Book of the day - My Salinger Year

   

    "An utterly beguiling memoir"; "The Devil Wears Prada meets Mad Men and Girls"; "an impossibly excellent read"; "the story of a reader becoming a writer, of a young woman deciding who she will be, of the power of books [...] a memoir that manages to be dreamlike but sharp, poignant but unsentimental."

    Having read those comments about Joanna Rakoff's My Salinger Year I couldn't not read the book, an account of her time as an assistant at a prestigious New York literary agency where one of her responsibilities is answering J.D. Salinger's 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 decades-old form response. Instead, drawn inexorably into the emotional world of Salinger's devotees, she abandons the template and begins writing back ..."

    The book is published in the UK tomorrow (5th. June); I'm reading it now and although not far in, I'm very taken with it indeed.

Comments

[Caroline]

Sounds wonderful and it has been added to my wish list! I will look forward to reading your thoughts when you are further in!

[Terra]

I've been reading memoirs recently, they are compelling. This one sounds interesting.

[litlove]

This one is contender for my books of the year list. I absolutely loved it.