My Salinger Year: A Memoir

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 officewhere Dictaphones and typewriters still reign and agents doze after three-martini lunchesand then goes home to her threadbare Brooklyn apartment and her socialist boyfriend. Rakoff is tasked with processing Salingers voluminous fan mail, but as she reads the heart-wrenching letters from around the world, she becomes reluctant to send the agencys form response and impulsively begins writing back. The results are both humorous and moving, as Rakoff, while acting as the great writers voice, begins to discover her own.