Joyce Maynard

Actress Kate Winslet was nominated for a Golden Globe for her performance in the movie adaptation of Joyce Maynard's 2009 book "Labor Day." (Beth Rooney/ Chicago Tribune)

In "Labor Day," the film adaptation of Joyce Maynard's 2009 novel, a depressed divorced woman named Adele (Kate Winslet in a Golden Globe-nominated performance) and her 13-year-old son Henry find their lives transformed when an escaped murderer named Frank (Josh Brolin) spends a long weekend holed up in their home in a small town in New Hampshire. Directed and adapted from Maynard's book by Jason Reitman ("Juno"), "Labor Day" is a romantic story of unexpected redemption. Although initially menacing, Frank turns out to be a savior of sorts, becoming a supportive lover for Adele and a nurturing father figure for Henry.


Printers Row Journal caught up with Maynard, 60, during the Chicago stop of what she laughingly calls "The Kate Winslet Was Unavailable Tour" promoting the movie, which was scheduled to open nationwide on Jan. 31. The author answered questions about "Labor Day"; the art of baking pies, which figures prominently in the film; dealing with Hollywood; her new novel, "After Her"; and, finally, the fallout from her long-ago romance with the reclusive writer J.D. Salinger. (After keeping silent about the affair with the author of "The Catcher in the Rye" for decades, she finally wrote about it in her best-selling 1998 memoir "At Home in the World," for which she was heavily criticized.) Here's an edited transcript of our chat.

Q: Your work seems to be about kinds of love — good love and bad love. And it seems to me that "To Die For" is about bad love masquerading as good love, while "Labor Day" is about good love masquerading as bad love.

A: Very good! Yes. In "Labor Day," Frank is really the antithesis of the guy that mothers want their daughters to bring home, but he turns out to be a true good guy.

Q: When we first see him, though, he's pretty scary.

A: Yes, and we're not giving anything away by saying that the tension in the movie is not about whether he's going to turn out to be a bad guy. The tension is about whether he's going to get away, which we're rooting for him to do. And I think that comes out of my own sometimes painful observations and life experience. I suspect that most people over the age of 25 know that the people who look like the good people are very cruel and dangerous.

Q: And in "Labor Day," the opposite is true.

A: Right. These are outsiders. You're not supposed to bring home a man who has blood dripping down his side.

Q: She doesn't really have a choice, though.

A: In the novel, she has a little bit more of a choice. Jason maybe correctly recognized that that would be a hard one for audiences to buy. I bought it, because I would have brought him home, and not just because he looked like Josh Brolin.

Q: In this case, maybe, the danger was making him seem TOO good. I mean, he cooks! He bakes! He fixes the car!

A: Yes, and P.S., he's a man that society has deemed bad. And he did kill somebody. But, you know, everybody has a story. And some of us — and I am one — get labeled as a bad person, in the era of Google all the more so. And that seldom bears much resemblance to who we are and what our story is. The headlines reduce him to "desperate convict on the run," and her to "agoraphobic neurotic." There's some basis for that, of course, but it's more complicated than that.

Q: It occurred to me when I was watching the movie that some critics are going to say that Frank represents a retrograde view of the role of men, the role of fathers in families — the guy who teaches the son how to play ball and so on.

A: (Laughs.) You know, I've been the mother trying to do that! I've played ball with my sons, and they're athletic but they're not ballplayers. (Laughs.) Oh, God, I'm so weary of that kind of political correctness.

Q: But you know what I'm talking about.

A: Of course. And as you say, he also cooks.

Q: Speaking of which, let's talk about the pie-baking scene, which has to be the sexiest pie-baking scene ever.

A: Jason put a lot into that. He came to my house to make pie, I went to his house to make pie. I went to the set to teach Josh to make the pie. Jason took only one liberty, which I think he was right to take. In the unlikely event that Josh Brolin came to my house to make a pie, we wouldn't all have our hands in the bowl together. You don't want to over-touch things in baking.

Q: But he's teaching Adele and Henry how to bake, so it makes sense.