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  Although I had consented to the Avedon sitting, I did little to promote that first book of mine, Looking Back, published in May of 1973. I withdrew from much of the tour that had been planned for me, and retreated to the farmhouse in New Hampshire I’d bought that heartbreaking spring with the proceeds from the book. There, with black flies swarming, I planted a patch of Early Girl and Jet Star tomatoes in the hopes that somehow, if I did a good enough job of replicating the kind of life Jerry valued, he’d value me again.

  He never did, of course. All that summer, tending my weedy garden, I imagined a day when he’d drive up the road to my house for lunch, sit on the porch with me, share a meal I’d made, and then—remembering how much he’d loved me once—he’d take me back.

  When—after I begged him—he consented to stop by that August on his way to Concord, he brought his twelve-year-old son along.

  “We’ll have to pass on lunch,” he told me, glancing over the plate of my just-harvested tomatoes, arranged in the pattern of a flower. “You’ve got yourself a great setup here, kiddo.”

  Five minutes after his BMW had pulled up in front of the house, the two of them were off down the road again, and except for that other brief and scorching visit on my forty-fourth birthday, that was the last time I saw him.

  * * *

  I am sometimes asked about J. D. Salinger’s reaction to this book. Not surprisingly, he never made any public statement about it. I could guess at his response, but the larger truth is this: decades have gone by now since I have lived, as I once did, under the long, bone-chilling shadow of his disapproval. It took me some hard years to reach this place, but how J. D. Salinger might have felt about how I live ceased to matter to me.

  After he died, a lot of reporters called me up to ask for a comment. I had none to offer. The stab of sorrow I felt, hearing the news, was not for the raging and bitter man who’d shaken his fist at me on his doorstep that day we spoke for the last time, the man whose most withering assessment had been to tell me, “The problem with you, Joyce, is … you … love … the … world.” I grieved for the person I’d known forty years earlier, the voice that spoke to me from the letters I couldn’t rip open fast enough at the Yale post office, I was so eager to hear what he had to say.

  It was the voice of Holden Caulfield speaking to me. Embodied—though I could not understand this yet—in the person of a fifty-three-year-old man, sitting at his typewriter at a high desk on top of a hill in Cornish, New Hampshire, with a dachshund at his feet and Glenn Miller playing in the background.

  That voice has inspired a few generations now, but its power over readers—young people in particular—endures. When you ask these readers what it is they love best about The Catcher in the Rye, what they will likely note is that when they first encountered the book (so often, this will have been in the teenage years) it had seemed to them that Holden Caulfield—and therefore, Salinger—had been the first and perhaps the only person in their life who understood how they felt.

  I understand what these passionate, devoted readers mean. I fell in love with the voice of Holden Caulfield too when I was young—though I hadn’t read the book at the time. For me, the voice of Holden Caulfield spoke to me through J. D. Salinger himself.

  This was a man I loved deeply once, with whom I once supposed—in the boundless innocence of youth—I would live my life forever. Ours was a story of two unlikely teenagers—a young girl trying to be older, a middle-aged man in search of youth—whose paths crossed briefly and, for me, at considerable cost.

  His choice to enter my life caused the loss of some things that I never got back (a Yale education was one; youth, another). But he also gave me some extraordinary gifts. Central among those: wise counsel about the importance, for a writer, of being true to herself. The necessity to disregard in equal measure words of harsh criticism and extravagant praise. “One day you’ll cease to care anymore whom you please or what anybody has to say about you,” he told me. “That’s when you’ll finally produce the work you’re capable of.”

  It was a grave mistake, giving myself over as I did to J. D. Salinger when I was eighteen, and to mistake what he wrote in those letters as something other than a brilliant fiction writer’s construct of who he might like to be, what he might imagine, if we were characters in a story, not human beings living out their lives beyond the page.

  But I was not wrong to recognize in his words the dark, brutally honest insight of the man who sent them to me, or the humor. Even now, after all these years, I can still remember the pure joy of seeing my name on the outside of an envelope addressed to me in his hand. I remember the beating of my heart when I made my way to Hanover to meet him for the first time, and I spotted him standing on the porch of the Hanover Inn, waving to me like a shipwrecked sailor catching sight of land. I sat in the front seat of his BMW that day, as he raced along the highway bringing me to his house for the first time, with Mt. Ascutney looming before us, and—it seemed then—no heights beyond our grasp. Neither one of us could stop talking, and I thought we were just at the beginning of the most wonderful lifelong conversation. I fell in love with words on a page, and transferred my affection easily and utterly to the man who wrote them.

  * * *

  If he were alive today, Jerry would be ninety-four years old. In November, I will turn sixty.

  A few months before then, just seven weeks from the day I write these words, I will return to New Hampshire again—a different hillside, in a different town—for my wedding to a man I believe to be my true and long-awaited partner. All three of my adult children from my first marriage will be there to celebrate (dancing wildly, no doubt, and very likely performing rap numbers and poems they will make up on the spot, flipping into headstands, performing cannonballs into whatever body of water is closest at hand). Many friends will come to celebrate, some from great distances. There will be pie.

  Sometime after this, near the end of this year, I will make my way to a movie theater and slip into a seat to watch a film made from that novel of mine from a few years back, Labor Day, whose sale once appeared contingent on concealing the fact that it had been written by the shameless former teenage lover of J. D. Salinger. It’s a coming-of-age story of a sort, featuring a couple of characters, no longer young, who’ve known heartbreak and loss but still believe that love is possible, as well as goodness. They don’t live happily ever after, exactly, but there’s a hopeful ending to their story.

  I believe in those. It was true of the eighteen-year-old girl I once was, and it is true of the woman I became. Difficult though things may get around here, I do still love the world.

  May 2013

  “Real isn’t how you are made,” said the Skin Horse. “It’s a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.”

  “Does it hurt?” asked the Rabbit.

  “Sometimes,” said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. “When you are Real you don’t mind being hurt.”

  “Does it happen all at once, like being wound up,” he asked, “or bit by bit?”

  “It doesn’t happen all at once,” said the Skin Horse. “You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t often happen to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.”

  —from THE VELVETEEN RABBIT by Margery Williams

  Introduction

  WHEN I WAS eighteen, I wrote a magazine article that changed my life. The piece was called “An Eighteen-Year-Old Looks Back on Life.” It was published in The New York Times Magazine with a photograph of me on the cover. In it, I described growing up in the sixties, expressing a profound sense of world-weariness and alienation. I spoke of wanting t
o move to the country and get away from the world. “Retirement sounds tempting,” I wrote.

  Among the hundreds of letters I received after the article ran was one expressing deep affection for my writing, and concern that I might be exploited in the months and years to come. J. D. Salinger wrote to me from his house, high on a hill in the country, where he had retreated many years before.

  I embarked on a correspondence with Salinger that spring. I fell in love with the voice in his letters, and when school got out, I went to visit him. Within a few months I left college to move in with him. For most of that year I lived with him, in extreme isolation, working on a book and believing—despite the thirty-five years separating our ages—that we would be together always.

  Shortly before the publication of my book, Looking Back, the following spring, J. D. Salinger sent me away. I remained desperately in love with him.

  For more than twenty years I revered a man who would have nothing to do with me. J. D. Salinger was for me the closest thing I ever had to a religion. What happened between us shaped my life in many ways long after he left it. But I put the experience away, just as I’d put away the packet of letters he’d written me.

  * * *

  I endeavored to move on with my life. A month after I left Jerry Salinger’s house, with the money I’d earned from the sale of Looking Back, I bought a farmhouse on fifty acres at the end of a dead-end road in a little town where I knew nobody. I lived there alone for two and a half years.

  I got a job as a newspaper reporter in New York City. I fell in love and married. My husband and I had a child, and then two more. We built a pond on our land where, winters, we would skate together in the moonlight. My husband made paintings, sometimes of me. Then he didn’t paint me anymore.

  I published magazine articles and books. I worked hard, drove carpools, cooked meals, went to hundreds of soccer and Little League games, read to our children and played with them and sat on the beach with my eyes locked on the tops of their heads in the water. My husband and I fought, and struggled to stay together.

  My father died. I wrote a lot of magazine articles and newspaper columns to support my family. I cared for my mother when she was dying, and fought so bitterly with my sister about our mother’s care that I could not attend the funeral. That week, my husband and I parted.

  I left the house at the end of that dead-end road. My husband and I didn’t fight over the house, but we went to war over custody of our children. I fell in love again, and when that love affair ended, I loved other men. Some of them were good choices, at the time. Some terrible.

  I made a new home. I made good friends and lost some. I wrote another book. My sons taught me how to throw a baseball. My daughter hung roses over her bed, and taught me by her own example what it is to be a hopeful and optimistic person who greets the world with open arms.

  I planted flower gardens. We got a dog. I taught many women, and a few men, how to bake pies the way my mother taught me. I swam long distances across many New Hampshire lakes and ponds, with the crawl stroke learned from my father.

  I turned forty. I sold a book I’d written to the movies, and worried about money a little less for a while. I wrote another book. Now and then I still got so angry about some relatively minor frustration that I would dump a gallon of milk on our kitchen floor. But it didn’t happen as much anymore.

  My sons grew taller than I was. My daughter knew some things I didn’t. I sold the house I’d bought after my marriage ended, and laid most of our possessions in the yard, had a giant tag sale, and then moved with my children to a town in California where we didn’t know anybody. We made a new home and new friends there. That was two years ago.

  * * *

  Because I have frequently made myself a character in my work, I wrote about most of these experiences. More and more over the years, I learned to trust my readers with the truth. I published stories and articles about aspects of my experience that some people would have considered shameful or embarrassing. I wanted to tell the story of a real woman with all her flaws. I hoped, by doing that, others might feel less ashamed of their own unmentionable failings and secrets.

  * * *

  Two years ago my daughter Audrey turned eighteen, the age I was when I left home to go to college, and the age I was when I got that first letter from J. D. Salinger.

  Audrey was a high school senior. We were still living in New Hampshire. After that year I knew it was unlikely my daughter would live at home ever again.

  I had always believed in encouraging my children’s independence. But now, out of nowhere, I felt a wave of terrible anxiety for her. All through the years when so many of my friends had fought bitterly with their adolescent daughters, Audrey and I had gotten along. The year she turned eighteen, we didn’t.

  She was breaking away from me, and I saw myself turning into a hovering and controlling woman. What if I hadn’t taught my daughter everything she needed to know as she ventured into the world? I had only a handful of months left. I wasn’t ready to let her go.

  When I was Audrey’s age, I had suffered from eating disorders. It had been a very long time since I had last stuck my finger down my throat or binged on a whole carton of ice cream. Now I found myself looking at my own beautiful daughter and panicking if I saw her turning to food for escape or comfort. “You’ve eaten half that container of Häagen-Dazs,” I’d say, my own stomach tightening, and reach across the counter to put the carton away. One day I started shoveling the ice cream into my own mouth so she wouldn’t eat it, all the while believing I was trying to save her.

  I stood on the sidelines at her cross-country track meets, waiting for her to cross the finish line, and realized I was breathing with her. I watched the slow ending to what had been an extremely tender and long-lasting relationship with her boyfriend and wept, myself, at their parting. Once when she was at school I entered her bedroom and started to read her journal—the very thing I had vowed, when I was twelve, I’d never do to any child of mine, because my mother did that to me. I stopped myself, but I couldn’t control the frantic feeling.

  “I just don’t want to see you get in situations where you might get hurt,” I told her.

  “The only situation where I’m getting hurt,” she said with unfamiliar sharpness, “is the one you’re creating. What’s happening to you?”

  Many things were happening. My firstborn child, my only girl, was nearly as old as I was when everything changed for me.

  * * *

  In my senior year in high school, I left my New Hampshire public school to enroll as a day student in Phillips Exeter Academy, a highly competitive prep school with a hundred-and-ninety-year tradition of educating boys. Unable to face meals in the dining hall, and filled with anxiety about college, about boys, about pleasing my parents, and my teachers, I took to eating little besides peanut butter and chocolate, and gained ten pounds. My mother—a lifelong dieter herself, who had always taken pride in my skinniness—remarked on this. I began to diet and exercise so rigorously that by the spring of my senior year I weighed 88 pounds.

  I sent applications to Harvard, Princeton, and Yale. I spent days bent over a legal pad, refining my answers to the essay questions. I never truly asked myself: Did I want to attend these schools? I only knew I wanted to get in.

  My daughter is nothing like the driven young woman I was then. A good but relaxed student, a young woman with a healthy body who’s smiling in nearly every photograph I have of her, that college-application season she spent her weekends riding her snowboard in the mountains of New Hampshire and Vermont with her many friends. She had no interest in attending Ivy League schools.

  She wrote her college essay one afternoon when the snow conditions were lousy, and said maybe she’d polish it up if she had the time. I said her writing needed work. There was nothing I knew better than how to write an essay like this. We’d work on it together, I said, as my parents had done with me.

  My daughter kept putting this off. The deadline w
as approaching, and everything in her applications was complete but the essay question. Not a day went by that I didn’t ask her: When are we going to work on it?

  The week the applications were due, she was still putting me off. Then it was the final day for getting her applications in the mail. “Come home after your first class,” I told her. “I’ll be waiting.” I was trying to sound more casual than I felt.

  Noon came and went. One o’clock, two o’clock. She wasn’t home. At two-thirty I turned on my computer and typed her essay myself. At three-thirty, the new version was mostly done. A little before four my daughter walked in the door. She took one look at what I’d done and her face was neither relaxed nor smiling.

  “How could you?” she said, looking over my shoulder at the computer screen.

  “These aren’t my words. I am not you,” she said, taking me by the shoulders. “I’m not the Girl Wonder who writes her autobiography when she’s eighteen. I don’t even want to be.”

  “I only wanted to help you,” I said. “I wanted to spare you pain. I wanted to keep you safe. I wanted you to go to a college where you can be happy.”

  My daughter was as angry as I’ve ever seen her. “You stole my voice,” she screamed. “You’re trying to take over my life. Get out. Get out.”

  I knew she wanted to hit me, but she couldn’t. When I reached to hug her she pushed me away. We ended up on the floor, wrestling, our legs wrapped around each other. Our arms gripped each other’s shoulders. “I don’t want to hurt you,” she said. “But you have to stop this. I’m stronger than you now.”

  We were evenly matched. She was younger, and had been running cross-country all that fall. But I had given birth three times, and had a kind of endurance and capacity for pain she couldn’t know. We rolled around on the floor for several minutes until we were both dripping with sweat. Then at the same moment, both our bodies went limp, and we lay there in each other’s arms, weeping.