Today's Hours:
By Keila Santa '25
On Wednesday, April 2nd, I attended bestselling author Joanna Rakoff’s reading at the Heineman Ecumenical and Cultural Center. As the 2025 Miriam Levine Reader, Rakoff shared stories about experiences becoming a published author and the unique series of events that lead her to writing her memoir, My Salinger Year. The film adaptation for My Salinger Year, starring Margaret Qualley and Sigourney Weaver, opened in theaters worldwide in sixty-five countries in 2021 and is now streaming on various platforms. In addition to this international success, Rakoff’s novel A Fortunate Age is winner of the Goldberg Prize for Fiction and the Elle Readers’ Prize, and her books have even been translated into twenty different languages.
My Salinger Year takes place over the year 1996, when Joanna, who was only 23 at the time, was launched into a job in publishing that would change her life. The book is divided into four sections which correspond to the seasons, and begins in January, when she started working as a clueless assistant at a literary agency in New York.
“I had not necessarily wanted to work in publishing,” explained Joanna. “As I said, I didn’t really know what I wanted to do. I knew that I wanted to have a big life. I knew that I wanted to do something creative. I secretly wanted to be a writer.”
Despite her minimal work experience—and not knowing how to turn on the office typewriter, let alone type 60 words a minute like she lied in her interview—Joanna persevered through the challenges in hopes that it would get her closer to her dream. Funnily enough, it did! But not in the way she was expecting. She was shocked to discover one day that the agency she worked for actually represented J.D. Salinger (yes, The Catcher in the Rye J.D. Salinger), and she was now going to be the one in charge of reading and responding to the piles and piles of fan mail he received. Joanna was no Salinger superfan, but she certainly knew who he was, and this unique task is what gave her the premise for her memoir and would later make her widely known as “the Salinger girl”.
After giving some background about the years before she worked at the agency and her early aspirations, Rakoff read two excerpts from My Salinger Year—one from the first section when she started at the job; and one from the second section, which took place in the Spring, when she unexpectedly received a call from Jerry Salinger himself while her boss was out for the day.
Following the readings, audience members had the opportunity to ask questions. One attendee asked if Joanna had any special tips that could help someone who was looking to get their book published. Joanna responded:
“If you are fully in it and are just writing your best work, you will probably be able to publish… The desire to publish has to come from an ingrained, almost like, DNA-level need to be a part of cultural conversation, and to be in conversation with readers.”
She went on to explain that she feels it can’t come from a superficial desire for professional development or fame—your heart has to be in it.
“In general the way to publish is to live a life that centers on writing and have everything you do feed your work… you kind of have to put publishing out of your mind, and it will come.”
Rakoff also gave insight into what she called the one secret about memoirs that nobody talks about—the invisible research that goes into writing them. When working on her own memoir, she interviewed people she worked with, spoke with Salinger scholars, spent hours reading papers about Salinger, and so much more. Her message to aspiring authors of the room was clear: there is an immense amount of work and dedication that goes into the craft of writing good literature, even when you’re writing about yourself.
Finally, Joanna gave some general advice on being a writer and shared her own experience on finishing her memoir. She explained that the advice we hear about sitting down and forcing yourself to write 1000 words a day isn’t always useful, and suggests instead that the empty space in between writing sessions is just as important:
“Sometimes things are happening in your brain and you're thinking about things in this way that you’re not even realizing, and then, you sit down to write that essay and it just comes out fully formed because you’ve been working it through without realizing it.”
Joanna said that although she still had to do a lot of cutting and reordering on her first draft of My Salinger Year, the story truly poured out of her in the last six months of the two years she spent working on it.
Overall, this was one of my favorite events I’ve attended all semester. Though Joanna’s bookish accomplishments are wildly impressive, I was captivated most by her radiant and hilarious energy. Joanna’s story and words of wisdom should be taken by aspiring writers as a reminder that if you have your heart set on the literary life, it will come—even if it arrives in the most unexpected ways.
If you want to read more about Joanna and her publications, check out her website here!
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