Memoir of a Literary Life

My Salinger Year 

by Joanna Rakoff

“To read Salinger is to engage in an act of such intimacy that it, at times, makes you uncomfortable. In Salinger, characters don't sit around contemplating suicide. They pick up guns and shoot themselves in the head. All through that weekend, even as I ripped through his entire oeuvre, I kept having to put the books down and breathe. He shows us his characters at their most bald, bares their most private thoughts, most telling actions. It's almost too much. Almost.”   ― Joanna Rakoff, My Salinger Year

If you love books, if you ever wanted to write books, if you were ever young and wondered what you should do with your life, this is a memoir for you. Joanna Rakoff, in this her second book, has written an appealing memoir about her first job in Manhattan with a literary agency. Not just any job, but one at the literary agent for J. D. Salinger is her destination. It was there that she entered an old style agency that in the nineties had yet to move into the digital world of computers and email.

Her story is one that balances the relative impoverishment of someone just out of college with the demands of living with her current boyfriend, and a job that is daunting at most of its best times. Her main task is to answer Salinger's fan mail, yet that involves preparing form letters responding to readers' letters and notifying them that Mr. Salinger does not read or respond to fan mail. Somehow she gets the idea that she should abandon the standard template and start responding to some of the more emotional epistles on her own. Needless to say this decision creates a few difficulties for her young career.

The memoir highlights how she handles this new world she has entered and the emotional impact that has on her personal life. The best moments for this reader were when she related her connection with Salinger's prose. Her reactions were not only realistic, but not unlike some of my own reactions to his novels and stories. His is truly a unique voice and his characters, from Holden to Franny & Zooey are iconic. His books demonstrate a love of literature in that is both like other great authors yet very definitely just right for his characters and narratives.

I think that Ms. Rakoff demonstrates a similar love of literature in the best moments of this memoir. While I found some of the personal anecdotes slightly less interesting than her literary adventures, that did not detract significantly from what was a very enjoyable literary memoir.