My Salinger Year Quotes

“Writing makes you a writer,” he’d told me. “If you get up every morning and write, then you’re a writer. Publishing doesn’t make you a writer. That’s just commerce.”
― Joanna Rakoff, My Salinger Year: NOW A MAJOR FILM

“So we’re all doing a pretty good job not revealing our emotions, right? But if you can’t reveal your emotions, how do you go on? What do you do with them? Because, you see, I keep crying at odd moments.”
― Joanna Rakoff, My Salinger Year: A Memoir

“I know, I said reflexively, but I didn't. I didn't want to be normal. I wanted to be extraordinary. I wanted to write novels and make films and speak ten languages and travel around the world.”
― Joanna Rakoff, My Salinger Year

“She’d never spent entire days lying on her bed reading, entire nights making up complicated stories in her head. She’d not dreamed of willing herself into Anne of Green Gables and Jane Eyre so that she might have real friends, friends who understood her thorny desires and dreams. How could she spend her days—her life—ushering books into publication but not love them in the way that I did, the way that they needed to be loved?”
― Joanna Rakoff, My Salinger Year: A Memoir

“The worst that being an artist could do to you would be that it would make you slightly unhappy constantly.”
― Joanna Rakoff, My Salinger Year: A Memoir

“He surrounded himself with fools - the broken, the failed or failing, the sad and confused - so that he might be their king. Which, obviously made him nothing but the king of fools.”
― Joanna Rakoff, My Salinger Year

“In literature, as in life, sometimes there are no right answers.”
― Joanna Rakoff, My Salinger Year: A Memoir

“To read Salinger is to engage in an act of such intimacy that it, at times, makes you uncomfortable. In Salinger, characters don't sit around contemplating suicide. They pick up guns and shoot themselves in the head. All through that weekend, even as I ripped through his entire oeuvre, I kept having to put the books down and breathe. He shows us his characters at their most bald, bares their most private thoughts, most telling actions. It's almost too much. Almost.”
― Joanna Rakoff, My Salinger Year

“Salinger was not cutesy. His work was not nostalgic. These were not fairy tales about child geniuses traipsing the streets of Old New York.
Salinger was nothing like I'd thought. Nothing.
Salinger was brutal. Brutal and funny and precise. I loved him. I loved it all.”
― Joanna Rakoff, My Salinger Year

“What terrified her was the set of circumstances that allowed her to eat a full pound of spaghetti, the unmoored, untethered quality of her life, in which no one—no mother, sister, roommate, professor, boyfriend, anyone—was there to monitor her habits and behaviors, to say, “Haven’t you had enough?” or “Can I share that with you?” or “Let’s have dinner together tonight” or even “What are you doing for dinner?” She woke up, went to work, came home, alone.”
― Joanna Rakoff, My Salinger Year: A Memoir

“Often, when I went out for breakfast on Sunday morning, at the Mediterranean place around the corner, I was seated by a dancer who’d been a year ahead of me at school and waited on by a painter who’d been two years ahead. At night, Don and I could meet Lauren for Thai food, or Leigh and Allison for gin and tonics at the Rat Pack–era bar on Bedford and watch an alternative circus, which involved one college friend of mine eating fire, another clowning in the style of Jacques Lecoq, another riding a unicycle and playing trombone. For me, this was heaven, heaven that could only be improved by Jenny moving in down the street. For Jenny, though, it turned out this was hell. She had cast off such childish things. Heaven was, she told me, eyes shining, driving to a large supermarket and unloading a week’s worth of groceries directly into her apartment from her designated parking spot.”
― Joanna Rakoff, My Salinger Year: A Memoir

“Nor did I write again to the high school girl. Her rage was too enormous for me to bear. And what could I say to her but Wait, wait, and you’ll see. It gets easier once you’re no longer graded, once you have to assess your actions for yourself.”
― Joanna Rakoff, My Salinger Year: A Memoir

“De Daumier-Smith’s Blue Period.” The narrator of the story, a teacher at a correspondence-based art school, writes a letter to his one talented pupil, urging her to invest in good oils and brushes, to commit to the life of the artist. “The worst that being an artist could do to you would be that it would make you slightly unhappy constantly.”
― Joanna Rakoff, My Salinger Year: A Memoir

“I didn’t write to YOU. I wrote to J. D. Salinger. Probably you’re just jealous that you’re not young anymore, so you feel like you have to punish kids like me. Or you’re jealous of Salinger because he’s famous and you’re just some person.” There was a sort of beautiful truth to her note. I was, indeed, just some person. Some person who was now beginning to understand why Hugh had handed me that form letter. To save me from myself.”
― Joanna Rakoff, My Salinger Year: A Memoir

“This is not a story about Christianity. Franny’s adoption of the Jesus Prayer has less to do with Jesus than with her desire to transcend her own troublesome ego, to stop the superficial thoughts and desires that plague her. To somehow find a way to live in a world that sickens her. To be her authentic self. To not be the person the world is telling her to be, the girl who must bury her intelligence in her letters to Lane, who must compromise herself in order to live.”
― Joanna Rakoff, My Salinger Year: A Memoir

“All right,” he said. “Don’t get stuck answering phones. You’ll never get out. You’re a poet.”
― Joanna Rakoff, My Salinger Year: A Memoir

“In literature, as in life, sometimes there are no right answers.” Part of me wanted to keep going, to tell this girl that she needed to be firm in her convictions, to resolve debates herself, without seeking outside authority, that the fact that she’d written to Salinger—who she surely knew would not be likely to write back—showed pluck and gumption, and she should run with those qualities; that the world outside Choate or Exeter or Deerfield Academy was even more complicated, and she would need to know her own mind to get by.”
― Joanna Rakoff, My Salinger Year: A Memoir

“JOANNE!” he cried. Somehow, he had figured out my name, or an approximation of it. I wondered, for a moment, if Roger had corrected him. Or Pam. “How’s the poetry?” I flushed. “Good,” I said. “Good.” “You’re writing every day?” he asked, lowering his voice. I flushed again. Suddenly I understood Roger’s nervousness. It was strange to feel the force of a famous person’s attention. “First thing in the morning.” “I am.” This was mostly true. “That’s what you do,” he said.”
― Joanna Rakoff, My Salinger Year: A Memoir

“To be Max was not just to broker big deals but to be utterly engaged with contemporary literature, as entangled with the ins and outs of narrative style as I’d been as a grad student, albeit in a far less rarefied way; to be in daily conversation with great writers and editors who cared deeply about words, language, story, which was another way of simply being engaged with the world, of trying to make sense of the world, rather than retreating from it, trying to place an artificial order on the messy stuff of life, preferring dead writers to living ones.”
― Joanna Rakoff, My Salinger Year: A Memoir

“I suppose,” she said with a shrug. She was, I suddenly realized, an unlikely leader, a reluctant president. She disliked being at the center of attention, having us all at her beck and call. This was why she came and went with barely a word to me. Not out of hauteur. She was shy, quiet, retiring. “We’re going for drinks tonight. All of us.”
― Joanna Rakoff, My Salinger Year: A Memoir

“He had no idea how much I knew and was afraid of destroying this deal before it had even gotten off the ground. He was also just afraid. Afraid in the way most people become when they get what they’ve long wanted.”
― Joanna Rakoff, My Salinger Year: A Memoir

“Salinger equated poetry with spirituality. Poetry, for Salinger, represented communion with God.”
― Joanna Rakoff, My Salinger Year: A Memoir

“Poetry, for Salinger, represented communion with God.”
― Joanna Rakoff, My Salinger Year: A Memoir

“earlier to—it was no secret—rejuvenate the Agency. He was a star, one of the best-known agents of the moment, and represented a host of writers I loved—Mary Gaitskill, Kelly Dwyer, Melanie Thernstrom—and just as many that I’d long wanted to read, like Jim Carroll and Richard Bausch. His writers published in magazines I read—Granta, Harper’s, The Atlantic—and seemed”
― Joanna Rakoff, My Salinger Year: A Memoir

“Apparently, Texas was so enormously powerful—so large, with so many schools and students, so much money—that it could demand a textbook tailored specifically to its needs, with a whole chapter on the Alamo, and another on the history of the state, and—most distressingly—the chapter on the civil rights movement omitted entirely.”
― Joanna Rakoff, My Salinger Year: A Memoir

“Now I was interested in difficult, gritty fictions, in large, expansive novels, in social realism. I was interested in Pynchon, Amis, Dos Passos. I was interested in Faulkner and Didion and Bowles, writers whose bleak, relentless styles stood in stark opposition to what I imagined”
― Joanna Rakoff, My Salinger Year: A Memoir

“I love Flaubert. I just finished Sentimental Education and I was amazed by how contemporary it seemed. But I also love writers like Alison Lurie and Mary Gaitskill. And I grew up reading mysteries. I love Donald Westlake and Dashiell Hammett.”
― Joanna Rakoff, My Salinger Year: A Memoir

“Typing was, as the placement agency lady had assured me, like riding a bike: my fingers remembered their places on the keyboard and flew across it as if by their own will.”
― Joanna Rakoff, My Salinger Year

“Salinger had once sat at his desk, trying to figure out what made a story, how to structure a novel, how to be a writer, how to be.”
― Joanna Rakoff, My Salinger Year

“It would not be an exaggeration to say that I'd always considered myself dark and heavy. A chubby child, burdened by sorrows: my own, those of my family, my plagued, storied race. But that instant, something shifted. Was it possible that Don was right? That the world perceived me in a manner entirely different from how I perceived myself? Was it possible too, that one could be complicated, intellectual, awake to the world, that one could be an artist, and also be rosy and filled with light? Was it possible that one could be all those things and also by happy?”
― Joanna Rakoff, My Salinger Year