My Salinger Year
by
The reader of Joanna Rakoff’s charming memoir, My Salinger Year (2014), needn’t be a devotee of the famously reclusive, eponymous author to love. Rakoff herself hadn’t read J.D. Salinger’s work when she began her entry-level job at his literary agency, charged with scrutinizing (for potential craziness) and then throwing out the endless stream of fan mail that arrived for him. During the course of the year, Rakoff did read and become a fan of Salinger’s work—but, for me, her own coming-of-age tale is the real story in this book, of a young woman and aspiring writer at her first job in New York City in the 1990s, broke but not broken.
