Joanna Rakoff

This was 1996. The country was in the grips of a recession. Almost no one I knew was gainfully employed. My friends were in grad school—getting MFAs in fiction or PhDs in film theory—or working at coffee shops in Portland, or selling T-shirts in San Francisco, or living with their parents on the Upper West Side. A job, an actual nine-to-five job, was an almost alien concept, an abstraction.

I didn’t want to be entertained. I wanted to be provoked

“It’s so nice just to be normal,” she’d told me a few months earlier, when I returned from London. In high school, we’d not wanted to be normal. We’d made fun of the normal people. We’d hated them.
“I know,” I said reflexively, but I didn’t. I didn’t want to be normal. I wanted to be extraordinary. I wanted to write novels and make films and speak ten languages and travel around the world. I wanted everything. So, I’d thought, had Jenny.

Carolyn began talking about friends of hers named Joan and John, and their daughter, who had an odd name, an odd name that sounded oddly familiar to me

I found him not writing but lying on the couch, in boxer shorts and a sleeveless undershirt, listening to Arlo Guthrie and reading the third volume of Remembrance of Things Past, which he’d informed me was properly called In Search of Lost Time. He often quoted passages or recounted scenes from Proust, but when I asked directly if he’d read the seven volumes in their entirety—I knew no one who had—he said, “That’s a silly question.”

Why didn’t Don consort with writers? Successful writers, published writers, or even simply ambitious, interesting writers, published or no? Why hadn’t he argued and bantered with the New Yorker editors? Why hadn’t he made them his friends? Forged alliances? Told them about his novel? Why hadn’t he talked about Gramsci or Proust with them? The answer sent a shiver through me: Don didn’t want friends who worked at The New Yorker. He didn’t want friends who dressed in creamy Brooks Brothers oxfords and college ties, friends who had health insurance and degrees from Harvard, friends who’d just published their first Talk of the Town pieces. He surrounded himself with fools—the broken, the failed or failing, the sad and confused—so that he might be their king. Which, obviously, made him nothing but the king of fools.
But what did that make me?

“I have a present for you,” said Don as I stashed some clothes in a bag. I looked at him quizzically. Don did not believe in presents, a principle he ascribed to communism, but which I suspected had more to do with poverty and stinginess

I thought about calling or dropping in on a friend, but who were my friends? Where were my friends?

In Salinger, characters don’t sit around contemplating suicide. They pick up guns and shoot themselves in the head

My husband stared at me, shocked, from the doorjamb. “This is about your dad, isn’t it?” he said. “It’s making you think about your dad. About what’s going to happen.” My father, we knew, was not going to recover. He would grow worse and worse, until he couldn’t move and couldn’t talk, and then: the end. “It’s reminding you of your dad.”

With the back of my hand, I wiped the tears from my face and swiped my nose. “No,” I said. “It’s just about Salinger.”