My Salinger Year (30 page)

My most profound thanks to: Jordan Pavlin, Tina Bennett, Stephanie Koven, Kathy Zuckerman, Caroline Bleeke, Svetlana Katz, Nicholas Latimer, Brittany Morrongiello, Katie Burns, Sally Willcox. Thank you to everyone at Knopf, WME, and Janklow & Nesbit.

Thank you to Allison Powell and Carolyn Murnick, to Joanna Hershon, Stacey Gottlieb, and Abby Rasminsky for such insightful early reads. To Lauren Sandler, for everything. To Kate Bolick, Evan Hughes, Adelle Waldman, Matthew Thomas, Dylan Landis, and, most of all, Charles Bock.

Thank you, also, to the wonderful editors and producers with whom I worked on the pieces that evolved into this book: Jeffrey Frank, John Swansberg, James Crawford, David Krasnow. And thank you to
Slate
, BBC Radio 4, and
Studio 360
.

Thank you, thank you to PEN for providing the funding that allowed me to finish this book. To Ledig House for a place to work, and to Ofri Cnaani and Claire Hughes for the same. To Paragraph, where most of this book was written, and to Joy, Lila, Sara, and Amy.

Thank you to Kenneth Slawenski and Ian Hamilton, whose impeccable research filled holes in my knowledge of Salinger’s life.

Thank you to Claire Dederer, Cheryl Strayed, and Carlene Bauer for examples of what a memoir can be, and straightforward guidance about writing one.

I am enormously grateful, of course, to the Agency for giving me the best first job a girl could have, and to my boss and the person known in these pages as Hugh for teaching me more than I ever could have hoped to learn about books, business, literature, and, yes, life. Also thank you to the person known in these pages as Lucy.

Thank you to Henry Dunow, Anne Edelstein, Jen Carlson, Corinna Snyder, and Chris Byrne. Thank you to Roger Lathbury, Robert Anasi, and Billy Bano.

Thank you to Coleman and Pearl.

This book would not exist were it not for the generosity, support, and editorial acumen of Amy Rosenberg. Thank you.

Keeril: There are no words.

Joanna Smith Rakoff is the author of the novel
A Fortunate Age
, which won the Goldberg Prize for Jewish Fiction by Emerging Writers and the
Elle
Readers’ Prize, and was a
New York Times
Editors’ Pick and a
San Francisco Chronicle
best seller. As a journalist and critic, she has written for
The New York Times
, the
Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post Book World, The Boston Globe, Vogue, Time Out New York, O: The Oprah Magazine
, and numerous other publications. Her poetry has appeared in
The Paris Review, Western Humanities Review, The Kenyon Review
, and other journals. She has degrees from Columbia University; University College, London; and Oberlin College and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.