My Salinger Year: A Memoir [B0565]

2015 PB in excellent condition. A keenly observed and irresistibly funny memoir about literary New York in the late nineties, a pre-digital world on the cusp of vanishing. Now a major motion picture starring Sigourney Weaver and Margaret Qualley.

After leaving graduate school to pursue her dream of becoming a poet, Joanna Rakoff takes a job as assistant to the storied literary agent for J. D. Salinger. Precariously balanced between poverty and glamour, she spends her days in a plush, wood-paneled office-where Dictaphones and typewriters still reign and agents doze after three-martini lunches-and then goes home to her threadbare Brooklyn apartment and her socialist boyfriend. Rakoff is tasked with processing Salinger's voluminous fan mail, but as she reads the heart-wrenching letters from around the world, she becomes reluctant to send the agency's form response and impulsively begins writing back. The results are both humorous and moving, as Rakoff, while acting as the great writer's voice, begins to discover her own.

From recent Amazon/GoodReads reviews: "I really enjoyed this memoir and now I want to reread Catcher In the Rye."; "I first watched the film and then decided to read the book. I feel certain aspects of the story could have gone deeper. The book feels like a diary. Although it is not the best memoir I have read, I love the description of New York back in the '90s!"; "Ending the year on a high note with this one! Genuinely interesting, and I really appreciated the insiders look at a luddite literary agency.

I also loved all the interpersonal dynamics, how convenience can trap a person in jobs and relationships."