My Salinger year, by Joanna Rakoff

It’s the mid-90s and The Agency is stuck somewhere mid-century.  When 23-year-old Joanna moves to New York to pursue her dream of becoming a poet, she is thrilled to be hired as an assistant to a famous literary agent, whose clients include “Jerry,” J. D. Salinger to the rest of the world.  And part of her job is keeping the rest of the world away from him.  “Assistant” turns out to be an underpaid secretarial job.  The office has resisted any new-fangled technology and she spends her days typing up correspondence on an IBM Selectric while listening to a Dictaphone of the type that got Nixon’s secretary in trouble back in 1972.  The agents smoke and drink – often from coffee cups at their desks.  But she actually loves the quiet, dim, cloistered atmosphere much of the time, and becomes involved with some of the many correspondents who send heart-felt letters to Salinger – which are supposed to be answered using a form letter.  These letters are usually from veterans who shared WWII experiences or angst-ridden teens who identify with Holden and are finding life “phony.”  Oddly, she has never actually read any of Salinger’s work until near the end of her year at the Agency, and she does actually meet him once in addition to talking to him on the phone.  But mostly this is a memoir of a young woman finding her way – she is involved with an older man who is a socialist and would-be novelist while still longing for the college boyfriend her parents approved of.  She struggles to live on her meager salary.  She makes bad decisions, and ultimately good ones.  She grows up.  249 pp.