My Salinger Year review – a fascinating coming-of-age memoir

Joanna Rakoff’s account of her time in New York as assistant to JD Salinger’s literary agent develops into a poignant look at both their lives

‘Forging a place’: Joanna Rakoff at home in Cambridge, Massachusetts last year. Photograph: Jared Leeds/Observer

Anita Sethi

Sunday 5 July 2015  The Observer

This funny, fascinating coming-of-age memoir explores the nature of fandom, the relationship between reader and writer, and “wildly extensive communication via the written word”, a phrase from JD Salinger. It’s winter 1996 when 23-year-old Rakoff drops out of graduate school and moves to a snow-swept New York, taking a job as an assistant to the literary agent for Salinger, and surviving on a salary so meagre that she can barely afford the rent. 
The book engrosses most when exploring her response to Salinger’s copious fan mail – from war veterans to teenagers in love with Holden Caulfield – and to Salinger’s “anatomies of loss”, his own stories. “We all have to start somewhere,” writes Rakoff, charting the turbulence of growing up, from the “loneliness of the outsider” to forging a place in the world. Yet this book about beginnings poignantly develops into one about an elderly, elusive author seeking closure.

My Salinger Year is published by Bloomsbury (NZ$35.00).