Name: My Salinger Year
ISBN: 9780307958006

Joanna Rakoff

Traces the author's experiences in 1990s New York as the assistant to the agent of J. D. Salinger, a job that contrasted with her threadbare personal life and was enriched by the famous writer's fan letters. By the award-winning author of A Fortunate Age. 40,000 first printing.

My Salinger Year

Ann Gabrielle

“Franny's adoption of the Jesus Prayer has less to do with Jesus than with her desire to transcend her own troublesome ego, to stop the superficial thoughts and desires that plague her. To somehow find a way to live in a world that sickens her. To be her authentic self. To not be the person the world is telling her to be, the girl who must bury her intelligence in her letters to Lane, who must compromise herself in order to live.

Maybe you, like me, identified so strongly with Franny Glass, upon first reading, that you wondered if Salinger had somehow--through some sort of bizarre, science-fiction-style maneuver-tunneled into your brain. Or maybe you, like me, found yourself sobbing with recognition, with relief, that there was someone else who had felt such exhaustion, such despair, such frustration with everything, everyone, including yourself, your inability to be properly nice to your well-intentioned father, or your inexplicable ability to shred the heart of the man who loves you most. Someone else who was trying to figure out how to live in this world.”

might seem like a cliche New York memoir, but is actually so tender w/o being indulgent or mushy 🥲 a little biased as well bc a) Salinger and b) this is so personally comforting—“quiet emotional” as Joanna said herself

maybe it is all true but surely sounds like fiction. reminded me of New York chapters of The Bell Jar.

Amanda S

This memoir gives some insight to what working at a book publishing firm must be like. There are also similar themes to that of Catcher in the Rye. A quick but highly recommended read - one of my favourites of the year.

Ember Skies

haifa

Alecz Hansen

kate

Burcu Şakır

Jessie

Carina Marshall

Liz Carpenter

Stephanie Midolo

Eleanor 

Nina 

At twenty-three, after leaving graduate school to pursue her dreams of becoming a poet, Joanna Rakoff moves to New York City and takes a job as assistant to the storied literary agent for J. D. Salinger. She spends her days in the plush, wood-panelled agency, where Dictaphones and typewriters still reign and old-time agents doze at their desks after martini lunches, and at night she goes home to the tiny, threadbare Brooklyn apartment she shares with her socialist boyfriend. Precariously balanced between glamour and poverty, surrounded by titanic personalities and struggling to trust her own artistic sense, Joanna is given the task of answering Salinger's voluminous fan mail. But as she reads the candid, heart-wrenching letters from his readers around the world, she finds herself unable to type out the agency's decades-old form response. Instead, drawn inexorably into the emotional world of Salinger's devotees, she abandons the template and begins writing back. Poignant, keenly observed and irresistibly funny, My Salinger Year is a memoir about literary New York in the late 1990s, a pre-digital world on the cusp of vanishing, where a young woman finds herself swept into one of the last great stories and entangled with one of the last great figures of the century. Above all, it is the coming-of-age story of a talented writer and a testament to the universal power of books to shape our lives.

My Salinger Year

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