Getting Up Off the Couch

“It’s really hard to be roommates with someone if your suitcases are much nicer than theirs.”

-J.D Salinger

I won’t say I’m going to exactly miss J.D. Salinger, since he hadn’t published anything in my lifetime, but his books, especially Franny and Zooey and Nine Stories, are some that truly changed my life, both as a writer and as a human alive in the world. So I felt like I should write something.

Franny Glass is still the character I identify with most in fiction. (I hope for my sake that this will change eventually, and I won’t always identify with a over-sensitive, over-wrought college girl having a nervous breakdown on the couch.) She’s self-serious, spiritual, frustrated about everything, and she doesn’t know what to do about any of it. She can’t quite wrap her head around the fact that maybe everyone has an inner life as rich as hers, and she feels as though she feels, sees and senses the world more acutely than other people. I pray to God I’m not like her, but I relate to Franny Glass the way some middle-aged women relate to Elizabeth Gilbert’s memoirs, or some teenage girls relate to Bella from Twilight. These books are successes because they make us sit up say “Yes! This is exactly how I feel!”.

So maybe I'm going to miss old J.D. after all.

My other, more eloquent tribute to J.D. Salinger in TNH: http://www.tnhonline.com/j-d-salinger-connected-with-young-readers-writers-1.1115385