The Seller in the Rye
When I heard about Salinger’s death the first person I thought of was Joyce Maynard who left Yale during her freshman year and went to live with him. Because he asked her to. Because he wrote her a bunch of letters after he saw that famous essay she did for the New York Times Magazine "An Eighteen-Year-Old Looks Back on Life" and became infatuated. He was 53 at the time and with his raw-grain diet I imagine he looked like a haggard old guy in baggy pants. She looked like a ten-year-old who hadn’t eaten in a month as you can see here. The love match lasted just eight months before he sent her packing under cruel circumstances but 30 years later she sold the tale in book form. She had already sold another book that got made into a movie with Nicole Kidman; and last year she sold a third one. Now she sells herself, meaning her experience and her personality, by offering hopeful would-be writers a week in her company in the tropical venue she keep for this purpose. All this I learned about on her website.I, meanwhile, seem never to have gotten the hang of all this selling. Sixteen years ago when I began to think I’d like to pull together a collection of short pieces, I pitched the idea to a couple dozen publishers and received as many rejections. Then instead of trying to figure out what these people DID want and giving it to them I formed my own imprint and made the book myself. A few years later I did it again with another book. Then I figured out how to get on TV and radio and did about 60 shows which in case you didn’t know nobody pays you for. Then I made two more books, audio books, using a back bedroom empty at the time. I gave 200 copies of Vacationing in My Driveway to our deployed soldiers overseas, 100 copies of I Thought He Was a Speed Bump to a public middle school in Brooklyn and another hundred of both to some places around here and still I have almost 2,000 books in the cellar. My mate of many years said the other day, “Why don’t we just throw them away, T?” It stabbed me in my heart to hear it– which shows there’s some kind of lesson in here somewhere though I'm darned if I know what it is.
