My Salinger Year: A Memoir

by Joanna Rakoff

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Book cover for My Salinger Year

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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.
  • ISBN10 030794798X
  • ISBN13 9780307947987
  • Publish Date 12 May 2015 (first published 1 January 2014)
  • Publish Status Active
  • Publish Country US
  • Publisher Random House USA Inc
  • Imprint Vintage Books