“Dear Jerry You Old Bastard”

Kelsey McKinney interviews novelist Joanna Rakoff, author of My Salinger Year, about her time answering the reclusive writer’s fan mail:

JR: I answered such a high volume that they fell into these categories for me. There were letters from people who I called in my head the crazies,” which ranged from people who seemed totally bonkers to weird stalker Unabomber people in love with Salinger. These letters often would be written in pencil, or pen but with blotches of ink smudged all over the paper. There was something really repulsive about it, almost as if they were like, “here are my bodily fluids on the page.” There were those people, and I was told that if anything seemed particularly crazy, I was supposed to report it to my boss’s second in command.

Then there were adolescents and people in their early 20s who would write in the voice of Holden or in the voice of Salinger, and those letters were hilarious. “Dear Jerry you old bastard. Me and my crumbund were thinking about how phony everyone in the world is. You’re the only person who totally gets us.”

KM: You didn’t read Salinger’s books until you were already working for the agency. What was it like reading his work while reading these fan letters?

JR: A lot of the reason I ultimately read him was seeing the impact he had made on these people’s lives. Somehow, for to this vast swath of the world’s population, he was able to make them feel less alone. They wrote these letters to him that were so intimate. They conflated Salinger with Holden, and what I got from that was that his work had such an intimacy of voice, and the stakes were so high in his work that somehow these readers were able to enter into these works as if they were kind of part of a texture of their own lives instead of a work of fiction. Which is ultimately what the best fiction does.