Just as [Joyce Maynard] dropped the depth charge of her mother’s quasi-incest into an early chapter of At Home in the World yet expected readers to stay focused on the fact that J. D. Salinger was a bad boyfriend, The Best of Us tucks a whopper into an opening chapter. At age 55, her children grown, Maynard had “missed being a parent as much as a person crossing the desert misses water.” So she sent away for a CD-rom from an international adoption agency, liked what she saw at an Ethiopian orphanage, and traveled to Africa to adopt two sisters: “They were ravenous for meat. ‘I love you I love you I love you,’ they told me.” But she soon tired of the responsibility. After 14 months, she drove them across the country and handed them off to a different family, and they were adopted a second time.
