Joanna Rakoff
“With time, I realized there was something universal here, that it was a story larger than just my own. I realized a memoir doesn’t have to be about a grand person reflecting on their life, or about an enormous trauma. It can be about small moments and be shaped like a novel.”
“Here is the story of a reader becoming a writer, of a young woman deciding who she will be, of the power of books. Here is a memoir that manages to be dreamlike but sharp, poignant but unsentimental. Here is a book I’m going to have to insist you read immediately.”
“My Salinger Year is at heart—and it has lots of heart—an affecting coming-of-age memoir about a naïve, eager literary aspirant. . . . Rakoff wisely—and deftly—weaves her Salinger story into a broader, more universal tale about finding one’s bearings during a pivotal transitional year into real adulthood.”
“Absorbing . . . Rakoff adeptly capture[s] the uncertainty of youth. . . . A beautifully written tribute to the way things were at the edge of the digital revolution, and also to the evergreen power of literature to guide us through all of life’s transitions.”
“The long-awaited book that perfectly captures the ‘90s, that time of social and financial excess that set the stage for the current economic collapse.”
Joanna Rakoff is the author of the international bestselling memoir My Salinger Year (Knopf, 2014) and the novel A Fortunate Age (Scribner 2010), winner of the Goldberg Prize for Fiction, the Elle Readers’ Prize, and a San Francisco Chronicle Bestseller. Rakoff’s books have been translated into twenty languages and nominated for major prizes in The Netherlands and France. She has written frequently for The New York Times, Vogue, Marie Claire, O: The Oprah Magazine, and many other publications.
The film adaptation of My Salinger Year stars Margaret Qualley as Joanna and Sigourney Weaver as her boss. Directed by Oscar-nominee Philippe Falardeau, the film opened in theaters and streaming in North America on March 5, 2021 and in the UK on May 17, 2021.
When asked about publishing culture now, as opposed to the mid-90s when My Salinger Year takes place, Rakoff responded, “Books and literature are more part of the cultural conversation than ever. There are great events every night. Publishers are, I think, returning to that more personal, personality-driven style of putting books into the world. We’re living in a golden age of all things literary.”
A graduate of Oberlin College, Rakoff holds an MFA from Columbia University. She lives in Cambridge, MA.
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