“Salinger was not cutesy. His work was not nostalgic. These were not fairy tales about child geniuses traipsing the streets of Old New York. Salinger was nothing like I'd thought. Nothing. Salinger was brutal. Brutal and funny and precise. I… — Joanna Rakoff Copy Share Image
“She’d never spent entire days lying on her bed reading, entire nights making up complicated stories in her head. She’d not dreamed of willing… — Joanna Rakoff Copy Share Image
“What terrified her was the set of circumstances that allowed her to eat a full pound of spaghetti, the unmoored, untethered quality of her… — Joanna Rakoff Copy Share Image
“The worst that being an artist could do to you would be that it would make you slightly unhappy constantly.” — Joanna Rakoff Copy Share Image
“She needed this wedding—this perfect, minutely orchestrated wedding—to shout, This is who I am. To tell us all that she was not that girl… — Joanna Rakoff Copy Share Image
“Salinger was not cutesy. His work was not nostalgic. These were not fairy tales about child geniuses traipsing the streets of Old New York.… — Joanna Rakoff Copy Share Image
“Why couldn’t Caitlin confide in Vix? Because she knew Vix would judge her. Because she knew Vix would refuse to understand. Because it was… — Joanna Rakoff Copy Share Image
“Alone in her anxieties and insecurities, alone in the tyranny of her mind, but also simply, literally, physically alone, her only companion an oversized,… — Joanna Rakoff Copy Share Image
“So we’re all doing a pretty good job not revealing our emotions, right? But if you can’t reveal your emotions, how do you go… — Joanna Rakoff Copy Share Image
“It gets easier once you’re no longer graded, once you have to assess your actions for yourself.” — Joanna Rakoff Copy Share Image
“Writing makes you a writer,” he’d told me. “If you get up every morning and write, then you’re a writer. Publishing doesn’t make you… — Joanna Rakoff Copy Share Image
“On Madison, the sun shone in jagged beams and the air held the promise, the hint, of warmth,” — Joanna Rakoff Copy Share Image
“Reading manuscripts was the exact opposite of reading for grad school: it was pure instinct, with some emotion and intelligence thrown in.” — Joanna Rakoff Copy Share Image
“Don’s European friends occasionally came up in conversation, but they’d yet to materialize in real life.” — Joanna Rakoff Copy Share Image
“I’d known, of course, that a blizzard was coming, or I suppose I’d known, for I didn’t own a television or a radio, and… — Joanna Rakoff Copy Share Image
