I tried Catcher at least 3 times, maybe more, and I never could finish it. I couldn't stand Holden. It's so far back I can't remember exactly why, but I think I found the whining of such a privileged boy tiresome. (I never got far enough to know why he was so unhappy.) I know that a voice such as his was groundbreaking, but by the time I encountered him that kind of narrator was fairly common. The railing against conformity that I held close was Sinclair Lewis's Main Street. (I guess I was an odd duck of an 80's teenager.) You're inspiring me to find a copy of that and see how it lands now.
Sinclair Lewis! You were no conformist as a reader. For sure, Holden is whiny. His family is entry-level rich, but also mired in grief after losing a child. They park their problem child in one expensive school after another because they can’t grapple with his problems. You might still feel like throwing the book across the room. No book is for everyone. But there are reasons fir Holden’s brattiness, and he has a sweet side that emerges as the story unwinds.
I didn't understand back then that there is always a reason for someone's difficult behaviors, and it is almost always pain. Wish I could have learned that from this book--that would have been an easier teacher!
I am not ashamed of having been one of those privileged, middle-class kids, (a girl- no less - in a male dominant world, where my choices were limited to hope I would be an executive secretary or a reporter like Oriana Fallaci - which in itself was a big swing) in the early 60s. When I read Catcher, at thirteen, he expressed me. He seeded the person I was to become for the rest of my life -- someone who openly told the truth about his pain, what he saw, what he felt -- and he was interested in the pain of others, regardless of their status, income, race, station, religion, affiliation, etc. His trials, his seeking for the real, for truth, for meaning clarified what I saw in front of me, what I FELT - juxtaposed against the dumbed down consciousness of adults and their tiki torches, wife swapping, false fronted, phony, fake, hairsprayed, girdled, loud, stupid, boring, dominating, punishing, religious, hypocritical, narcissistic boozed out, 1950s generation -- What a relief to read a book that spelled out what my generation could come to pick up on and move into a new paradigm that pulled mothers like mine from living life in B&W to color as she discovered her orgasm - something that happened when women started telling their truth and we kids turned back to them to share our vibrators and free them up from not being able to wind the windows down in the car and let their hair loose -- Catcher relieved some of the pain from believing no one else was going through what I was feeling. Regardless of the flaws of my generation, we moved culture along, thanks to Catcher and so many other books and music and influences...
You mention his interest in other people's pain. It's often eclipsed by his snarkiness, but it's there if you look. In a touching passage, he gives money to some nuns who are canvassing for a cause. He also goes out of his way to buy a record for Phoebe, and is crushed when it breaks.
I too read and disliked Catcher in high school. I had good friends (but was not 'popular') and a good home life, with no losses yet then.
I reread it again years later, probably in my late 50s. I still disliked it. Whiny, ugh. I think that it would be hard to identify with Holden without some of the same loneliness, loss, and displacement in the readers heart, especially when reading as a teen or young adult. He's bristley and hard to like, but then he wasnt written to be likeable, I'd guess.
Perhaps for me it was the opposite problem? I had too much of my own loneliness, loss, and displacement. It was a lot of work to hide that, and there was Holden, not even trying to get along. 🙂
The same for me, at 18 I was just trying to survive and needed so desperately to believe in something. I’ve spent my life resenting Holden and felt justified when I came across Joyce’s autobiography,
All I could think of when I started to read this was your sister. Don't you read this book differently since Sallinger played such a negative role in your sister's life?
Without a doubt, Salinger did great harm to my sister and other young girls he preyed upon. A horrible human wrote a towering novel that transcends him. Twenty years ago, the last time I wrote about this book, I did think about Joyce, and said so. That’s changed. Art, in my view, is greater than the artist. I could tell a story about Joyce, me, our mother and Salinger, but that’s not the story I chose to tell here. This is a story about reading.
I too feel pulled to reread Catcher…it’s been way too long since the high school assignment. I have no memories of it…or the purpose of my teacher. But as another reader says….there is so much to classic literature we need to revisit! Your writing triggers so much in writers…not just readers; it’s mesmerizing and thought provoking! You have indeed done well, dear Rona…this may be my favorite as you
Pull me back in time and send me to the library! 😌Thank you for this beautiful piece…an inspiration to be better! 🥰
I must confess- I’ve never read Catcher. I want to now though. I have had countless people tell me I would love it, and I would always smile and say thank you- I’ll check it out, and then promptly forget about it.
Thank you for sharing your experience and perspective, you’ve given me the nudge to finally pick it up.
Oh, good. This book contains the world, but Holden is too young and bewildered and lonely to see what’s right in front of his eyes. Maybe you will write your own essay about it.
I love reading your essays. I became aware of you after a colleague brought your sister's book, The Usual Rules, to our academic review board at the high school where I taught for consideration for the 9th-grade English curriculum. Joyce came to speak at that school in the early 2000s after a book mix-up led to a censorship scandal (I wrote about it on my Substack), and I have been hooked on your family stories ever since. This one was no exception. I appreciate your sentiments on Holden and David; I now feel compelled to revisit both of them. I look forward to your writing every week. Thank you for your honesty.
I didn’t like Holden on the first reading or the last, although I was as lonely and unconnected a teen as you were, Rona. He struck me as another snotty boy upon whom teachers might lavish time and attention. They ignored me, as the boys did, and/or burdened me with tedious, female-only chores I was supposed to perform selflessly, as I had to do at home.
When Holden ended up in the hospital, I was filled with rage and envy. After attempting suicide at seventeen under my parents’ roof—they never noticed, or knew—I found myself hotly jealous of the likes of James Taylor and Sylvia Plath, and later Elizabeth Wuertzel, who ended up entering what appeared to be posh and nurturing surroundings.
I kept trying to convince myself that Salinger was the genius everyone said he was. There were many other things he wrote that I liked much better. Eventually I enjoyed everything he published EXCEPT “Catcher.”
P.S. Oddly enough, after I read “David Copperfield” and “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn” at nine, I became fascinated with cauls. Both David and Francie were born with them.
Leslie, what a terribly sad story you tell here. You made it, despite being wretched and ignored. As for Salinger’s other work, I never really took to the Glass family but loved the short stories.
Leslie, I really get what you say here about the screw-ups getting all the attention and accolades. Everyone loves a good redemption story. Would that I had messed up my life more…. (Not really, but kind of.)
I am a Catcher fan although I read the book in my 20s, when I was working with teenagers, and could see how it would appeal to them. However, re-reading it years later, I saw Holden as a troubled child loss in grief at the death of his brother and alone, with no one to help him cope. Grief can explain so much erratic behaviour. Think of Hamlet too. But a good lesson for me on the benefits of a second look. I have 2 novels I re-read for pleasure: Margaret Laurence's The Diviners, and John Fowles' Daniel Martin. Posted about the later on my OneLonelyWriter substack. Love your posts, Rona.
Thank you, JM! Oddly for a bookish Canadian, I have not yet read The Diviners. Guess I have a treat in store. And as for grief, Catcher is steeped in it.
This will be a little bit long, Rona. Sorry. I was you and millions of others in response to Catcher. Then I moved on. Then in my early 20s, in complex circumstances, I was reintroduced to Salinger, and the Glass family and the central mythos of Seymour’s sacrificial suicide and that family’s embodied struggle toward and representation of Salingerian wisdom. There was the New Yorker cult that evolved around it. Then his retreat from the world and the imaginings of all the buried and withheld wisdom waiting to released to the world somehow someday. Then the truth about him.
Like you – like many – professionally, intellectually, artistically, I hold to the work as distinct from its creator. Who’s Homer, whose Sophocles, anyway, but a name? A Grecian Urn hasn’t even a name. There is only the object, its beauty and its wisdom.
But some creators we do know and know deeply. Their lives become entwined with reception of their work, with the meaning of their work. To some degree, they make it so. Salinger ensured that by his retreat. For me, the more important figure in that regard wasn’t Salinger but rather Hemingway, who ensured it by how and how publicly he lived. I’ve written about how, after years of dedication to his work, I came to reject the artist and to some lesser extent the art, not because of the persona, which so many disliked all along, but because of what, more, I learned about the person. A work of art is not a logical argument so wholly distinct from whoever makes it.
Very currently, a lot of reassessment is beginning of Joan Didion because of the publication of her psychiatric notes and the faulty, damaged human they reveal. Some readers were apparently fooled by her analytic and interpretive power into thinking her more monumentally “objective” in its art. I always saw clearly the faulty, damaged human she already always revealed – like me, like most of us (I won’t presume to say all) – and I appreciated her work all the more for it.
I have gone on long. I think there’s some coherence in my perspectives here and some obvious contradiction. But your piece prompted these thoughts, so I thought I’d share them.
Jay, this is so endlessly interesting. Yesterday I asked myself, “What if Aristophanes beat his wife?” (Not Sophocles but close enough.) I recall a piece of yours about Hemingway, perhaps the first one I read here. A Moveable Feast remains a dear companion in spite of everything it reveals about the flaws of the writer and everything I’ve read about how this book came to be. When I led memoir workshops, I often read aloud from the first chapter. One of my groups included a therapist who observed that Hemingway was clearly not in the best of mental health. I hoped you’d stop by and appreciate your thoughts. We will never tie a bow around the sprawling question of the artist and the work.
I can’t remember anything from my teen-age reading of Catcher In The Rye. It certainly doesn’t stand out for me. Maybe I need to re-read it. The book that meant the most to me in my depressed and suicidal adolescence was Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar. I remember feeling she was putting my feelings into words. Recently I re-read the book and found I could relate to very little in it. I guess it is good I made it through that intensely suicidal phase of my adolescence. Thank you for your wonderful piece that made me re-think this book.
Tommie, your survival attests to the resilience of most adolescents. Here you are. What a wonderful thing. It’s probably for the best that The Bell Jar is no longer calling your name. As for Catcher, it wouldn’t take you long to decide if this novel has anything to tell you. It’s a fast, intense read, although it rewards contemplation.
Amazing piece which could not have been more relevant at this moment. I am in the mist of helping to raise my 2 grandsons. The oldest nearly 15 and well into the Holden stage and the 12 yr old just testing the waters but dealing with the loneliness of adolescences. Really touched me and I will definitely get out my copy and and reread hoping to get my grandsons to listen.
Mary, I wonder if the boys will connect with the book. One teenager told me that nobody likes it anymore (although, as you see from the story of Amy and her student, not every teen agrees). The right book is a strong bridge between age and youth.
I've never read Catcher in the Rye, but I've got it on hold at the library now. I appreciated the comparison to David Copperfield, and the contrast between the two main characters which rings true in a way I can't logically explain. Perhaps it says something about how our intentions influence outcomes.
"By trusting good souls, he creates a family of choice that stands by him when his judgment fails ... Hope can blind him, yet in the end it sees him through. Holden, the anti-David, trusts no one. By expecting that others will fail him, he all but ensures that they do."
Margaret, I see TPL has 12 holds on 80 copies. Quite a testament to the book’s enduring appeal. Maybe I sparked a surge in holds? This post attracted way more views than most of the others.
Yes, I was #12 of 80, and surprised to see so many copies available! Might be interesting to check back in a few weeks to see whether the number of holds has decreased, after the effect of your post has waned :)
The essay was beautifully written, Rona, so I'm not surprised it attracted attention. Like other commenters, I was also aware of the art vs. artist theme in the context of your sister's story. If you decide to tackle that theme in a future essay, you've also got some great Canadian content to draw on!
Wow, Rona. You capture the experience of returning to Catcher after years away with such clarity and care. The connection to David Copperfield was a surprise, which probably speaks more to an incomplete exploration of either on my part. Timeless, the discussion of grief and search for meaning, but your descriptions of how they differed in their approaches makes me want to go back to revisit them myself! What I'm not interested in doing is revisiting my own teenage years again. Oof! We are such tricky beings as adolescents!
Elizabeth, I could have said more about David Copperfield. What a treat. There are so many terrific audiobooks, it was hard to settle on one, but we were delighted with our choice. This novel is perfect for the times—hopeful, generous and richly populated with unforgettable characters. What a fertile imagination Dickens had.
It's always interesting to me when a book I've read before pulls me back in, often at a different time in life. I really loved how your adult self added layers of understanding of Holden and your younger self.
I'd never considered the ways in which Holden Caulfield's journey could be viewed as a mirror of David Copperfield's.
I tried Catcher at least 3 times, maybe more, and I never could finish it. I couldn't stand Holden. It's so far back I can't remember exactly why, but I think I found the whining of such a privileged boy tiresome. (I never got far enough to know why he was so unhappy.) I know that a voice such as his was groundbreaking, but by the time I encountered him that kind of narrator was fairly common. The railing against conformity that I held close was Sinclair Lewis's Main Street. (I guess I was an odd duck of an 80's teenager.) You're inspiring me to find a copy of that and see how it lands now.
Sinclair Lewis! You were no conformist as a reader. For sure, Holden is whiny. His family is entry-level rich, but also mired in grief after losing a child. They park their problem child in one expensive school after another because they can’t grapple with his problems. You might still feel like throwing the book across the room. No book is for everyone. But there are reasons fir Holden’s brattiness, and he has a sweet side that emerges as the story unwinds.
I didn't understand back then that there is always a reason for someone's difficult behaviors, and it is almost always pain. Wish I could have learned that from this book--that would have been an easier teacher!
Yes. Decades after high school, I reconnected on social media with some classmates I disliked at the time. They suffered terribly. I had no idea.
I am not ashamed of having been one of those privileged, middle-class kids, (a girl- no less - in a male dominant world, where my choices were limited to hope I would be an executive secretary or a reporter like Oriana Fallaci - which in itself was a big swing) in the early 60s. When I read Catcher, at thirteen, he expressed me. He seeded the person I was to become for the rest of my life -- someone who openly told the truth about his pain, what he saw, what he felt -- and he was interested in the pain of others, regardless of their status, income, race, station, religion, affiliation, etc. His trials, his seeking for the real, for truth, for meaning clarified what I saw in front of me, what I FELT - juxtaposed against the dumbed down consciousness of adults and their tiki torches, wife swapping, false fronted, phony, fake, hairsprayed, girdled, loud, stupid, boring, dominating, punishing, religious, hypocritical, narcissistic boozed out, 1950s generation -- What a relief to read a book that spelled out what my generation could come to pick up on and move into a new paradigm that pulled mothers like mine from living life in B&W to color as she discovered her orgasm - something that happened when women started telling their truth and we kids turned back to them to share our vibrators and free them up from not being able to wind the windows down in the car and let their hair loose -- Catcher relieved some of the pain from believing no one else was going through what I was feeling. Regardless of the flaws of my generation, we moved culture along, thanks to Catcher and so many other books and music and influences...
You mention his interest in other people's pain. It's often eclipsed by his snarkiness, but it's there if you look. In a touching passage, he gives money to some nuns who are canvassing for a cause. He also goes out of his way to buy a record for Phoebe, and is crushed when it breaks.
I too read and disliked Catcher in high school. I had good friends (but was not 'popular') and a good home life, with no losses yet then.
I reread it again years later, probably in my late 50s. I still disliked it. Whiny, ugh. I think that it would be hard to identify with Holden without some of the same loneliness, loss, and displacement in the readers heart, especially when reading as a teen or young adult. He's bristley and hard to like, but then he wasnt written to be likeable, I'd guess.
He was written to be real. And much as I loved him, I understand why you didn’t.
Perhaps for me it was the opposite problem? I had too much of my own loneliness, loss, and displacement. It was a lot of work to hide that, and there was Holden, not even trying to get along. 🙂
The same for me, at 18 I was just trying to survive and needed so desperately to believe in something. I’ve spent my life resenting Holden and felt justified when I came across Joyce’s autobiography,
All I could think of when I started to read this was your sister. Don't you read this book differently since Sallinger played such a negative role in your sister's life?
Without a doubt, Salinger did great harm to my sister and other young girls he preyed upon. A horrible human wrote a towering novel that transcends him. Twenty years ago, the last time I wrote about this book, I did think about Joyce, and said so. That’s changed. Art, in my view, is greater than the artist. I could tell a story about Joyce, me, our mother and Salinger, but that’s not the story I chose to tell here. This is a story about reading.
I too feel pulled to reread Catcher…it’s been way too long since the high school assignment. I have no memories of it…or the purpose of my teacher. But as another reader says….there is so much to classic literature we need to revisit! Your writing triggers so much in writers…not just readers; it’s mesmerizing and thought provoking! You have indeed done well, dear Rona…this may be my favorite as you
Pull me back in time and send me to the library! 😌Thank you for this beautiful piece…an inspiration to be better! 🥰
Thanks so much, Joan. You have been reading my stack since the beginning, so your comment means a lot. I love sending readers back to the library.
I must confess- I’ve never read Catcher. I want to now though. I have had countless people tell me I would love it, and I would always smile and say thank you- I’ll check it out, and then promptly forget about it.
Thank you for sharing your experience and perspective, you’ve given me the nudge to finally pick it up.
Mesa! Read it, it's a very special book. My copy came today, I'll be digging into 50 years later. xo
I just started it this afternoon!! 😍😍😍 4 chapters in now :) So far I love it!
It’s really special. xo
Oh, good. This book contains the world, but Holden is too young and bewildered and lonely to see what’s right in front of his eyes. Maybe you will write your own essay about it.
I love reading your essays. I became aware of you after a colleague brought your sister's book, The Usual Rules, to our academic review board at the high school where I taught for consideration for the 9th-grade English curriculum. Joyce came to speak at that school in the early 2000s after a book mix-up led to a censorship scandal (I wrote about it on my Substack), and I have been hooked on your family stories ever since. This one was no exception. I appreciate your sentiments on Holden and David; I now feel compelled to revisit both of them. I look forward to your writing every week. Thank you for your honesty.
Thank you, Kate. It’s a pleasure to have responsive readers like you. I just found you piece about Joyce and left a comment.
Thank you so much for taking the time to read it!
My pleasure. I wanted to understand the backstory.
I didn’t like Holden on the first reading or the last, although I was as lonely and unconnected a teen as you were, Rona. He struck me as another snotty boy upon whom teachers might lavish time and attention. They ignored me, as the boys did, and/or burdened me with tedious, female-only chores I was supposed to perform selflessly, as I had to do at home.
When Holden ended up in the hospital, I was filled with rage and envy. After attempting suicide at seventeen under my parents’ roof—they never noticed, or knew—I found myself hotly jealous of the likes of James Taylor and Sylvia Plath, and later Elizabeth Wuertzel, who ended up entering what appeared to be posh and nurturing surroundings.
I kept trying to convince myself that Salinger was the genius everyone said he was. There were many other things he wrote that I liked much better. Eventually I enjoyed everything he published EXCEPT “Catcher.”
P.S. Oddly enough, after I read “David Copperfield” and “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn” at nine, I became fascinated with cauls. Both David and Francie were born with them.
Leslie, what a terribly sad story you tell here. You made it, despite being wretched and ignored. As for Salinger’s other work, I never really took to the Glass family but loved the short stories.
Thanks for your kindness, Rona, toward the insomnia-aggravated grouchiness of my post. Seven hours of sleep made me a new woman!
Seven hours of sleep! Ah, bliss. Nobody warns you that growing older means losing sleep.
Just smiled to recall that for two years when I was biologically programmed to sleep until noon, I worked the dawn shift as a dishwasher.
Leslie, I really get what you say here about the screw-ups getting all the attention and accolades. Everyone loves a good redemption story. Would that I had messed up my life more…. (Not really, but kind of.)
Yes cauls!I had to look it up at age 11 when my mom allowed me to read A Tree. I never knew anyone in real life who had one.
I am a Catcher fan although I read the book in my 20s, when I was working with teenagers, and could see how it would appeal to them. However, re-reading it years later, I saw Holden as a troubled child loss in grief at the death of his brother and alone, with no one to help him cope. Grief can explain so much erratic behaviour. Think of Hamlet too. But a good lesson for me on the benefits of a second look. I have 2 novels I re-read for pleasure: Margaret Laurence's The Diviners, and John Fowles' Daniel Martin. Posted about the later on my OneLonelyWriter substack. Love your posts, Rona.
Thank you, JM! Oddly for a bookish Canadian, I have not yet read The Diviners. Guess I have a treat in store. And as for grief, Catcher is steeped in it.
This will be a little bit long, Rona. Sorry. I was you and millions of others in response to Catcher. Then I moved on. Then in my early 20s, in complex circumstances, I was reintroduced to Salinger, and the Glass family and the central mythos of Seymour’s sacrificial suicide and that family’s embodied struggle toward and representation of Salingerian wisdom. There was the New Yorker cult that evolved around it. Then his retreat from the world and the imaginings of all the buried and withheld wisdom waiting to released to the world somehow someday. Then the truth about him.
Like you – like many – professionally, intellectually, artistically, I hold to the work as distinct from its creator. Who’s Homer, whose Sophocles, anyway, but a name? A Grecian Urn hasn’t even a name. There is only the object, its beauty and its wisdom.
But some creators we do know and know deeply. Their lives become entwined with reception of their work, with the meaning of their work. To some degree, they make it so. Salinger ensured that by his retreat. For me, the more important figure in that regard wasn’t Salinger but rather Hemingway, who ensured it by how and how publicly he lived. I’ve written about how, after years of dedication to his work, I came to reject the artist and to some lesser extent the art, not because of the persona, which so many disliked all along, but because of what, more, I learned about the person. A work of art is not a logical argument so wholly distinct from whoever makes it.
Very currently, a lot of reassessment is beginning of Joan Didion because of the publication of her psychiatric notes and the faulty, damaged human they reveal. Some readers were apparently fooled by her analytic and interpretive power into thinking her more monumentally “objective” in its art. I always saw clearly the faulty, damaged human she already always revealed – like me, like most of us (I won’t presume to say all) – and I appreciated her work all the more for it.
I have gone on long. I think there’s some coherence in my perspectives here and some obvious contradiction. But your piece prompted these thoughts, so I thought I’d share them.
Jay, this is so endlessly interesting. Yesterday I asked myself, “What if Aristophanes beat his wife?” (Not Sophocles but close enough.) I recall a piece of yours about Hemingway, perhaps the first one I read here. A Moveable Feast remains a dear companion in spite of everything it reveals about the flaws of the writer and everything I’ve read about how this book came to be. When I led memoir workshops, I often read aloud from the first chapter. One of my groups included a therapist who observed that Hemingway was clearly not in the best of mental health. I hoped you’d stop by and appreciate your thoughts. We will never tie a bow around the sprawling question of the artist and the work.
Oh you’ve sent me to add Catcher to my TBRR (reread) pile. Thank you!
The ultimate compliment. I hope you enjoy it.
I can’t remember anything from my teen-age reading of Catcher In The Rye. It certainly doesn’t stand out for me. Maybe I need to re-read it. The book that meant the most to me in my depressed and suicidal adolescence was Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar. I remember feeling she was putting my feelings into words. Recently I re-read the book and found I could relate to very little in it. I guess it is good I made it through that intensely suicidal phase of my adolescence. Thank you for your wonderful piece that made me re-think this book.
Tommie, your survival attests to the resilience of most adolescents. Here you are. What a wonderful thing. It’s probably for the best that The Bell Jar is no longer calling your name. As for Catcher, it wouldn’t take you long to decide if this novel has anything to tell you. It’s a fast, intense read, although it rewards contemplation.
Yes, I am now 71 years old—far from that stormy adolescence. I will read Catcher.
Amazing piece which could not have been more relevant at this moment. I am in the mist of helping to raise my 2 grandsons. The oldest nearly 15 and well into the Holden stage and the 12 yr old just testing the waters but dealing with the loneliness of adolescences. Really touched me and I will definitely get out my copy and and reread hoping to get my grandsons to listen.
Mary, I wonder if the boys will connect with the book. One teenager told me that nobody likes it anymore (although, as you see from the story of Amy and her student, not every teen agrees). The right book is a strong bridge between age and youth.
Brilliant piece, Rona. And now I will re-read Catcher.
Thank you, Jane. I hope it gets you thinking and feeling.
goddamn relatable
Thanks, Anna.
I've never read Catcher in the Rye, but I've got it on hold at the library now. I appreciated the comparison to David Copperfield, and the contrast between the two main characters which rings true in a way I can't logically explain. Perhaps it says something about how our intentions influence outcomes.
"By trusting good souls, he creates a family of choice that stands by him when his judgment fails ... Hope can blind him, yet in the end it sees him through. Holden, the anti-David, trusts no one. By expecting that others will fail him, he all but ensures that they do."
Margaret, I see TPL has 12 holds on 80 copies. Quite a testament to the book’s enduring appeal. Maybe I sparked a surge in holds? This post attracted way more views than most of the others.
Yes, I was #12 of 80, and surprised to see so many copies available! Might be interesting to check back in a few weeks to see whether the number of holds has decreased, after the effect of your post has waned :)
The essay was beautifully written, Rona, so I'm not surprised it attracted attention. Like other commenters, I was also aware of the art vs. artist theme in the context of your sister's story. If you decide to tackle that theme in a future essay, you've also got some great Canadian content to draw on!
Wow, Rona. You capture the experience of returning to Catcher after years away with such clarity and care. The connection to David Copperfield was a surprise, which probably speaks more to an incomplete exploration of either on my part. Timeless, the discussion of grief and search for meaning, but your descriptions of how they differed in their approaches makes me want to go back to revisit them myself! What I'm not interested in doing is revisiting my own teenage years again. Oof! We are such tricky beings as adolescents!
Elizabeth, I could have said more about David Copperfield. What a treat. There are so many terrific audiobooks, it was hard to settle on one, but we were delighted with our choice. This novel is perfect for the times—hopeful, generous and richly populated with unforgettable characters. What a fertile imagination Dickens had.
It's always interesting to me when a book I've read before pulls me back in, often at a different time in life. I really loved how your adult self added layers of understanding of Holden and your younger self.
I'd never considered the ways in which Holden Caulfield's journey could be viewed as a mirror of David Copperfield's.
A book you love is like a friend. You can outgrow it. What did I ever see in The Alexandria Quartet? Or it can grow along with you.