Our book buyer, Louisa Kazsa reviews this treasure of a memoir.
Narrative non-fiction only seems to get more and more popular, due perhaps to the rise of ‘long reads’ on the internet – perhaps our attention spans are growing, not shrinking? One of this year’s finest examples of the genre has to be Joanna Rakoff’s autobiographical gem, My Salinger Year. Fresh, unpretentious and brutally honest, this is a rare slice of an ‘ordinary’ person’s life that reads as anything but.
Although J.D. Salinger is the star of this book’s title, the book itself is much more an autobiography of Rakoff’s than a biography of the famous author – to the extent that it doesn’t matter whether you’re a Salinger fan or not. Rakoff wasn’t when, fresh out of college, she fumbled her way into a glorified secretary gig at one of New York’s oldest and most illustrious literary agencies, where the book begins.
With little idea of the implications of her new job, Rakoff is set to work by her formidable, pantsuit-and-turban-wearing, tobacco-smoke-breathing dragon of a boss, who becomes a star of the book in her own right. Rakoff’s first task: dealing with the outrageous volume of fan mail the agency’s most famous client, J.D. Salinger, receives. Having consciously avoided reading Salinger – ‘I had no interest … in precocious children expounding on Zen koans or fainting on sofas, exhausted by the tyranny of the material world’ – she is nonetheless soon drawn into the world of his readers and their deeply felt connections to Salinger’s work. A thankless task soon becomes an obsession, and Rakoff begins to understand the hold the renowned eccentric has over thousands around the world.
Meanwhile, life outside the rarefied air of the agency continues. Rakoff herself can be frustrating – she moves into a unheated hovel with her terrible boyfriend while shrugging off the attentions of those with her best interests at heart, buries her head in the sand regarding her crippling financial situation and isn’t particularly grateful for the unique opportunities her work affords her – but that’s because the book is written so entertainingly, it’s hard to remember it’s not a novel. This is Rakoff’s own life, a tumultuous year in her twenties when she makes her first steps in the real world, with the inevitable unattractive stumbles. That she presents it so unflinchingly makes it a privilege to read.
What the book offers is a truly complex self-portrait, containing multiple narratives. It’s a coming of age story, a literary odyssey and a love story, set in two wildly differing worlds: the cloistered, dusty literary agency, and the drug- and alcohol-fuelled chaos of 1990s Brooklyn. It’s also an homage to New York set against the backdrop of the author’s twenties, in the mode of Patti Smith’s Just Kids (not to mention some of Salinger’s own books).
Rakoff’s life in the city is often bleak, but it has moments of true magic. Exhausted and weak after a hard winter living off ramen in the aforementioned hovel, she takes refuge in the lobby of the Waldorf hotel, only to find a tiny antiquarian bookshop and a sudden memory of the romance of visiting New York as a child, not to mention a vivid impression of what life might be like on the right side of the Brooklyn Bridge. It’s moments like this that render the links to Salinger all the more resonant and make this book a small treasure.
