Interview: Joanna Rakoff in conversation with Kelly McMasters

Joanna Rakoff is the author of the forthcoming memoir, The Fifth Passenger, as well as the international bestselling memoir My Salinger Year and the bestselling novel A Fortunate Age. The gorgeous film adaptation of My Salinger Year is now streaming and Rakoff’s essays and reviews have appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, O: The Oprah Magazine, Vogue, Elle, and elsewhere.

In October 2022, Hofstra’s Great Writers, Great Readings series hosted Rakoff in conversation with Kelly McMasters, Associate Professor of English and Director of Publishing Studies. The following conversation is adapted from that event.

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Kelly McMasters: Your first memoir, My Salinger Year, is an international bestseller, and now you are working on your second memoir, The Fifth Passenger. How do you approach going back into your life, returning to “you” as a character and as a narrator, in a different book? How did it feel to come back to yourself on the page?

Joanna Rakoff: It’s interesting. I mean, I started writing this new book in 2013. I wasn’t under contract for it as I am now, but, as an experiment, I was at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and I had more free time than I normally do. I had been toying with the idea of writing a book on this subject. I grew up believing I had one sister whose name is Amy, is eighteen years older than me, had a very fraught relationship with my parents, and was a bit of a distant aunt figure to me. At a certain point in my childhood, when I was in middle school, I found a picture, and I knew there was something weird about this picture. It was of a family that I didn’t recognize at all and eventually, after thinking about it for a very long time, I showed it to my father and he started crying. It turns out that I had two siblings who were killed a year before I was born. He didn’t tell me that, he simply pointed to the children in the picture and said, “That’s your brother sister.” I spent most of my life knowing that I had these siblings, not knowing what happened to them, but suspecting that my sister was somehow involved in whatever had happened. In this book, I go back and report out what happened, which is a process that has taken a pretty long time for a bunch of different reasons.

So, to actually answer your question, this whole absence or secret was something that had haunted me really since childhood, and defined, in a strange way, every aspect of my life. This curiosity developed in me about “Who were these siblings that I missed?” I would not have been born if they had not died, so this is a huge conundrum. I thought about it all the time, and I kept thinking about writing about it. I was asked to write about it; it would come up in an interview and everyone would ask me to write about it, and I occasionally did, but I was never satisfied with the pieces because there was so much I didn’t know. In 2013 I suddenly realized I had an entry point to the story: these drawings that were in the living room, because it had actually only just occurred to me that they were my brother and sister. So, I started to write this, and I had really just finished My Salinger Year at this point, and I worked on it very, very, very slowly, trying to figure out what this book was over the years that followed. Was it simply a story about my childhood? Because I wasn’t sure that was interesting to me.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that I think when I first started writing this, I was the same person that wrote My Salinger Year. Then I wrote a proposal and sold it four years later in 2017, and by that point I was a different person, so a lot had changed and my perspective on the story had changed. Then I started actually writing the book significantly later because I took a break to write the screenplay for the My Salinger Year film and then make that film, so I really started writing the book in earnest in the fall of 2019, and I felt like a different person again. The book kept shifting, and my perspective kept shifting, so it was difficult. I kept taking breaks from it, and I would return to it as a different person.

However, as a writer, I think I have a pretty strong aesthetic in terms of the way I put sentences together, and also in terms of the way I think about narration. I want my books, even if they’re in the first person, to feel like there's an omniscient narrator guiding you through the story. I want there to be distance between my narration and the story, and I want there to be silences and ellipses and a lot of white space in the story so the reader is never going to be told how to feel. My worst fear is sentimentality, writing something that is tawdry in which I am manipulating the reader. I think, ultimately, when I sat down to work on it, I was still that person with that aesthetic.

KM: I also wonder about the question of vulnerability in writing a memoir, and then seeing that memoir on screen and seeing a different person play you. It’s one thing to be reading from My Salinger Year here and returning to a scene that you had control over, but then once something is released, you lose control. Then the movie comes out and it’s you but it's not you; there’s a little bit of safety in that distance, but you decided to return to the page, and you, again.

JR: I worry that this is going to sound very negative, but every writer’s dream is to write a book that finds a large readership; even if you don’t verbalize it to yourself, that is what you want. No one wants to write a book and have no one read it, but there is some anxiety with that. In my proposal for The Fifth Passenger, I essentially had to include a paragraph or two in which I talked about how it would still be me, the writer that people know. I had to ensure potential editors that readers were going to meet me now and see how my life turned out, because it was definitely implied that that is what people wanted, and I feel okay with that, but I think the scary part is just worrying that people are going to come to the book wanting something different than what it is. That it would feel too dark or sad or something like that, even though I am not really a very dark or sad person, but it is a story with a lot of tragedy in it. The real truth is that it has been a very hard book for me to write because of that fear. I wrote My Salinger Year thinking that no one would read it. I was told by my editor, point blank, that this book has a very limited audience. We really only see this as appealing to people who work in publishing, maybe people in media. It's a very New York book, no one is going to read it outside of New York. I embarked on My Salinger Year thinking about it as some sort of palate cleanser. I am a person who writes big, big novels that are kind of social novels, Victorian novels. My first novel I spent six years writing, so I thought that I’d write this little, short book and no one was going to read it and I didn’t care. This will support me and my children and keep food on the table, and then that's not how it turned out. Now I’m writing this book thinking, “Wait, people are going to read this.”

KM: I guess that’s what I was getting at, that there is an element of bravery to return to the page both personally in the writing of it, but also in putting it out there. You quote Abigail Thomas in your author’s note, describing memoir as “the truth as best she can tell it.” Abigail Thomas is brilliant, an incredible writer, and I recommend everyone in this audience read her, especially on this question of truth. But what does that mean to you? Why did you put that in your author’s note?

JR: I had never written a memoir; I had barely written any personal essays before I wrote this book, and, full honesty, I didn’t really know what a memoir was. I was a book critic, but I only reviewed fiction, so there was this process for me of figuring out what makes a good memoir. A year after I signed the contract, I think I read about a hundred memoirs. I decided that for that year I was only going to read memoirs. I will say that the vast majority of memoirs are not successful. There’s a lot of memoirs where the first chapter is a magazine article and it’s really good, and the rest of the book feels totally superfluous. Or there are the books that were a series on NPR, but it doesn’t really translate to the page. But then there are the few that are amazing. I analyzed those and tried to figure out what made them work. I had three friends and acquaintances who are fiction writers who had written memoirs, and I asked them if I could take them to lunch and just ask them some questions. Now looking back on it, those questions seem so naive. As in, I remember I asked them, “How do you condense everything?” One of the writers said, “You can’t write a memoir without rearranging things and condensing things and having composite characters. You have to.” I was really a novelist and a journalist, and that was almost a bad combination of things for writing a memoir because, as a journalist, you adhere to a strict, ethical code. You’re not going to write a profile of someone and change how the events occurred in her life. That would be crazy, you would lose your job.

KM: I think what you said earlier in a class today is that you are now writing your story, but also other people’s stories, and that it’s your responsibility to get it right. Even in My Salinger Year, your boss or J.D. Salinger himself, they may have a different recollection, or a different experience, of what you wrote. But this is your story, and this is the best that you can tell it. In my nonfiction classes, I talk about the narrator being a pie, and essentially the real you is that pie, but for each piece that you write, you’re only writing a slice of that pie because you can’t put everything in. You can’t condense everything and serve everything and give the whole pie the entire time. I find the idea that you can condense in nonfiction very freeing. Honor Moore, who was a mentor of mine, used to say, “Just start with ‘I imagine.’” The idea is that nonfiction can be a dream, nonfiction can be conditional, but it can also be collective. I think you do this beautifully in the opening here of My Salinger Year. Can you read a few lines?

JR: This is from the opening section of the book called “All of Us Girls”:

There were hundreds of us, thousands of us, carefully dressing in the gray morning light of Brooklyn, Queens, the Lower East Side, leaving our apartments weighed down by tote bags heavy with manuscripts, which we read as we stood in line at the Polish bakery, the Greek deli, the corner diner, waiting to order our coffee, light and sweet, and our Danish, to take on the train, where we would hope for a seat so that we might read more before we arrived at our offices in midtown.

KM: This opening does speak, not just to the specific girls you are speaking about, not just to your narrator, but to a collective feeling. I wondered if you could tell us the story of how you knew to begin there in that way?

JR: As I said, I did not want to write My Salinger Year. The idea was presented to me, and I was very resistant to it. My agent, who is kind of a formidable agent, was resistant to the idea, too. There is a writer, Joyce Maynard, who wrote a book about having an affair with Salinger, and my agent told me “You don’t want to be Joyce Maynard. You don’t want to be known as the Salinger girl.” I haven’t actually read that book, I’ve read nothing by Joyce Maynard so I have no feelings about her, but that was my agent saying this to me. Then this editor, whose idea it was, contacted her and got a meeting with her which is actually very hard to do. He spent half an hour with her, and he convinced her that it was a good idea, which is really shocking. She called me right after the meeting and said she thinks I should do it, she thinks he’s right. I was just resistant. I’m not a memoirist, I didn’t feel like there was a story there. Who wants this silly story about me at twenty-three doing these stupid things like answering J.D. Salinger’s fan mail? Who cares? She told me to give it a week and try to write the first twenty pages, and if at the end of that week I still really didn’t want to do it, then okay. She wasn’t saying, “Okay, I’ll let it go,” because she doesn’t let anything go, but she was more like, “Okay, we’ll talk about it more.” I worked at a shared writer’s space on 14th Street on the West side, and I used to run on the High Line every day at around five. I spent my week in my little cubicle at the shared writer’s space thinking that this was a stupid idea, and that I wasn’t going to do it. I had a new novel I was working on and I had a review due, and I just kept thinking “Ugh!”

I did some research as I was trying to think through what was happening in 1996, hoping that would make this more interesting to me. It did make it a little more interesting; I was reminded of the stuff that was happening at the time that really changed publishing and media. It was the year The New York Times launched their website. It was the year Salon launched. It was kind of a turning point in publishing and media. We are in the age that started in 1996. That was interesting to me, but it wasn’t enough. That was nonfiction, it was reporting. It was not a memoir, it was not a story, it was a subject. On one of the last days of this week, I put on my running clothes, and went up to the High Line. It was a very beautiful day, and there were all these young women wearing the same kind of clothing that I had worn when I had worked in an office in my twenties, like really inexpensive polyester skirts. Some of them had Coach handbags, and it was clear that their mom had bought them that handbag. So many of them had these huge tote bags with manuscripts in them, and I knew that some of them worked in galleries because it was the gallery neighborhood and I could tell by the way they dressed. But they were all young women starting out in whatever kind of arts, or arts-adjacent, profession.

At that moment, I suddenly saw the larger story. This is not just a story about me, it’s a story about what it means to be a young woman, alone, in a large city without a safety net, trying to make your way in a profession that, even if it’s populated by women as publishing is, is still incredibly difficult and competitive. A profession in which you’re not going to make a living wage. A profession in which most people who succeed have independent incomes or something that helps them. This is a story about the vast majority of us trying to make our way in some kind of world about which we feel extreme passion. So, I finished my run and I went back and wrote those first few pages, and they are unchanged since that day.

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Transcribed by Olivia Kuch