My Salinger Year: A Twelve-Month Memoir - Hardcover

Joanna Smith Rakoff was an office assistant in New York City working for a literary agent when she was handed the responsibility of replying to all correspondence written to the agency’s notorious client, J. D. Salinger.
She was supposed to inform the fans that Salinger would not accept letters and return the correspondence. But she felt a growing sense of Holden taking grasp of her—a growing familiarity with the life crises that prompted the queries—and, rather than brushing off the correspondents, Rakoff started posing as Salinger and supplying answers to strangers’ requests for advice. She wrote one girl to start studying harder if she wanted an A in English, to another woman that she was sorry about the loss of her daughter who’d so loved “A Perfect Day for Bananafish.” The words of advice started flowing, and Rakoff’s alter ego started dispensing the advice as she imagined it would flow from the 80-year-old Zen Buddhist vegetarian himself, in an alternative world.
“Salinger, I thought, would have done the same thing. And so would have Franny, Zooey, Seymour, and Holden, certainly they would have. Franny, clutching her little cloth copy of The Way of a Pilgrim, would cry over these letters, would keep them in her overcrowded purse, folding and unfolding them until they fell apart at the creases.”
In the tradition of Nora Ephron, Steve Martin, and David Sedaris, Rakoff has created a bittersweet, hilarious tale that will win a huge national audience. This is the striking debut of a young writer and a nonfiction jewel for Salinger scholars.

Joanna Smith Rakoff is an editor at The Paris Review and a professor of English at Columbia University. She is a frequent contributor to the New Yorker and is the author of the poetry collection, Trash.  She lives in New York City.