# My Salinger Year: Joanna Rakoff & Rosie Goldsmith in Conversation

Page: https://stenobird.com/podcast/slightly-foxed-725618/my-salinger-year-joanna-rakoff-rosie-goldsmith-in-conversation
Text version: https://stenobird.com/podcast/slightly-foxed-725618/my-salinger-year-joanna-rakoff-rosie-goldsmith-in-conversation.md
Podcast: [Slightly Foxed](https://stenobird.com/podcast/slightly-foxed-725618)
Published: 2024-05-10T13:40:00+00:00
Episode link: https://audioboom.com/posts/8503294
Audio file: https://audioboom.com/posts/8503294.mp3?modified=1715352887&sid=4974324&source=rss
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JSON: https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/slightly-foxed-725618/episodes/my-salinger-year-joanna-rakoff-rosie-goldsmith-in-conversation
Duration seconds: 3463

## Resource

‘There was no voicemail. I was the voicemail.’ In this out-of-series special episode of the Slightly Foxed podcast Joanna Rakoff, author of the 2008 literary smash hit My Salinger Year (released as a Slightly Foxed limited-edition hardback in March 2024), joins us down the line from her home in Massachusetts for a conversation with our podcast presenter Rosie Goldsmith. From their respective sides of the Atlantic, Rosie and Joanna take a trip back to New York in the freezing winter of 1996 when Joanna Rakoff, aged 24, landed her first job as assistant at one of the city’s oldest and most distinguished literary agencies. No matter that she didn’t even know what a literary agent was and had lied about her typing speed. She’d also led her parents to believe she was living with a female college friend when she was in fact sharing an unheated Brooklyn apartment with a penniless and unpublished Marxist novelist whose sole and very part-time job was watering the plants at Goldman Sachs. Rosie and Joanna take us deep into the strange, time-warped world she’s strayed into at The Agency, with its Selectric typewriters, filing cabinets and carbon paper, and into her unusual relationship with its best-known author J. D. Salinger, to whose mountain of fan mail it was Joanna’s job to reply. Salinger was famously reclusive, wanting nothing to do with his fans and Joanna was supposed to reply with a pro forma letter. But the more heart-wrenching the letters she read, the more she found herself pulled into the senders’ lives and, unbeknownst to her terrifying boss (‘whiskey mink, enormous sunglasses, a long cigarette holder’), she replied to every single one and sometimes, fatally, enclosed a personal note herself. Joanna describes how My Salinger Year came to be, from a gem of an idea…

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## Transcript

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