When she was 23, Joanna Rakoff left graduate school for New York City. She wanted to be a poet. She also needed money, and so she took a job at Harold Ober Associates as the assistant to Phyllis Westberg, a legendary literary agent who just happened to represent J.D. Salinger. When Rakoff arrived at the agency’s offices on her first day of work in January 1996, she stepped into a bygone era of publishing — there were no computers in the office, just typewriters, Dictaphones, and a complex filing card system. Business was done by phone and messenger, and the number one rule was to preserve Salinger’s privacy at all costs.
That meant answering Salinger’s fan mail, a duty that fell to Rakoff. Stacks of letters arrived each day, and Rakoff was supposed to reply with a simple form letter. But the letters, from veterans and teenagers and countless others who saw something of themselves in “The Catcher in the Rye” and Salinger’s other stories, proved too much to dismiss with a stock reply. Rakoff began responding to some personally. That forms the basis of “My Salinger Year,” Rakoff’s memoir about her time at the agency, her encounters with Salinger, and how, through it all, she found her own voice as a writer. Rakoff will be at RiverRun Bookstore in Portsmouth on June 9. The Sound recently caught up with her about Salinger’s legacy, revisiting the 1990s, and the art of answering fan mail.
As a writer who’s read and re-read Salinger many times, why do you think Salinger’s stories persist? Why are we still reading them?
It’s the difference between popular literature and great literature. Great literature endures and has an appeal beyond the sort of constraints and confines of the day in which it was written. … With Salinger, I think we forget that his work was revolutionary in its day. In a way, his work is still kind of revolutionary and bombastic … the fiction that was being published in the 1940s and 1950s was watered-down Victorian or Edwardian fiction. It was written in the third person and very staid and plodding. Melodrama was huge in the 1950s. When “The Catcher in the Rye” came out, people were just shocked by it. It almost shocked Americans, and then people around world, out of a kind of stupor. He portrayed postwar America in this bombastic way, with this scathing voice that was at once excoriating and kind of hilarious, in a style that just hadn’t been done. … (Salinger’s work) is great. It’s really good, and it still has relevance for us. … His style is magnificent. It’s funny, it’s moving, and he puts sentences together in a way that is remarkable. … His work is very cathartic for people. I definitely found that in answering the fan mail. His work produces a very emotional response.
What was it like to revisit that time in your life while writing?
I don’t think of myself as a nostalgic person or a particularly sentimental person. I’m a bit of a minimalist, I have no problem throwing things away. I didn’t think before I wrote this book that I wanted to go back to that time. Certainly, I didn’t want to go back to being 23. I just turned 43 and … I hated being young. … I didn’t think, “I wish we could go back to those days when we typed on the typewriter.” I have the newest possible iPhone, I’m a completely technology-embracing person. As I wrote … I started to remember what it felt like to just be alone without your phone at all times. And to not be available at all times, when you’re at lunch to be able to sort of … literally get lost, to not have a GPS on you all the time.
You never name your boss and refer to your workplace as “The Agency.” When things are so easily found online now, why obscure those details?
I obviously knew anyone could find this information in one second. It wasn’t a legal thing. My publisher said it would not be a big deal to leave the names in. They were changed for stylistic reasons. I wanted the book to feel like a novel. I wanted it to feel timeless and universal in a way, and also, I had a particular style in mind. I settled on a particular tone and approach to language that felt right to me. It’s a very pared down book. I wanted, in leaving out some of the names … the characters to feel almost like platonic ideals, wanted my boss to feel like she could be anyone’s boss. … And the other names I really changed partly for me, partly so I could have the distance to write about people honestly, rather than feel like I was betraying them by writing about them, or just to protect people so they didn’t feel like being written about in a way made them uncomfortable.
Do you get fan mail? How do you respond?
I get a pretty decent amount. And I have so much trouble responding. I totally understand why Salinger gave up responding, because it’s so hard. You never know at what length to respond. I want to respond in a big way but I put off doing it and I wait too long. I also understand why I wasn’t supposed to correspond with fans. It becomes this kind of thing that sucks the life out of you. It’s an overstatement, but if you’re trying to write and have other people in your life … you have to preserve a lot of yourself for writing. You have to be really careful. … That said, everyone loves getting fan mail. I do get a decent amount of the sort of fan mail Salinger got, people saying, “Your book came to me at the right time, I was recovering from brain surgery, it changed my life.” But I think, oh god, how do I respond? But also, I’m glad my book went beyond the confines of typical entertainment, which is wonderful, to be that rare book that makes you cry and rethink your whole life. That’s what you want to write.
Joanna Rakoff reads from “My Salinger Year” on Tuesday, June 9 at 6:30 p.m. at RiverRun Bookstore, 142 Fleet St., Portsmouth.