There are first jobs and there are first jobs. At 23, Joanna Rakoff, just out of college, has no specific ideas about what she wants to do, other than the fact that she wants to write poetry. 

From the very first page of My Salinger Year (Bloomsbury, Rs 399), young Joanna stands out as a reflection of what many young writers are at her age — a little bit at sea, quiescent but not to a fault and quietly sentimental. It is apt that Joanna finds herself a job as an assistant to a literary agent, the revered J.D. Salinger’s agent no less, something she discovers only later. 

Unlike many before her, she had not applied for the position hoping to meet Salinger in the flesh and perhaps press her poems into his hands for a review. Joanna is warned that “Jerry” wants to speak to no one and has no interest in his fan mail. In fact, responding to these letters is Joanna’s responsibility. When she’s given the standard reply that she must dash off to the fans, it is clear that the Salinger mails are not supposed to occupy much of her time or her mind. 

The letters, however, absorb the impressionable young poet completely, even though she had missed what she calls “the Salinger window” in her adolescence and had moved on to “gritty fictions” and “social realism”. 

Salinger’s fans though, were of all ages — war-ravaged soldiers, mothers who had lost their children, seemingly misunderstood Holdenesque youngsters.... It was nearly impossible to respond to their fervent outpourings with a crisp, form letter. Joanna did what many a quiescent-but-not-to-a-fault-and-quietly-sentimental young poet-assistant may have done; she started replying to the letters individually. 

Joanna Rakoff is exhausted and starving when I meet her at Taj Bengal. She’s just landed in Calcutta after a stop in Jaipur and is caught off guard by the intensity of the country. After black-and-grey Boston, she feels like India is in Technicolour. She’s ordered herself a kathi roll. I tell her she’s made a good choice. 

I try to imagine the 42-year-old as a 23-year-old, quietly plodding away on an old-fashioned typewriter in an office that has refused to embrace technology. She fits the bill. Like her narrative voice, she’s soft-spoken and earnest. Her personal style, as I’d imagined, is well-fitted-chic even if it’s not all a la mode and she’s slipped into a pair of low black stilettos because her mother keeps badgering her to “dress like an adult”. It’s a choice she later regrets when she has to manoeuvre across the pebbled grounds of Victoria Memorial to reach her session for the Kolkata Literary Meet. 

My Salinger Year was never a book in Joanna’s mind; it never occurred to her that there was a story there. Writing about herself has never been a natural impulse and it was after much prodding, by friends and editors, that she came round to the fact. “I somehow lack whatever gene it is that tells you to write about yourself… I was only able to write this book once I had an idea that there was a story to it outside myself.” The process was not seamless, she admits. It was hard revisiting her “idiotic” 23-year-old self.

Would older and wiser Joanna have been less hopelessly embroiled in Salinger’s fan mail? Probably. “Answering the fans’ letters felt like another silly, young-person thing to do.” That’s what age does to you — makes you prosaic and guarded. 

She doesn’t regret her involvement with the letter writers. She regrets, instead, being unfair to her college boyfriend and she lived for a long time with the guilt of having hurt him in the way she did. 
 

“What was hard was piecing my stupid young self and the mistakes that I’d made. I had left the person I’d loved and hurt him really badly and that felt like the worst thing I’d ever done in my life. I was writing this book 13-14 years after it had happened and I was still haunted by what I’d done to the only person I’d ever truly loved.” 

In her novel, she has chosen to sometimes avoid the proper noun and thus, her Boss, the Agency and her college boyfriend have gone nameless. A quick google search will reveal the identities of the first two. The third is Keeril, to whom the memoir has been dedicated and to whom she is now engaged. 

Other than the nitty-gritty of her work, Joanna’s first job held the kind of universal predicaments that all first jobs entail. Elaborate lunches are out of the question; the cheapest sandwich is what one gets by on. Joanna admits that guilt-free, expensive sandwiches only came to her after she turned 30. Rent was the new beast she came up against, along with the discovery that decent apartments are difficult to come by. And like many of us, she left her first job because there were things that if she didn’t do then, she’d never do. 

“In America there is this idea that your most glorious moment is when you’re young. Older people will wish they were still 22 when they were thinner and having so much fun. But I feel very happy to be beyond that and be settled in the world and be grounded.”

Besides writing, acting was one of the things that Joanna wanted to try her hand at. Her father had been an amateur actor for years and the talent was inherited. Joanna, who had understood that acting was about the mind, was upset to discover that it was also about the body.
 
She was distressed when she was told that she wasn’t thin enough or beautiful enough to snag the leading roles. “It’s not that I thought I was stunning but I realised later that acting was also about engaging with the body — something I had been loathe to do.” 

These days Joanna makes a living out of writing, a dream that she has relentlessly worked towards. Writing has always been a part of her life, of course. Breaking away from her family’s tradition of science, she spent many years as a journalist and a writer for magazines. “I come from a family of scientists and they wanted me to go to medical school,”she laughs. 

One of her oldest literary influences is Charles Dickens. She’s read a fair share of Indian writers too and  Arundhati Roy and Jhumpa Lahiri have stayed with her. “Jhumpa Lahiri’s short stories struck a deeper chord than her novels,” she admits. 

When I leave Joanna, she’s still finishing the remains of her kathi roll, possibly relieved to be left alone before another journalist accosts her. True to my promise, I’ve picked up Catcher in the Rye. Like her, I’d missed my Salinger window. 

 

Ramona Sen