1996 attracts the 24-year-old Joanna Rakoff back to New York to find there after completion of studies in London work. Your standards are high: "I did not 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." Together with her friend Don Marxist, of which her friend from his student days knows nothing, it relates a shabby apartment in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Joanna Rakoff has studied literature and is despite the recession immediately a job as an assistant in a literary agency, whose names Rakoff just like to her boss silent discreet. You might want to research on the Intenet, what names are hidden behind them. It is Rakoffs first job and she has only vague ideas of what she has to do and what is expected of her. On the first working day she learns that The Agency "Jerry" Salinger represents that avoids any contact with the public. The main task of the young woman who read best manuscripts and would like to have contact with writers who feel post it for a long time, back to Salinger with a specially to typing on the typewriter abschlägigen form letter too modest, the since the 60s unchanged each addressee is sent. Computer have still held in The Agency, which could come from a Dickens novel, no feeder. Salinger to get any fan mail and will not be contacted; unequivocal statement of the chain-smoking chief that also applies for Rakoff itself. Nevertheless, there seems to be an almost sexual excitement that comes over Rakoff, as she realizes that she has worked for Salinger: "My body convulsed, Briefly, as the chill air insinuated itself into my hot points." For this consciousness: "I was already part of something." Finally, there is a small sensation when Salinger after decades will publish a new book. However, there is no new text, but perhaps his weakest story to be published in a dedicated micro-publishing now. This "Hapworth deal" Rakoff owes it that they can gradually make contacts and a door into the world of the literary opens for them.
MY SALINGER YEAR is a "one-year Biography", in the Joanna Rakoff and their readers report back on an important year of her life, where she met Salinger and his work, and her childhood and youth permanently wipes to realize where their way they will lead. It is an authentic coming-of-age story of a sympathetic young woman, about their love and money troubles, their experience that friendships often do not last forever and the life changes.
The book title is to be taken literally, it is in MY YEAR SALINGER not to Salinger, but about what the encounter mean to him and his lyrics for the narrator. For most adolescents and young adults, there is a soundtrack to life, songs that represent a certain mood, these seem to express better than anything else could. Songs that match the mood, but at the same time also create mood. Beautifully described has also Lavinia Greenlaw in her book The Importance of Music to Girls. For Joanna Rakoff to Salinger proves the soundtrack, which accompanies and helps her to make the right decisions for them.
On the one hand Rakoff proves with this book great empathy, at the same time but also a very strong self-centeredness, which sometimes seems bizarre, for example if they reported what dress she wore on a certain day, that they attracted "over a black slip", and which sandwich she ate that day.
MY SALINGER YEAR is a book about the love of literature; about how hard it is sometimes to make the right decision; it is characterized by a desire to find their own way and to go, and most of all it is a book about Joanna Rakoff, an autobiography of one year.
