woman, no longer young—caring for a child, but uncared for, herself," she says. And, during a particularly difficult time—following her divorce and the death of her mother in the late 1980s—she struck up an epistolary relationship with a convicted felon living at a maximum security prison in California. At the time, "I was ready to believe, in a funny way, that since the men who looked like good men proved to be not good men, that maybe the true good man was the man who looked like a bad man," she says. The relationship ended when Ms. Maynard found out that the man was in jail for decapitating his parents.