My Salinger Year

An Amazon Best Book of the Month, June 2014: Once upon a time, not so very long ago, there existed a world in which writers used typewriters, publishers and agents sent manuscripts (on paper!) via the U.S. Postal Service, and starry-eyed ambitious young people moved to New York to try their luck in the literary world. (Okay, so that last bit still holds true.) It was the late ‘90s when writer-to-be Joanna Rakoff got her first job in New York publishing as an assistant to the woman who represented the great reclusive author J.D. Salinger. In the winsome and meticulously observed My Salinger Year , Rakoff recounts her experiences as an earlier-era Lena Dunham-creation, complete with a ratty Brooklyn apartment, strident anti-establishment boyfriend, and big, big dreams. “We all have to start somewhere,” is how Rakoff begins her story of being young, gifted, and possessed of a coveted “editorial assistant” job that her parents (my parents, your parents, everyone’s parents) would call “secretary.” While it’s true that J.D. “Jerry” Salinger figures into the narrative--and rather sympathetically so--it’s a mistake to say he’s at the heart of it. Youth, adventure, hope, ambition, and a keen eye and ear are what make this book run; with it, Rakoff--author of the novel A Fortunate Age --takes her place among such illustrious coming-of-age-in-New-York writers as Sylvia Plath, Candace Bushnell, and, well, maybe even J.D. Salinger. --Sara Nelson From Booklist *Starred Review* Rakoff, the author of a much praised first novel, A Fortunate Age (2009), chronicles her year working at the problematically retro New York literary agency that had been representing the reclusive, nearly deaf, and still demanding J. D. Salinger since 1942. It’s 1996, and Rakoff’s chain-smoking boss is loud and cryptic. There is no computer on the premises, and Rakoff’s nebulous responsibilities entail using an ancient Dictaphone and handling Salinger’s heart-battering fan mail—hundreds of letters from lonely, angry teens and grateful military veterans who recognize in the author one of their damaged own. A poet involved with an unsavory, wannabe novelist, Rakoff misses her far more reliable college boyfriend. She finds her low-wage job enchanting, intimidating, ludicrous, and, briefly, thrilling when Salinger pitches the agency into a tizzy by allowing a teeny-tiny press to turn “Hapworth” (1965), his last published story, into a book. As Rakoff recounts her funny and wrenching personal predicaments, she also charts the quiet battle of attrition between the values of the old publishing world, personal and impassioned, and the aggressively invasive corporate imperative. An intriguing look at the ever-fascinating Salinger and a gracefully incisive tale of love and literature, creativity and survival. --Donna Seaman “ My Salinger Year is at heart—and it has lots of heart—an affecting coming-of-age memoir about a naïve, eager literary aspirant who, like a character out of Salinger (Franny Glass, for one), ‘was trying to figure out how to live in this world’ . . . What adds freshness to My Salinger Year is not just its wry take on the writer of the rye but Rakoff’s sympathetic mix of passivity, naïveté, stoicism, earnestness, understated intelligence, and finely honed literary sensibility . . . Rakoff wisely—and deftly—weaves her Salinger story into a broader, more universal tale about finding one’s bearings during a pivotal transitional year into real adulthood.” xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0 —Heller McAlpin, The Washington Post “A breezy memoir of being a ‘bright young assistant’ in the mid-1990s . . . Salinger himself makes a cameo appearance . . . The real star of My Salinger Year remains the Agency itself, with its Dictaphones and fox stoles, its wistful attempts to cling to the days of ‘“Thin Man” movies and steamship travel’ . . . The ‘archaic charms’ of the Agency are comically offset by its refusal to acknowledge the Internet age.”xa0 xa0 xa0 xa0 xa0 xa0xa0—Suzanne Berne, The New York Times Book Review “Glamorous . . . A time-capsule portrait . . . Rakoff does a marvelous job of capturing a cultural moment—the publishing industry on the cusp of the Internet era—and describing the ambition and anxiety of a young, bright, creative person living beyond her means in an expensive and relentlessly competitive city . . . What is most admirable is [her] critical intelligence and generosity of spirit.” xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0 —Priscilla Gilman, The Boston Globe “Absorbing . . . Not only does Rakoff adeptly capture the uncertainty of youth—how one weaves down the road of responsibility, with hardly enough money for rent or sense for relationships—she also perfectly describes the agency’s office . . . A beautifully written tribute to the way things were at the edge of the digital revolution, and also to the evergreen power of literature to guide us through all of life’s transitions.” xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0 —Kim Schmidt, Chicago Tribune “Charming . . . Accomplished . . . With her gimlet eye for detail, Rakoff captures 1996 hipster Brooklyn perfectly, although these creative, aspiring, slightly ridiculous people are eternal types . . . My Salinger Year ’s heart lies with Rakoff’s own story . . . Salinger is not a mentor to her but a muse who inspires her artistic independence.” xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0 —Alix Ohlin, San Francisco Chronicle “Rings true . . . Rakoff is a keen observer . . . The loneliness of life after college, perfectly explained . . . There’s something Salingeresque about her book: it’s a vivid story of innocence lost.” xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0 — Entertainment Weekly “Gentle, funny, closely observed . . . Covers much more than just Salinger . . . The special unworldliness of the young literary person, who has reached adulthood without ever knowing or caring much about how the world works, is the real subject of My Salinger Year .” xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0 — Tablet Magazine “Moving . . . Heartfelt . . . Rakoff uses Salinger—his fan mail and her favorite character, Franny—to help illuminate her inner life . . . The memoir is touching, and it’s easy to empathize with how Rakoff, like Franny, is ‘trying to figure out how to live in this world.’” xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0 — USA Today “ My Salinger Year describes its author’s trip down a metaphorical rabbit hole back in 1996. She arrived not in Wonderland, but a place something like it, a New York City firm she calls only the Agency . . . An outright tribute to the enduring power of J.D. Salinger’s work.” xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0 — Salon “Gripping and funny . . . A coming-of-age story: an involving, evocative tale that will have bookish women everywhere shuddering in recognition. Like Rona Jaffe’s novel of the 50s, The Best of Everything , it is concerned with what it feels like to move to the big city, to take on your first job, and to struggle to survive on a tiny salary when all the while your dreams are seemingly being snuffed out at every turn, and your love life is spiraling into muddle and mayhem. It is about the heady, never-forgotten period in every girl’s life when fear and elation seem almost to be the same thing . . . So raw and so true.” xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0 — The Guardian “Hard to put down . . . Demands sympathy, admiration, and attention . . . The details about Salinger are fascinating . . . What this book is really about, though, is not Salinger, but Rakoff; a coming-of-age tale of a young writer . . . Irresistible.” xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0 — The Sunday Times “Intimate . . . Elegant . . . Graceful.” xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0 — The Sunday Telegraph “As memoirs go, this is possibly one of the year’s funniest, enthralling and entertaining . . . For an insight into old-fashioned publishing this must be hard to beat. Everyone smokes, returns tiddly from boozy lunches, and authors are treated with respect. It knocks spots off The Devil Wears Prada .” xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0 — The Sydney Morning Herald “Lures you in . . . A story about growing up and getting better in a rapidly changing industry and world.” xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0 — Flavorwire , “June 2014 Books You Must Read” xa0 “Honest, introspective, and completely compelling . . . Sure to appeal to readers who are obsessed with the enigmatic Salinger, but it is intended for those who have experienced (or are experiencing) their own bluesy, confused, post-college Salinger Year. Rakoff is a careful observer and endearingly human. Her coming-of-age story is a gentle reminder that we are all, still, coming of age.” xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0 — Library Journal “Sharply observed . . . Engaging, particularly for its mastery of tone . . . Rakoff provides good company as she explores the mysteries of the literary world.” xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0 — Kirkus Reviews “This is a vibrant coming-of-age memoir that moves along with momentum and energy, and one only wishes Rakoff had spent more than one year with Salinger so we’d have an even fuller portrait of a man who was and is often misunderstood.”xa0xa0xa0 xa0 xa0 xa0 xa0 xa0xa0— Publishers Weekly “While it may be the Salinger cameo that initially draws readers in, it’s Rakoff’s effortlessly elegant, unhyperbolic prose and poignant coming-of-age story that will keep them engrossed through the very last word.” xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0 — BookPage “Here is the story of a reader becoming a writer, of a young woman deciding who she will be, of the power of books. Here is a memoir that manages to be dreamlike but sharp, poignant but unsentimental. Here is a book I’m going to have to insist you read immediately.” xa0 xa0 xa0 xa0 xa0xa0xa0 —Maggie Shipstead, author of national bestseller, Seating Arrangements “The writing is beautiful, and the story takes me back to my first days in New York . . . The best thing I’ve read in ages.” xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0 —J. Courtney Sullivan xa0 xa0“This is an impossibly excellent read—a glowingly entertaining, miss-your-subway-stop engrossing, note-perfect piece of storytelling. Joanna Smith Rakoff’s My Salinger Year is ostensibly about finding your way as a young adult and what it really means to be on your own for the first time; but it’s really about Manhattan at the brink of the internet age, the disappointments of love, the joys of reading, the perils of ambition, phonies (of course it’s about phonies!), what books meant to our culture in the twentieth century and what they continue to mean in the new one. Really now, who doesn't want to find out what it’s like to have cranky old Jerry Salinger screaming at you first thing, before you’ve even had your morning coffee?”xa0 xa0 xa0 xa0 xa0 xa0xa0—Charles Bock, author of New York Times bestseller, Beautiful Children “Joanna Rakoff is the literary world’s Lena Dunham, both of them witty, sensitive, elegantly baffled, zeitgeist-hitting Brooklyn ladies of their respective half-generations. We root for Joanna as she painstakingly juggles the Dictaphone and Selectric of her enigmatic chain-smoking female boss, in a city that has banned nicotine and switched to computers; as she deals with her lovable, impetuous, gym-rat Socialist boyfriend in the still-Wild West of Williamsburg; and as she finds herself in the worshipping world of ‘Jerry,’ the stodgy agency’s venerated star-client and reason for being. Joanna discovers herself the just-pre-“start-up”-world way: by worrying and feeling and writing and struggling. Make no mistake: Joanna's memoir is about her, not J.D. Salinger. And we're the richer for it.”xa0 xa0 xa0 xa0 xa0 xa0xa0—Sheila Weller, author of New York Times bestseller Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon, and the Journey of a Generation “Every young person who moves to New York with creative ambitions should read Joanna Rakoff’s wonderful memoir of being young and literary in the late 1990s. Navigating her first ‘real’ job—which happens to be at a storied literary agency—a live-in boyfriend who doesn’t invite her to his best friend’s wedding and an apartment without a kitchen sink, Rakoff finds joy in reading and writing and in the city itself, which comes alive in her hands, from rooftop parties downtown to the Plaza Hotel to arty coffee shops in not-yet-gentrified parts of Brooklyn. Meanwhile, the story Rakoff tells of that one all-important year is as transporting as the best novels and is full of insight into work, love and the pursuit of an artistic life.” xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0 —Adelle Waldman, author of The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. “I fell in love with My Salinger Year like the young Joanna Rakoff falls in love with the books in it—deeply, with abandon, letting the world fall away. For anyone who worked in a pre-Google office in New York City, this book is a gift of memory, a Dictaphone transcription from a forgotten age. But anyone who loves fiction, and people, and youth, and love, will fall in love with it, too—and with Joanna's sensuous longing for belonging, the lovely and curious kind of coming of age we all would like to remember for ourselves.” xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0 —Eleanor Henderson, author of Ten Thousand Saints Joanna Rakoff’s novel A Fortunate Age won the Goldberg Prize for Jewish Fiction by Emerging Writers and the Elle Readers’ Prize, and was a New York Times Editors’ Choice and a San Francisco Chronicle best seller. She has written for The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Vogue , and other publications. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. How many times had I been told that Salinger would not call, would never call, that I would have no contact with him? More than I could count. xa0 And yet one morning, a Friday, at the beginning of April, I picked up the phone and heard someone shouting at me. “HELLO? HELLO?” Then something incomprehensible. “HELLO? HELLO?” More gibberish. Slowly, as in a dream, the gibberish resolved into language. “It’s Jerry,” the caller was shouting. Oh my God, I thought. It’s him . I began, slightly, to quiver with fear, not because I was talking to—or being shouted at by—the actual J. D. Salinger, but because I so feared doing something wrong and incurring my boss’s wrath. My mind began to sift through all the Salinger-related instructions that had been imparted to me, but they had more to do with keeping others away from him, less to do with the man himself. There was no risk of my asking him to read my stories or gushing about The Catcher in the Rye . I still hadn’t read it. “WHO IS THIS?” he asked, though it took me a few tries to understand. “It’s Joanna,” I told him, nine or ten times, yelling at the top of my lungs by the final three. “I’m the new assistant.” xa0 “Well, nice to meet you, Suzanne,” he said, finally, in something akin to a normal voice. “I’m calling to speak to your boss.” I had assumed as much. Why had Pam put him through to me, rather than taking a message? My boss was out for the day, it being Friday, her reading day. xa0 I conveyed this to him, or hoped that I did. “I can call her at home and have her call you back today. Or she can give you a call when she gets in on Monday.” xa0 “Monday is fine,” he said, his voice ratcheted down another notch. “Well, very nice to meet you, Suzanne. I hope we meet in person someday.” xa0 “Me, too,” I said. “Have a great day.” This was not a phrase I ever used. Where had it come from? xa0 “YOU, TOO!” Ah, the shouting. xa0 I put the phone down and took a deep breath, as I’d learned to do in ballet. My entire body, I realized, was shaking. I stood up and stretched. xa0 “Jerry?” asked Hugh, stepping out of his office with a mug of coffee. xa0 “Yes!” I said. “Wow.” xa0 “He’s deaf. His wife set up this special phone for him, with an amplified receiver, but he refuses to use it.” He sighed his trademark sigh. To be Hugh was to be let down by the world. “What did he want?” xa0 “Just to talk to my boss.” I shrugged. “I offered to call her at home and have her call him back, but he said Monday was fine.” xa0 Hugh wrinkled his face in thought. “Hmm, why don’t you call her anyway. I think she’d want to know.” xa0 “Okay,” I said, thumbing through my Rolodex. xa0 She wasn’t home and had no answering machine. She didn’t believe in them. Just as she didn’t believe in computers or voice mail, another newfangled invention not employed by the Agency. If you called during business hours, you reached Pam, the receptionist. If you called outside business hours, the phone just rang and rang, as it did at my boss’s apartment, twenty blocks north of the office. I tried again, every hour or so, until the end of the day, to no avail. It would have to be Monday. Read more