My Salinger Year

A fun and light hearted read about Joanna, who leaves her degree program and her college boyfriend, and find a job with a literary agent. Simply called "The Agency, this is the agency that represents Salinger. Although she expects to find herself busy reading manuscripts, instead she finds herself

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typing letters on a typewriter and answering phones. Although this is the mid nineties, the office, or least her boss, defies technological advances in favor of the archaic way the agency has always run. It is amusing to read how delighted they are when a copier is finally delivered and they no longer need to use carbon paper.

She also finds and moves in with a new boyfriend, a pseudo intellectual, trying to write his own novel. I call him the worm, and that is a generous label.

I enjoyed reading about the workings, behind the scenes interplay between agents and writers. Eventually Joanna is given the letters written to Salinger by fans and told to send them a form letter in reply. Joanna will soon take I upon herself to do more than that. Salinger does make a brief appearance, but most of what we learn about him are from those letters and the phone calls he makes to her boos.

A good, easy read about a young girls foray into adulthood, first job, a apartment in Williamsburg, her relationships, her successes and failures. Does she eventually rid of the worm? Well...........

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I freely admit I'd never heard of the author, Joanna Rakoff, of this memoir, but because I like looking into other people's lives, that didn't stop me from reading it. And, of course, I have heard of Salinger, as well as read his works. Loved them when I was younger, not sure what I would think of

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them now.

I had to double check to ensure myself that the author's job with The Agency, a literary agency, was started in 1996. The agency had a very 1950s or MadMen feel to it. Typewriters, Dictaphones, smoking in the office, drinking in the office, no computers. No wonder they were losing authors.

While Salinger, and his personality as well as his quirks, entered into the book, this really is a memoir about the author, and a very interesting one.

I was appalled that a parent would surprise a child with credit card bills she did not know she was amassing. Pay your own way? Sure. But to be presented with bills out of the blue, bills you did not know you owed, seems cold and mean. To have a famous author who talks to you and still, three seasons later, never bother to read his books? Very odd indeed.

But then again, the author had a very messy personal life, the perennial story of being with a person who is not good for her but just going along, staying on the ride.

While the glimpses of Salinger were interesting, this book is more about how another everyday person, someone whose options are not terribly different from most of ours, chooses to live her life. It is well written, entertaining, and satisfied my need for literary voyeurism.

I was given an advance copy of this book for review.

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Joanna Rakoff’s first job out of college is a dream job working for a prestigious literary agency that represents, among others, J. D. Salinger. The Agency is like a place out of time and Joanna loves the subtle lighting, the reserve of the agents, and the care with which they treat their

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authors. But it’s the nineties, not the thirties, and things are changing. This little memoir of a year spent in a job that most avid readers only dream of is a delightful tale of Joanna’s coming-of-age, both personally and professionally, amid a cast of quirky, lovely characters. I loved it.

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Joanna Rakoff spent a year, in 1996 when she was 23, working as an assistant at the literary agency in New York which represented J.D. Salinger. It's a quirky place of typewriters, carbon copies, and hushed tones when referring to 'Jerry' himself. Joanna received the fan letters for the author

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which she was expected to reply to with a form letter but instead she found herself writing proper responses and getting embroiled in the stories of strangers..

I really enjoyed this memoir. I loved the agency and its old-fashioned ways and I liked reading about the way it operated. Rakoff also talks about her private life, her aspiring author boyfriend and her parents. Her colleagues were great, a fairly eccentric bunch. This is an endearing look at a special year for this writer and it doesn't matter if you've never read any J.D. Salinger books. I haven't and it took nothing away from the pleasure of the read for me.

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Joanna Rakoff was fortunate enough to experience the atmosphere of an old-school literary agency, one that managed to represent some of the most respected writers of the 20th century - and she did it just in the nick of time: 1996.

As recounted in her memoir "My Salinger Year," the agency and the

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agents were nothing like the author expected them to be. Instead of finding a high tech (well, as high as high tech was in '96, anyway), Rakoff walked into an office that still thrived on manual typewriters, carbon copies, dictaphones, and walking down the hall to speak with co-workers. These people thought that having a copy machine was too high tech to fool with and there was no way they wanted computers in the office. When they finally got a copy machine, the typists were overjoyed - but when they got one IBM computer for the entire office and were pretty much told to stay away from it, they were reminded where they worked and for whom.

Rakoff was 23 years old in 1996 when she found herself working for J.D. Salinger's agent, and her encounters with the man are both interesting and endearing (especially for fans of Salinger's work). She only met him one time, as I recall, but had numerous phone conversations with the hard-of-hearing Salinger during which he shouted into the phone at her.

Joanna Rakoff grew into her job. She was little more than a secretary (1950s-style) when she started at the agency but, by the time she left just a year later, she had sold a story on her own and identified a new client for the agency via a manuscript she plucked from the company slush pile. But, ultimately, Rakoff decided to move on with her life - one in which she finally shed an anvil of a boyfriend, married and had a couple of children, divorced, and finally joined the college boyfriend she pined for throughout the length of "My Salinger Year."

Avid readers will enjoy this insider's look at a New York literary agency as seen through the eyes of someone fresh from school. It is one of the better books-on-books of 2014.

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At first, I was skeptical. Her life was almost too perfect. But as her year unfolds and she discovers Salinger, I find her becoming more and more real, more connectable.

In 1996, Joanna took a job at a prestigious New York City literary agency, lying about her ability to type on an electric typewriter. She found herself on a steep learning curve, needing to master the typewriter, an audio transcription machine, a new vocabulary and a set of unbreakable rules

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relating to a writer called Jerry. Her scary boss instructs her never to give people Jerry’s contact details, and to try and end phone conversations as quickly as possible. Only after the conversation does she notice the office shelves full of J D Salinger books and realise who “Jerry” is.

This is not really another book about Salinger – while the famously reclusive writer becomes an important figure in her life, Joanna doesn’t even expect to meet him or speak to him, and she has never read his books. It is the story of her year, as the title suggests, a year of changes in her life, of work, of her relationship with her boyfriend, of conversations with colleagues, family and friends, and letters from Salinger’s many fans. She is supposed to send a standard response turning down everyone’s requests and invitations, and throw the letters away. What will happen when instead she starts to write back?

Somehow, while the details seem potentially quite mundane, the people and events in this short memoir are vividly and convincingly portrayed. I couldn’t see why the author was drawn to her useless boyfriend but I was fascinated by her story of a year in her life, of all her interactions and the choices she eventually has to make.

I received a free review copy of this book through the Amazon Vine programme.

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When I first saw the title of this book, I thought the author was either another brash, young egotist or someone pulling a cheap marketing scheme to sell a few extra copies (possibly both) so I almost passed it over. Now that I've completely read it, I understand that it really couldn't be named

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anything else. Rakoff is no Salinger, but she's no slouch of a writer either and she does share rare peeks (short ones) into the later life of a reclusive American literary legend that nobody else would have the vantage point for. Glad I didn't skip it and worth a read.

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“Carolyn began talking about friends of hers named Joan and John, and their daughter, who had an odd name, an odd name that sounded oddly familiar to me. I’d heard her discuss Joan and John before, but now I realised, with a jolt, that she was talking about Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne.

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These were Carolyn’s intimates, the people whose pedestrian travails – bathroom renovations and missed flights – she chattered about.”

Joanna is a newly minted Master of a literature degree, badly in need of a job. She wheedles her way into a job assisting a literary agent – and discovers, several weeks into the job, that the agent represents J. D. Salinger. With no background in Salinger at all, she muddles along in the job and in the big city, while trying not to let leech-like boyfriend Don scupper her prospects.

Not masses happens in the course of this year – although obviously enough to fill a short book, it’s not action-packed. Which is fine; it gives Rakoff plenty of time to muse on being young and broke and working in the literary world in New York. I would happily read more of Rakoff’s writing; maybe it is easier to be funny and light-hearted and insightful when writing about one’s own life rather than making up a world, but I liked what I read. It was intelligent without being overwrought, evocative without being cluttered.

At this point in a review template, I have the prompt “characters”. Which is tricky when reviewing non-fiction. The protagonist is impossible to review, given that it’s the author! But Rakoff does a good job of moulding the people around her into characters on the page, particularly helpful office furniture Hugh, deadbeat boyfriend Don, Next Big Thing in Literary Agency Max. I liked these people (apart from Don, who sounds like a waste of space), and they were fine to spend some time in the company of.

This was yet another instalment in my recent New York themed reading and watching – as I mentioned in my post on the subject, I loved the frequent references to a little bit of New York I spent some time in recently (and I was most amused to find the quoted reference to Joan Didion, author of The Year of Magical Thinking which I read immediately before this!). I know it was set 20 years ago, but apart from the technophobic set-up in the office, I hardly noticed this at all. I suppose not knowing what Brooklyn rents are these days probably helped, that the figures given didn’t age the book!

Well worth the quick read, whether you’ve read Salinger or not, just as a fun “a year in the life” story. If you’ve read Salinger, possibly more interesting?

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In this well-written coming of age memoir, Joanna Rakoff is a somewhat clueless 23-year-old when she quits her Masters program in London and returns to New York City. Almost unbelievably she falls into a job as the assistant to the head of the literary agency who represents J.D. Salinger. Even

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though it is 1996, the agency is run as if it is 1955. Dictaphones and IBM Selectric typewriters are still in use, people still smoke (copiously) in the office and the editors take afternoon naps at their desks after partaking in 3-martini lunches. The author seems to go through her days at work in a dream. She never presses her employer for a better wage, even though she is only earning $18,000 per year, an she seems mystified when her father presents her with her credit card bills that total up to over $12,000 as well as her student loans.

Likewise she seems to live her personal life in a dream. She lives with a rather doctrinaire Marxist who is "writing a novel" (aren't they all?) and lashes out at the "bourgeois establishment" whenever he feels insecure. She doesn't protest hen he moves them into a ramshackled apartment without heat and then has her sign the lease because "she's the one who has a steady job." The more she writes about this jerk, the more the reader wonders when she's going to come to her senses and give him the boot.

But slowly the scales start falling from her eyes. She is put in charge of answering Salinger's fan letters and, unable to slough them off with the agency's decades old form letter, begins to reach out to some of the writers. In connecting emotionally to these people, she also starts to nurture her own creative talents and starts writing poetry again. Over the course of the year she orks there, she learns about her own value as a person and begins to set out on her own journey as her own authentic self.

Recommended for anyone who knows the power of books and the written word to transform one's life.

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Enjoyed reading this book, but don't know if I could recommend it. The author wrote about her events working as an assistant to a literary agent, but she really wanted to become a writer. You will need to like memoirs to read this one.

In 1996 recent M.A. graduate Joanna Rakoff lands an English major's dream job: assistant at a legendary New York City literary agency. It doesn't take long for the glamor to wear off, however. Joanna's unnamed boss runs the unnamed Agency (always capital "A") as if technology had stopped developing

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in the 1940's, when the Agency's most famous and enduring client, J.D. Salinger, was signed. Joanna's main job function, for which she is poorly paid, is to type her boss's correspondence using a Dictaphone and an IBM Selectric typewriter. For most of the book, the office has no computers, and an unused Telex machine is kept in a storage room, in case it is called upon. The recently-installed photocopier and fax machine are novelty items. The higher-ups at the Agency chain-smoke at their desks and sip alcoholic beverages from their "water glasses".

There's more to this memoir, however, than just descriptions of obsolete office equipment antiquated executive behavior.. It is a coming of age story, as Joanna learns to navigate her post-grad school years, with their changing priorities and shifting allegiances. As she reads and answers Salinger's still-voluminous fan mail, first with an Agency-approved form letter, and later with her own responses, she finds her own voice as a writer.

I found this memoir easy to relate to and very enjoyable to read.

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A wonderful memoir, funny, honest, revealing, completely absorbing, and very New York.

A remarkable memoir of a year almost twenty years prior, Rakoff details the twelve months she spent working as a "Literary Assistant" (read, "Secretary") for "The Agency"- her nom de plume for the highly regarded literary agency representing the likes of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Judy Blume, and of

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course, J.D. Salinger. Rakoff has yet to read any of Salinger's work as she responds via typewritten form letter to hundreds of Holden Caufield-esque fan letters. She begins to realize that she might have missed something in her youth and spends a lonely weekend reading all of his books. Falling in love with Salinger's characters (as much as the loving fans she has been unmindfully writing to), Rackoff looks at her own life through Jerry's lens and finds it lacking. A terrific companion book for any of Salinger's writing, but especially "The Catcher in the Rye", Rackoff identifies its intrinsic quality and understands why so many around the world relate to and love his endearing yet fallible characters.

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An easy, enjoyable read with a nice NYC vibe. A good companion piece to read with Salinger stories and it provides an interesting window into J.D.S.'s literary agency back in the days of dictaphones and typewriters.

Mildly amusing, mildly entertaining, mildly well written.

J.D. Salinger would not have liked Joanna Rakoff's 2014 memoir “My Salinger Year,” but I did.

Salinger, like Harper Lee a remarkable writer driven into seclusion by the pressure of early success, was known for his strict control over his life, his privacy, his books and everything else he could

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control. And because his books have sold so many copies, he had lots of control. Much of that control was exercised through his New York literary agent, who so catered to him that she resisted installing computers and other modern technology in her office. Salinger preferred typewriters.

Rakoff, an aspiring poet eager for a start in New York literary circles, took a job as assistant to that agent. Soon she found herself opening Salinger's mail and sending back form letters explaining that the author did not want to read his mail, talking with him frequently on the telephone and, on one occasion, actually meeting him and shaking his hand when he showed up at the office.

In the fall of 2002, Rakoff wrote an article for Book magazine also called "My Salinger Year," which essentially boiled the book's contents down to four pages. Did it really take her more than a decade to write the complete memoir? Or is it indicative of Salinger's influence that it was necessary to wait until after his death in 2010 to get it published? And although she named the literary agency (Harold Ober Agency) in her article, she just calls it the Agency in her book. Did his influence extend even beyond his death?

Rakoff says she got tired of copying form letters (the office had no copy machine) and so began replying to the letters from Salinger's fans herself, something that would have angered Salinger if he had found out about it. But, of course, he never read his mail.

When not focusing on Salinger, Rakoff writes about her private life, about surviving in New York City on a pitiful salary, living with a leftist boyfriend who imagines himself a great writer (she knows better) and trying to make decisions about her future.

Her memoir turns from interesting to fascinating when she finally gets around to actually reading Salinger's books, something she had avoided in the past, in part because her parents liked them. She loves them, especially “Franny and Zooey” (my own favorite). Now she rereads his books every year. Her comments about Salinger's work are glowing. ("Salinger was brutal," she writes. "Brutal and funny and precise. I loved him. I loved it all.") Even so, he wouldn't have liked it.

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Rakoff has just finished her degree in the UK, and returns to New York, where she lands a job as an assistant at The Agency, a premier literary agent. Along with the job she collects a new boyfriend who has literally ambitions himself.

She gets the position by saying that she can use a typewriter,

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which she can, kind of. As she finds her feet in the first few days she comes to realise that this agency has no internet access or computers of any form at all. Instead every record of submission is manual, and stored on record cards. Her boss too is very much old school, and she comes to realise that they are not always receptive to change. Most important though is Jerry. If he calls then he must be put through immediately to her boss, and not engaged in any small talk. She agrees. A little while later it dawns on her that Jerry is J D Salinger, the legendary writer and self imposed recluse. One of her task is to answer the many fan letters that they receive as he has no desire to receive or read any fan mail, but rather than use the standard letters, she answers them as she sees fit. Most are appreciative, but the odd one back fires.

As Rakoff walks amongst the literary giants, her personal life is a bit of a state. She has moved in with Don, even though she still has a boyfriend on the West coast. She is on a low wage but is having to cover the rent and food and so on. She returns home for her birthday, and her father presents her with the credit card bills and the student loans that she never knew she had, making a perilous financial situation even worse.

It is a story of some charm, as she travels around the city of New York, and starts to make headway into the book industry and discovers real love. It is nicely written too, she carries her youthful enthusiasm off with some aplomb.

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Really enjoyed this book. Engagingly written and very open about what it's like to start a first job and maintain an early relationship. Loved the parts about her difficult boss.

Joanna Rakoff's MY SALINGER YEAR (2014) is a memoir, something I had to keep reminding myself, because it reads like a novel, and a pretty good one at that. In it, Rakoff looks back at 1995-96, the year she spent working as a Iow-paid "assistant" to a demanding "boss" at an unnamed prestigious NYC

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literary agency after dropping out of grad school. An aspiring poet, she also leaves her long-time boyfriend and moves into a rundown, unheated apartment with an older, world-wise, self-styled "socialist," also an aspiring writer. Her boss's main client is, of course, the reclusive J.D. Salinger, or "Jerry," as she comes to know him via her boss (who is herself a strange character). Rakoff had never read any of Salinger's work, but finally reads all of it, over one long marathon weekend of reading. Holden and the Glass family and Salinger's New York City all come alive for her then, especially so as she reads the author's voluminous fan mail, still arriving daily. One of her jobs at the agency is reading that mail, and to respond with a form letter, which she finds hard to do. There is much here about the publishing game, "slush piles," books, agents and poor wages, as well as some glimpses of Rakoff's family background and her troubled dating life in the 1990s. As I said, it reads like fiction, or, at the very least, "creative non-fiction."

The book was actually something of an international bestseller, translated into several languages, but I only heard about it because I read Rakoff's blurb on the back of another book, Daisy Alpert Florin's debut novel, MY LAST INNOCENT YEAR, just released this week (a book I actually enjoyed even more than this one).

J.D. Salinger, even though he is gone now, and published nothing after 1965, continues to have millions of fans worldwide. I suspect that fact helped make Rakoff's book a success, though Salinger himself is mostly a peripheral character here. That said, I thoroughly enjoyed it. Very highly recommended.

- Tim Bazzett, author of the memoir, BOOKLOVER

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An engaging and well-told real-life tale of a year in one of New York's big literary agencies... At times the pacing is off (there's a lovely build of tension that never resolves and is very frustrating!) but the writing is warm and funny and humane. A lovely insight into the old-fashioned Agency

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world...

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A very interesting account of the author's year working at a literary agency in New York.