At twenty-three, after leaving graduate school to pursue her dreams of becoming a poet,
Joanna Rakoff moves to New York City and takes a job as assistant to the storied
literary agent for J. D. Salinger. She spends her days in the plush, wood-panelled
agency, where Dictaphones and typewriters still reign and old-time agents doze at their
desks after martini lunches, and at night she goes home to the tiny, threadbare Brooklyn
apartment she shares with her socialist boyfriend. Precariously balanced between
glamour and poverty, surrounded by titanic personalities and struggling to trust her own
artistic sense, Joanna is given the task of answering Salinger’s voluminous fan mail.
But as she reads the candid, heart-wrenching letters from his readers around the world,
she finds herself unable to type out the agency’s decadesold
form response. Instead,
drawn inexorably into the emotional world of Salinger’s devotees, she abandons the
template and begins writing back…
Poignant, keenly observed and irresistibly funny, My Salinger Year is a memoir about
literary New York in the late 1990s, a pre-digital world on the cusp of vanishing, where a
young woman finds herself swept into one of the last great stories and entangled with
one of the last great figures of the century. Above all, it is the coming-of-age story of a
talented writer and a testament to the universal power of books to shape our lives.
Sales and Marketing Highlights
Not just for Salinger fans - this charming coming-of-age memoir is The Devil
Wears Prada meets Julie & Julia, with a dash of Mad Men and Rona Jaffe's
The Best of Everything and a touch of Girls
River Road Entertainment have optioned the screen rights to My Salinger Year
and a film script is currently being written
In 2011, BBC Radio 4 produced a 30-minute radio documentary in which they
followed Joanna Smith Rakoff as she sought (and found) the writer of her
favourite Salinger fan letter

About the Author

Joanna Rakoff is a poet and the author of the novel A Fortunate Age, which won the Goldberg Prize for Jewish Fiction by Emerging Writers, was a New York Times Editors' Pick, a winner of the Elle Readers' Prize and a San Francisco Chronicle bestseller. As a journalist and critic, she has written for the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Vogue, Time Out and O:The Oprah Magazine. The BBC produced a radio documentary following her as she tracked down the writer of her favourite Salinger fan letter. She has degrees from Columbia University, University College London and Oberlin College. Joanna Rakoff lives in Boston.