Writers in Hiding: My viewing of ‘My Salinger Year’
My Salinger Year debuted at the 70th Berlin International Film Festival on February 20, 2020. On March 5, 2021, the film saw a wider release. You can look at those dates and guess how that all went. The film did not clear a million dollars, but the film probably didn’t cost that much to make. These figures are always relative, which is also an easy sentence to write for casting such concerns aside.
My Salinger Year is about writers and writing, although My Salinger Year avoids ever sharing its protagonist Joanna’s words, well, sort of. Joanna is played by Margaret Qualley, and Joanna is a poet. But she doesn’t write a ton of poems in the film. And the film never indulges in trying to make us believe she is a poet. This is not Finding Forester (2000). But Joanna does write.
Having taken a job in a late ’90s literary agency whose boss fears computers and the internet, Joanna is tasked with responding to J.D. Salinger’s fan mail. The agency provides her with a typewriter. She types on a typewriter. The writing that fills the movie consists of praise written to J.D. Salinger, the form letter response to the fan mail, and the instances when Joanna goes off script and offers a personal response to the letters she finds deserving of more than boilerplate. These are the physics of any slush pile, and one of the film’s better scenes is when a recipient of a personal letter from Joanna shows up at the agency to confront Joanna for having the gall not only to respond but to respond with life advice. All writers want, but some writers want anonymity too.
My Salinger Year is also a memoir published in 2014. (I haven’t read it.) So there is a sense of all this really happened glossing the mystique and mystery that is J.D. Salinger’s presence in the film. In the scenes where he is physically present, he is present in a sort of faceless mannequin kind of way. His back is always to the camera. He is at a distance. He is out of frame. He is a voice on the telephone asking Joanna if she has followed his advice to write everyday.
Writing in this film is a small daily habit. And that is certainly how a lot of writers work, and depending on your interpretations of Sisyphus, that daily habit is either a curse or a blessing. Realistically, the task is a bit of both, but there are Tik Tok optimists among us. Some writers hit the kettlebells pretty hard. Some writers are shredded with enlightenment.
My Salinger Year avoids romanticizing writers for the most part. Despite having voice and body, J.D. Salinger is present in the way a Grecian urn is present. Joanna’s boyfriend Don (Douglas Booth) is an asshole. Joanna’s best friend Jenny (Seána Kerslake) gives up writing because of writing’s childish nature. Almost all writers have thought about quitting writing, have known (or been) a literary asshole, and have contemplated the truth and beauty of some iconic figure writ larger than the page. But, at the close of the film, The New Yorker seemingly delights in fast tracking Joanna’s manilla envelope of poems from the Condé Nast help desk to the desk of the magazine’s poetry editor.
Again, I don’t know how Joanna Rakoff’s writing career unfolded, but this scene crosses the screen as the most magical in the film. Write. Try. Someone is awaiting those words. That may be true. Or it might not be true at all. But any writer who sticks with the routine probably wants to mistake Sisyphus for being happy. It’s really not that far a stretch from an old Scottish actor playing a reclusive author. Caught up in the euphoria of typewriter keys being punched, he yells, “Yes! You’re the man now, dog!”
Please join us next week for our weekly Book Club’s reading of the esteemed Avalon Landing by William Forrester.
