Ambled into the bookshop during my lunch hour last Friday looking for something light and distracting for the weekend. Ambled out with Ian Kershaw’s Personality and Power: Builders and Destroyers of Modern Europe (Penguin Press, 2022).
And that was my weekend.
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I’m currently reading the post-apocalyptic novel Lark Ascending by Silas House…
Very good so far!
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Next time grab something by Becky Chambers, as long as you like sci-fi
Tho I do hope you enjoyed what you got!
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Lark Ascending
Intriguing title! Also title to one of the few pieces that makes me think i might know what “sublime” means.
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Lovely! Possibly an influence on the author?
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Vaughan Williams did that a lot: composed music based on various British writers. (We’ve performed a number of his choral/orchestral pieces.) It feels to me like the old-school equivalent of writing a movie or musical score.
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J.D Salinger was yet another artistic bastard.
I was eighteen years old. I had recently signed a contract to expand a story I’d written for the New York Times, published a few months earlier–“An Eighteen Year Old Looks Back on Life.”
It had been my dream for as long as I could remember to live in New York. First, I’d go to a good university and study art and and act in plays and make new friends. Then…the world of this wonderful city awaited me.
That spring I’d gotten a letter from J.D. Salinger. Then many more. By July I’d given up my summer job writing for The New York Times, to move in with Jerry Salinger. By September I’d given up my scholarship to Yale and dropped out. Under Jerry’s frequently disapproving eye,I spent that fall writing my book. I knew what to speak of in this book and what to leave out.
By December, I no longer played the records I loved or dressed in my college clothes. My diet was limited to uncooked foods. Jerry found many things wrong with me. I had learned how to make myself throw up. My instructor: him.
In March of the next year, on a trip to Florida with his children, Jerry put a fifty dollar bill in my hand and sent me home --home meaning his house in New Hampshire, where I’d spent the previous nine months and the place I believed I would live forever. He instructed me to clear out my things and go away.
In April my book was published: “Looking Back: A Chronicle of Growing Up Old in the Sixties.” There would be no mention of my having dropped out of Yale in those pages, or of my eating disorder, my father’s alcoholism or my mother’s silence about that. I would not mention he name of J.D. Salinger–not then, or for another twenty five years.
For years after that day in Florida, when the man I worshipped like a religion sent me away, I believed that because he had dismissed me as a person of no value, this must be so. I was in my forties when I finally revisited what had happened and allowed myself to write the story I had been forbidden to tell, before.
But in 1972, when the photograph on the left, below, was taken–part of a series , one of which would be used for the cover of my first book-- none of this had happened yet. I knew only that here I was, in New York City–Central Park! a place I had dreamed of, growing up in New Hampshire–and I’d signed a book contract, and a man I believed to be the funniest wisest, smartest, most enlightened on the planet would love me forever, as I would, him.
He stood off to the right of the steps that day, watching the photographer take my picture. After, we went to Bloomingdales, where he bought a couple of pounds of Scottish smoked salmon --a food I’d never tasted until he introduced me to it, a rare departure from our spartan diet.
Then we drove back to his house in New Hampshire–the state where I’d grown up, the state I’d planned to leave as soon as possible, in favor of New York, while Jerry had foresworn New York in favor of New Hampshire. And if he did, so would I.
Jerry Salinger didn’t think much of my writing Looking Back. He mostly disapproved of publishing books. More and more over the months, as I struggled to please him, he disapproved of me.
But that day in Central Park , I believed a bright and glorious future lay ahead for the two of us. That day, all I knew was love and admiration. I was always a hopeful person.
Yesterday, in Central Park again–a perfect Sunday afternoon–I asked David if he could find that spot with the stairs where I had had my picture taken long ago. He did, and I took off my shoes. I knew how to sit, and where.
I’ll be seventy years old this November. The man with whom I came to this spot, fifty one years ago, is long dead. He departed my life long before then, though I cannot pretend that certain aspects of his choice to enter it as he did, more than half a century ago, have not continued to cast a shadow.
Back in February, I spent five days in a studio in San Francisco, recording the audio book of Looking Back. On every page, I read words written by my younger self that, if I could, I would have changed. The girl I used to be back then was naive and opinionated, frequently a prim know-it all. In the pages of what purported to be the story of her life so far, she was also keeping a large secret.
In the end though, as the days of recording came to an end, a rush of pure, tender protectiveness for that girl overtook me. I wished I could reach through the pages I was reading out loud and put my arms around that girl, tell her to be careful of her body, her gifts, her precious and breakable heart. As i finished reading the final paragraph into the microphone, I realized I was weeping.
I recorded the book as it was written. You can listen to it now on Audible–the words of my 18 year old self, recorded by my 69 year old self.
And here I am in New York City, though only for a quick visit. I survived it all. As women do, if they are lucky.
[Amazon link in original post]
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Wow. Thank you so much for posting that. I never knew that back story. Thank you.
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This has been interesting so far!
Just over halfway through!
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I unironically want to read the book.
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The juxtaposition of the opening sentences with the title screams “best seller.”
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Will the underpants gnomes show up as the heroes? 
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