I recently watched My Salinger Year –the movie based on Joanna Rakoff’s excellent memoir of the same name, and I have been thinking and thinking of it. It struck a nerve. Coming of age in the literary world 1990s for a young women, and having artistic/literary aspirations seems a long ago time, but also suddenly watching this movie, like it was yesterday. To revisit that time through this movie’s lens and through Margaret Qualley’s shifting features and large perceptive eyes, was complex and bittersweet.
I loved the interiority of this movie — and the memoir too. I loved the tone that is both ironic, and loving, and not without a satirical punch.
I love this movie for its glamour, it’s storytelling, it’s characterizations (oh my God Sigourney Weaver!), spot on, and most of all its subtlety, and how it met in allowed for the importance of an inner life, a reading and writing life, which must be nurtured, even fought for.
I loved — and laughed, and smirked — at this mannered depiction of the hazy pre-digital days, pre-smart phone (hell, pre-cell phones, pre-fax (!), total pre-digital age) which appears now, in hindsight, hazy, distant, but also surprisingly potent.
And sobering. This world evoked, remembered, is full of gatekeepers and privilege, a dream of a literary world that is troubling and imperfect. The missing people, the BIPOC creators and dreamers and consiglieres and agents and editors — is striking, and depressing
But — and — amid this sober accounting, I find myself loving still how the movie — and the memoir — evokes the inner life of a young artist. A young woman artist.
I loved that at its heart was an internal fight to give oneself permission to dream, to aspire to make a mark. I loved how the over-investing in a male partner’s ego can hamper that dream.
Clearly — this is even more clear now — it is the dream of a life that was possible to dream for some.
But — no, and — I love that the heart of this memoir — and this movie — is one that believes that a young person‘s dream — all of our dreams — to make a mark, to make art, are fragile and important and need to be protected and nurtured. This movie is a gift to aspiring artist of every age, especially perhaps to women, young women.
Stories matter, individual stories matter, and collective stories matter, and this is one that I am so very glad is told, in both forms, both prose and now film. It calls to me still, it reminds me, even now, decades later, of this dream, this formative and guiding dream, and how fragile it is, about a dream that is fragile, and reminded me of Jason Reynolds words in his blistering and cathartic poem “For Everyone” performed at The Kennedy Center:
“When it comes to
https://826digital.com/for-every-one/
my dream,
the way I like to describe it
is that
it’s a rabid beast
that found me
when I was young.
It bit me
And infected me,
but before
I could catch it,
It shot off into
The darkness.
Now I spend my life
Searching for it,
Hunting it down.
I know I’m on its trail.
I can smell it,
I can hear it.
Something I think I can even see it.
Either way,
I know
I’m on the right track-my nose to the dirt,
Foaming at the spirit.
I look under heavy stones,
Behind massive trees.
Deep in dark caves,
And I will keep looking
Until I find that beast,
that thing that bit me when I was young.
The truth is,
Finding that beast may
Or may not happen.
But the treasures I’ve discovered
under the heavy stones
and behind the massive trees
and deep in the dark caves
have created the hunter
and the human
that I am.
Is the dream of My Salinger Year still extant? Still relevant? If so, has the digital age eclipsed this dream? Or has it made this dream more available? I hope so.
Thank you Joanna, for writing this memoir, and those who made this film.
