| Salinger by Simon Prades |
My Salinger Year by Joanna Rakoff – review
'Never, never, never give out his address or phone number': Rakoff has drawn on her experience working at an old-fashioned literary agency in NYC to write a spellbinding memoir
Laura Miller
6 June 2014
Laura Miller
6 June 2014
A
lthough not as celebrated as 19th-century French novels about social-climbing young men from the provinces, the story of a young woman finding her fortune in New York City is a fetching literary genre of its own. It ranges from the tragic (Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar) to the quasi-trashy (Rona Jaffe's The Best of Everything) to the comic (Ruth McKenney's delightful but, sadly, half-forgotten My Sister Eileen) to the bohemian (Mary McCarthy'sThe Company She Keeps). Truman Capote's cool, sweet slip of a novella, Breakfast at Tiffany's, is a voyeuristic variation on the theme, in which the narrator can merely guess how Lulamae Barnes, a wild child from a Texas backwater, became the glamorous Holly Golightly; it is a transformation that could only have happened in New York.