Joanna Rakoff, MY SALINGER YEAR

Joanna Rakoff, MY SALINGER YEAR

Zibby is joined by Joanna Rakoff, author of the memoir My Salinger Year, which details the year she worked at the literary agency that represented J.D. Salinger. From responding to Salinger’s fan mail to essentially running the agency when her boss suffered a personal tragedy, Joanna shares countless unbelievable stories— including one about the secrets her family kept hidden from her for decades.

Transcript:

Zibby Owens: Hi, Joanna.

Joanna Rakoff: Hi. I’m so happy to be here.

Zibby: It’s so nice to do this in person.

Joanna: Yes, this is the highlight of the spring.

Zibby: I’m so glad you came back to New York, that I could make an excuse for you to come back.

Joanna: I know. It’s so strange and exciting to be back here.

Zibby: It’s so awesome.

Joanna: Thank you so much for having me.

Zibby: Oh, my gosh, thank you for dealing with my crazy kids and husband and chaos, total chaos at the end of the schoolyear. My Salinger Year, tell listeners, if they don’t know what it’s about or if they happen to have missed our virtual book club, what it’s about and how it’s become this new movie and gotten all sorts of new attention.

Joanna: My Salinger Year is a memoir. It’s often called a novel, which I take as a compliment.

Zibby: Did I say novel?

Joanna: No, you did not.

Zibby: Good. Phew. I was like, did I already mess up? Oh, my gosh, okay.

Joanna: That’s the story of my life, actually. Basically, I take it as a compliment because I feel like that means that it reads like a novel, which was my goal in writing it, but it is a memoir. It is about the year, 1996, that I spent working at New York’s oldest and most storied literary agency for a grande dame literary agent who in the book is just called my boss. In real life, her name was Phyllis Westberg, who, it turned out, represented J.D. Salinger, but I didn’t know this when I took the job. I only found out after I started. I was told on my first day that I would not see Salinger. I wouldn’t talk to him on the phone. He wouldn’t call. He wouldn’t come in. Then within an hour of my arriving on my first day, he called. It turned out that it was an unusual year for him, an unusual moment for him because he decided to come out his hermit-tude. I don’t know if that’s a word.

Zibby: Let’s make it a word. I like that word.

Joanna: It should be a word. He wanted to publish a new book in a very unusual way. Whereas previous assistants, and my boss had had forty of them or thirty of them, had really had no contact with him, she wasn’t lying to me, I was on the phone with him all the time. I did meet him. This whole situation with him was a lot of my job, actually. I’m sort of burying the lead here, I realize, because the other big part of my job was that I had to answer his fan mail. I was supposed to send just a very terse form letter, but I was so moved by a lot of the letters. They were so wonderful and charming. A lot of them were very confessional. I ended up corresponding with a lot of the fans. It changed my life.

Zibby: Wow. What a way to start off a literary career with regular correspondence with one of the greatest — my gosh, I’m trying to think of my first job after college. Maybe I called a printer or something. I had no responsibilities at all. That’s so neat.

Joanna: I think that it was an unusual situation. One of the tiny aspects — maybe it’s not tiny. One of the aspects of the book that I left out is that this was also an unusual year for my boss who was this very imperious, let’s just say old-school publishing lady. Physically, just to set the scene, she was the kind of person who would come in wearing a really dramatic caftan with a giant necklace, some sort of huge pearl embedded in layers of gold that was so heavy that it was kind of weighing down her neck, or a big medallion, huge, huge ornate glasses. If this were now, you’d be like, oh, those are so Versace, but then, that wasn’t even part of the lexicon, gold glasses. She was not a twenty-first century boss who was like, hey, how’s it going? She just kind of ignored me. She chain-smoked. She wore fur coats. She drank coffee all day and went out for three-hour lunches from which she would come back smashed and fall asleep in her chair. This is a very different work situation than you have now. She had a very unusual personal life as well. She had never gotten married or had a family. It was almost like she was a nun and Salinger was the god that she worshipped. I guess the cheesier way of saying it would be that she was married to work. The agency was her family and her everything.

She had a lover who was married to someone else. For more than twenty years, he had been involved with my boss, which his wife was fully aware of. He went back and forth. He lived part of the week with one woman, part of the week with the other. They all socialized together. His wife called my boss almost every day to talk about him. Here’s the horrible part. While I worked for her, he committed suicide basically in front of her. Still, even all these years later talking about it now, I feel like I’m going to cry talking about it. I found out afterwards that he was severely bipolar. He required constant care. He had been an actor in his youth but had actually stopped working because of his mental health issues. My boss was devastated by this, and she left. She just was gone for months. While she was gone, I had to pretend to the world that everything was fine. Salinger would call. I would say she’s in a meeting or she’s at lunch. Eventually, he noticed and said, “You know, she’s been out a lot.” I was like, “Yeah, she’s so busy.” In fact, I was actually doing her job for her, every aspect of it. I was negotiating contracts. I was doing everything. Looking back on it, it’s pretty demented. I was twenty-three years old when I first started this job, and twenty-four. I will say, I think I was a somewhat mature kid because of the circumstances of my growing up. Still, I shouldn’t have been doing this.

Zibby: Wow. On the other hand, a lot of people, this would be a total dream come true. How do you work your way up the ladder? Oh, wait, here I am doing a full-on agent job with a year. It’s pretty remarkable.

Joanna: It’s true. The truth is that I loved it. I’m a person who likes to work independently, so I loved worked on my own. As a person who’s very self-motivated, I think I worked harder when she wasn’t there than when she was there. I enjoyed working without someone peering over my shoulder. I probably did a better job because I wasn’t nervous that she was going to criticize everything I did. She was very harsh. It was kind of a dream come true. The strange thing about it was that I took this job really almost as a lark. I had been in grad school. I had finished a master’s in English. I thought that I wanted to go on and get my doctorate. I was supposed to actually start my doctorate but changed my mind at the last minute. I thought of this as just a lost year, an interim year. This was just a job. I just wanted to be in New York and be with my college friends. I wanted to do something literary. I realized that I was good at this. I had never been that good at anything in my life.

Zibby: I’m sure that’s not true.

Joanna: It’s kind of true. I was good at ice skating. There was a brief moment when I was a serious figure skater. I was a good student, but not the best student. In terms of agenting, I was really good at it. My boss came back. This is portrayed in the movie. There’s a scene in which this happens in the movie. My boss was almost gobsmacked by how well I had done this job, including negotiating contracts and working over contracts, which actually is a quite specific task. You almost need to have a lawyer brain, which I didn’t think I had at all. My parents wished that I had. I hadn’t taken this job because I wanted to be an agent, not at all, but I had this period where I thought, oh, wait, maybe I should do this. I kind of thought I was going to stay on and do it.

Zibby: Crazy. Then when did you know that you had a book on your hands?

Joanna: A very long time after. In fact, the truth is, I never knew I had a book on my hands. I never wanted to write this book. The idea for it did not come from me. I really am a journalist and a fiction writer. I’m not a person who’s written a lot about myself. I say this even as I ramble on to you about myself.

Zibby: I love hearing it, so keep going.

Joanna: I wrote for magazines and newspapers to support myself while I was writing my first novel. I actually loved writing about other people. My favorite thing to write were profiles and book criticism.

Zibby: You should take my job.

Joanna: I know. It’s true.

Zibby: You should just be sitting here.

Joanna: It’s true. I loved interviewing writers. I had a column where I actually profiled debut novelists. I did all sorts of stuff with that. It’s strange looking back on it because the economy has changed so much. Journalism has changed so much. That was my day job. I was a freelance journalist. I did stints where I worked as a staffer at magazines. That was what I did to support myself while writing a novel. Now I think that’s kind of people’s end goal, to do what I did, what I thought of as just my day job. There was something freeing about thinking of it as a day job. I might have been better at it because of being like, whatever, I’m really a novelist. During this period when I was freelancing, I was in a pitch meeting at a magazine. I was pitching all of these reported pieces. Then at the last second just out of nowhere out came, “Or I could write a personal essay about answering Salinger’s fan mail.” The editors obviously said, “Yes, do that.” So I did it. They assigned me eight hundred words. I turned in an eight-thousand-word piece. For those of you who don’t work in journalism out there, that’s way too long for almost any magazine except for The New Yorker, and this was not The New Yorker. It ran and it got a lot of attention. I was asked to write a book by many editors. I was approached by agents. I thought this seemed crazy. Who would want a book about me at age twenty-three, twenty-four? I thought a memoir is a great person looking back on their life. This was still in the early aughts. Memoirs have really changed since then. Wild had not come out yet. This was a different era.

Anyway, years went by. I published my novel. Salinger passed away. I was known as this person who had answered Salinger’s fan mail, so I was asked to write other pieces and be on the radio. I did all that. Then the BBC asked me to do a radio documentary about answering Salinger’s fan mail, so I did that. An editor saw the script for it and asked me to turn it into a book. I would say this was the end of 2010 by this point. It was fourteen years after I had done all this. I actually said no at first. I said no for a long time. Eventually, that editor had a meeting with my agent. My agent had been radically opposed to my doing this book. She was like, “You don’t want to be known as the Salinger girl. People are going to think that you’re capitalizing on your Salinger connection.” That seemed fair to me, definitely. I felt like, okay, this is not terrible advice. She met with this editor. He convinced her. She got out of the meeting and called me and said, “I think he’s right. I think you should do it.” I was like, “I don’t think so.” She said, “Just try to write the first twenty pages.” I did. That became the proposal. That became the book. The twenty pages of the book are exactly what I wrote. It was a strange inception of a book.

Zibby: All this time later, now it’s a movie.

Joanna: Now it’s a movie, exactly.

Zibby: Crazy. What was it like the first time you watched the movie? I know you’ve been involved in a lot with the writing and all of that, executive producer and all of that stuff.

Joanna: Watching it is still a really strange experience. You’re seeing yourself. I think it’s different than seeing a novel or a short story portrayed on film because you’re watching movie stars play you and people you know. I watched it for the first time. I should actually back up and say I had seen various cuts of it along the way just on my laptop. I was on set when it was filmed, so I had seen some of it. Then before the final cut was done, we got word that it was going to be the opening film at the Berlin Film Festival, 2020. This would be in February 2020. We found out just in January right after the new year. The director hurriedly finished the final cut and said to me, “I think that you should wait to watch it on the big screen.” I trust him. He’s a very — I don’t know. How would you describe him? He’s a person who really believes in film. He’s truly an auteur. The film is really visually beautiful. The people who were involved in the way the film looked are truly geniuses and visionaries. The director of photography has won a million awards. She’s really a visual artist. Her name is Sara Mishara. She’s just incredible. It has a little bit of a Wes Anderson feel to it, the way it looks.

I knew that he wanted me to see it as it was meant to be, and so I said okay. I saw it for the first time in a 1,700-person theater at the world premiere wearing a very low-cut gown that I was like, am I going to have some kind of costume mishap with this, or wardrobe mishap? and shoes that I could not walk in and a full face of makeup that is not my normal thing at all sitting next to Margaret Qualley and Sigourney Weaver, all of us holding hands. I just was sobbing through the whole thing. Actually, so were they. It was really, really strange and moving. My heart was beating very, very quickly for the entire ninety minutes. It was a really profound experience. There’s nothing that I can compare it to. Seeing these moments not just from my life, but from my book — in a way, the book part of it, this piece of art that I created was turned into another piece of art. It just felt like so much.

Zibby: Wow, that’s really special. Not that many people can say that that’s happened. That’s really cool.

Joanna: It’s true. Yes, that is so true. I think it’s a once-in-a-lifetime thing.

Zibby: That’s so exciting, oh, my gosh. The movie was so good, as I told you. I had COVID when I watched it. Now I have to watch it again with my husband now that I cheated on him by watching a movie without him. I feel like we watch everything together.

Joanna: I’m scared he’s not going to like it being a film industry person.

Zibby: He’s going to like it. No, he’s totally going to like it. He’s totally going to like it. You mentioned a few minutes ago that because of your upbringing you were more mature, perhaps, than other people. I know this is fodder for your next book. Can you talk about your next book and the way you grew up and why that might be the case?

Joanna: My parents had me somewhat late in life for the seventies. Now everyone has kids. They were in their mid-forties when they had me. What I am telling you is basically the plot of my next book, which is called The Fifth Passenger. Cross fingers that I finish it in the next month, will be out in a year. It’s another memoir. I sort of wish it were a novel. It would be easier. They had me late in life. I grew up in a relatively small town outside of New York City. It’s a town called Nyack, a Hudson River-edge town. My family felt very different. I thought that it was because my parents were older than all the other parents. There was something odd and unusual about my house. I had a sister who was eighteen years older than I was who had a very contentious relationship with my parents. I never understood why they were always fighting and why there was so much tension. There were always things going on that I didn’t understand. I grew up in this atmosphere of things happening. People would stop talking when I walked into the room. I would walk into the room, actually, sometimes, and I would find my mother sitting with her face in her hands. Then she would look up at me and start crying. I thought that it was because I had done something wrong, always. I would say, “What did I do? What happened? What did I do?” I would try to figure it out. When I was about ten or eleven, I found a photo of a family. They looked a little familiar to me, but I couldn’t place them. I have a big extended family in New York and California. We spent a lot of time with extended family. I thought, maybe these are my cousins. I don’t know. The photo definitely looked like it was from another era, like the sixties, the way people were dressed and their hair. I just had this feeling that I should not ask my parents about this photo. It was in my dad’s office kind of tucked away. I just kept looking at it. I would sneak into his office and look at it.

Finally, one night right before bed, I asked my dad about it. He pointed to the man, the father figure. He said, “That handsome devil is me.” I did not recognize him as my father. My father had white hair. This man had black hair. He pointed to a woman, also with black hair, and said, “That’s your beautiful mother.” Again, I had a mother with white hair. This person had black hair cut in a very trendy style, which my mother did not have. He pointed to a girl and said, “That’s your sister Amy,” the sister I knew. Then he pointed to the two other kids. As he did, he started crying and said, “This is your sister Anita. This is your brother Mark.” It turned out that I had two siblings who were in between my sister Amy, eighteen years older than me, and me who had died a year before I was born. I didn’t find this all out at the time. My father started crying and hugged me. I just went to bed. I never asked him anything else. Then over the course of my life, I slowly found out little bits and pieces of things, some of them while I was on book tour for my first book, which is called A Fortunate Age. I’m a very slow writer, so it came out a long time ago in 2009. When I was on tour — it was a book that got some attention at the time. I would go to San Francisco and be in The Chronicle. People would see my picture and realize that I was I, come to my events. By people, I mean people who knew my brother and sister.

I would do an event. Someone would be in the signing line, get to the front of the line, and just burst into tears and hug me across the signing table, and then eventually calm down while the booksellers were looking on shocked about what was going on. I wasn’t aware of this because there were no pictures out in my house; I look almost identical to my sister Anita. Nyack is a really small town. People that were close to Anita and Mark, people that weren’t, everyone knew my family. All over the country, people would come to these events and see me, burst into tears, tell me their stories. Sometimes they would hand me a letter telling me their story. Sometimes they would hand me their card and say, “Can we get coffee and talk about your family?” None of them knew that I didn’t know anything. They all assumed that I had grown up knowing this story, but I hadn’t. That’s basically the book. Really, I’m not even answering your question. The reason I was maybe a bit more mature than your average twenty-three, twenty-four-year-old is because my parents kind of treated me like I was a companion rather than a child. We traveled everywhere. They took me with them everywhere. I went to dinner parties with them. I now know that it was because they just were afraid to leave me alone. It turned out that my brother and sister had died in a car accident while they were on vacation. They had left the three kids and gone on vacation without them. There was a car accident. They just never wanted to leave me. I was raised almost like their little friend. They talked to me like I was a little adult.

Zibby: Your mother now has Alzheimer’s?

Joanna: Yes.

Zibby: Is your father still alive?

Joanna: No, my father died a long time ago, more than ten years ago. My mother, we believe, has Alzheimer’s. She has dementia. It’s pretty advanced at this point, though she has a lot of moments of lucidity.

Zibby: Before your father died, did you guys come to some sort of peace and understanding of what happened?

Joanna: We did not. I feel like this is so crazy in this day and age, but we have still never talked about any of this.

Zibby: What? You never did with your dad and you still have not with your mom?

Joanna: No. My father, on his deathbed, kept mistaking me for Anita and kept talking to me as if I were her and saying — it’s so awful; I’m going to cry — saying, “I’ve missed you so much. I’ve missed you so much. You were my favorite. You were my most beautiful girl. You were my sweetest girl. I missed you so much. I can’t wait to be with you.” He said, “Tell me what it’s like over there.” The things that you hear about people saying on their deathbeds, it turns out they’re true. We never talked about it. I’ve tried to talk to my mother about it. She kind of shuts down. She’ll occasionally, over the years, say a little something, as in — my oldest child was born with dirty blond curls. My mother said, “I always wanted a blond child.” Then there was a long silence. She said, “I had a blond child,” meaning my sister Anita. She was like, “But I lost her. Oh, well. That’s that. Nothing can be done.”

Zibby: Oh, my gosh.

Joanna: I know.

Zibby: First of all, I can’t wait to read that book. Second of all, I feel like I want to say I’m so sorry. First of all, I’m sorry — first of all, second of all, third of all. I’m so sorry for the loss that your parents went through and the fact that they couldn’t even talk about it and the fact that you went through this childhood of secrecy and not really knowing everything. Yet you’re so happy and joyful and warm and bubbly as a person. You wonder sometimes, do people’s personalities come out of these sort of traumas because of them? In spite of them? Unrelated?

Joanna: I know, I think about that all the time, actually. I recently read this book that you may have read called The Body Keeps the Score.

Zibby: No.

Joanna: It’s so good. You have to read it.

Zibby: Okay, I’ll read it.

Joanna: I actually feel like it was an Oprah pick. It came out a while ago. By a while, I mean maybe five years ago. It’s basically about trauma and how trauma lives in the body. It’s written by this man. I think his name is Bessel van der Kolk. It’s just so fascinating. He’s the preeminent trauma researcher. He’s worked with all the other preeminent trauma researchers. It just is so interesting. This is one of the things that he investigates. Why do some people go through incredibly traumatic experiences and come out essentially unscathed or even stronger for it, whereas other people, their lives are destroyed? I will say, my sister’s life was really destroyed by these events. She was driving the car.

Zibby: She was driving the car?

Joanna: Yes. One of the things that I’ve tried to suss out as I — this book involved years of research. I’ve tried to figure out, was her life destroyed by the fact that she had to keep a secret, that she was told, “You can never talk about this. We’re just going to put this behind us?” or was her life destroyed by the fact that she has this residual guilt about this accident, or by my parents having these very ambivalent feelings toward her? They, of course, love her. She’s their daughter. I think they believe she was responsible for — they did believe she was responsible for Anita and Mark’s deaths. I just don’t know. When I look at my parents, my mother was really destroyed by this. My father, who has a very different personality, was a very happy person. He really did weather it really, really well. Was this because of their upbringing? They had very different upbringings. My father was from a really solid home. My mother was not. Who knows? Is it just the way your brain is wired? I read this book because I thought it might help me understand. It was just fascinating in and of its own right.

Zibby: I have a thousand other questions about the next book, but I’m getting off. Oh, my gosh. Can you just say, do you know how old your brother and sister were when they died?

Joanna: I didn’t know until very recently. They were twelve and fourteen. I’ve interviewed a lot of people who knew them. It was so interesting just to hear about their lives, to be honest. I had been trying so hard to unravel the story surroundings their deaths, but then to hear about what they were like as people was so fascinating. Some people will say to me, they were so young, almost as if, well, it wasn’t that big a deal. They were fully formed people who did all sorts of fascinating and amazing things. I’ll tell you one tiny, tiny story. Nyack is a town — a lot of people in the New York area are familiar with it because it’s actually a pretty popular place to live now. A lot of people in the entertainment industry and the arts live there. It’s always been a countercultural and liberal enclave. It also is a kind of old money, original New York Dutch family enclave. There’s a country club there called — you will understand just how old New York this is. It’s just called The Field Club. In my childhood and prior to that, Jews and blacks could not join. My family lived in a pretty affluent neighborhood in Nyack on a street called Broadway. On one side of Broadway, the side that faced the river, there were all these beautiful mansions. Actually, the writer Norman Rush lives in one of them. It’s beautiful. Across the street from us was an old Nyack family that were actually half Jewish, half black. My brother’s best friend was the older son in the family. This was the early seventies. They were so irritated by this that they went and graffitied the main, beautiful, old house at The Field Club. I can’t actually say on the podcast what they said because there are expletives involved.

Zibby: Nothing good.

Joanna: Nothing good, yeah. I’ve heard this story from everyone who knew Mark. They all told it to me in this gleeful way. He just was a really ferocious person who was very political but also very funny and a huge prankster.

Zibby: Wow, oh, my gosh, I can’t wait to hear more about this. It’s fascinating and devastating all at the same time.

Joanna: It’s definitely a hard thing to talk about, this story.

Zibby: No, it’s not. It’s just heavy because you can feel the pain that still lingers there.

Joanna: Yes, I know. I talk about this in the book. It’s one of those things where, for my whole life, people would say, “Do you have siblings?” I would say, “I have an older sister.” They would say, “How much older?” I’d say, “She’s much older.” “How much older?” “Eighteen years older.” “Oh, so you must have been an accident.” In fact, I was the most planned child there was. My parents had me after losing these two children on purpose. I would think, what do I say? Do I explain? I would just sort of laugh. I knew that if I said, well, there were two kids in between us and they died, then people would be like, . I just never talked about it, ever.

Zibby: I bet, in some part, it’s really therapeutic to just have it all out, right? No?

Joanna: Not yet, but maybe that will come. Let’s hope.

Zibby: All right, keep working on the book. Let’s see how you feel when you turn it in. I feel like just having the secret, yourself free, I just think it’s going to — maybe not. Maybe it’ll be terrible. We’ll find out. Keep me posted. Any advice to aspiring authors?

Joanna: That’s such a better question. Not that the other questions were bad, but you know what I mean.

Zibby: Sorry, I’ll try and do better.

Joanna: No, no, that’s an easier question.

Zibby: No, I’m kidding.

Joanna: This is so funny, I was just asked this the other day by the director of my mom’s nursing home. He was like, “I want to write a novel. What advice do you have for me?” I was like, “Well, , here is my advice to you.” I have three major, very simple pieces of advice. One is to just not really think about publishing. I get so many DMs from people saying, what advice do you have about finding an agent? They haven’t even written anything yet. They have an idea for a book. They think they have to get an agent. That is not going to create a good book. You just really have to write the book. There are people that tell you you have to write every day and all of that. I feel like those rules don’t apply to everyone. I don’t write every day. I have three kids. The month of June is the worst month for me. I can’t work through all of June or the first two weeks of September because I’m just consumed with school stuff or whatever. I can’t work from Thanksgiving through New Year’s.

Zibby: I was going to say, what about December?

Joanna: December is the worst. There are these periods where I just can’t work. Things happen. Anyone who says these prescriptive things is just wrong. You have to find your own rhythm as a writer, but you do have to find that rhythm. For me, I know that to have a good writing day I need get to get a full night of sleep. I need to wake up before everyone else and have my mind be clear. This was true even before I had kids. Even when I lived alone, I had to wake up right away and not do anything else, not look at my phone, not check email, not even read. I had to just wake up. Maybe I could take a walk or go running, even though I hate running, but it’s good for figuring out your thoughts. I’d say, really, the most important thing, this is so dorky, but is to write and not think about publishing. You just can’t. It is pointless. It’s self-sabotaging. I’d also say you, of course, have to read. I cannot tell you how often people write to me or talk to me and say, how do you read so much? Everyone must say this to you. How do you read so much? How do you have time to read? For me, I feel like I would go crazy if I didn’t read all the time. I just do. It’s not like it’s on my to-do list. It’s just part of who I am. I do sometimes read five books in a week. That’s just how I am. You don’t have to do that. Some people are slower readers than others. If you’re going to write a great book or a great essay or anything, you have to be reading all the time. You just do. You’re not going to write a good book if you don’t have time to read. That doesn’t make any sense.

Zibby: Uh, oh, for the people listening.

Joanna: Sorry, you guys. You need to put down your phone and read. I’d definitely say, put a lot of controls on your phone. Use Freedom. I use a lockbox. I lock my phone away sometimes for days at a time.

Zibby: Good for you.

Joanna: It just is sanity thing. It’s not like I’m part of some kind of Shaker-esque cult.

Zibby: I get it.

Joanna: I just am like, enough. I can’t take it anymore. I want this thing gone. It’s either, smash it or lock it away.

Zibby: One time, I put my phone in the freezer. I thought that was because when it overheated, it might help if I put it in the freezer. Turns out, did not work.

Joanna: Did it break the phone?

Zibby: It broke the phone. Make sure your lockbox is room temperature. Joanna, thank you so much. Thanks for coming on “Moms Don’t Have Time to Read Books.”

Joanna: Zibby, thank you so much. This is a dream. This is so exciting. Thank you.

Joanna Rakoff, MY SALINGER YEAR

MY SALINGER YEAR by Joanna Rakoff

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