Joanna Rakoff, OC ’94, journalist and author – The Oberlin Review


I didn’t listen to them, of course, and enrolled in an MA in Literature program at University College London. I had taken the Oberlin-in-London program and chose this master’s program largely because I wanted to come back to London. While in the program, I started to realize that I didn’t want to write college work. I don’t mean to say it wasn’t fun, because writing a novel isn’t necessarily fun either, but it just wasn’t interesting for me. I was writing short stories and poetry, and realized that I wanted to write my own work rather than analyze the work of other writers.

One thing i don’t talk about in My year Salinger is that I transferred to a doctoral program in New York. While I was working in this agency, I was taking evening classes. I had a full scholarship and the program was wonderful and the teachers were very supportive of me, but I hated it. It wasn’t fair to me. I wanted to be part of the cultural conversation, and in academia there are few people who do, but most are not.

I didn’t want to be in the trenches writing papers that no one was ever going to read. I wanted to write things that are relevant to people’s lives. After two semesters, I dropped out and enrolled in Columbia’s MFA writing program. While I was there I had two teachers who were at The New Yorker and they both said to me independently, “You should write for magazines. Coincidentally, around the same time, a best friend of mine from Oberlin started working at Atlantic and he also said, “You should write for us.” I thought, “All these people tell me to do this; I should do it. ”So while I was at Columbia, I started writing for magazines. And I loved it.

Once you started doing journalism, did it make you feel like you had the cultural pulse you lacked in academia?

Yes, really, really. I have done a lot of different things in the journalistic field. There was a period when I was a freelance writer for a section of The New York Times, and I wrote about all different things. I once wrote about a crime wave in which women were assaulted and how this related to the popularity of Sex and the city, I’ve written about how women’s lives were affected by 9/11 and many other topics. I edited an arts and culture tablet for a while. I have written hundreds of book reviews for anyone who will allow me. I have written articles on postpartum depression and the like for women’s magazines. I loved doing interviews. I really enjoyed writing profiles. I loved shaping stories, and figuring out the difference between an idea and a story was really fun for me. I would have an idea and I was like, “What’s the story over there? How do I make this a real story? It all really, really helped me when I had the courage to write a novel.

On the theme of writing your memoirs My year Salinger, in an interview with The Guardian you mention the painful nature of revisiting this period of your life. How long did it take you to access that frame of memory and piece together the story?

My third book is due very soon. I’m very late because of the pandemic, and because of the release of this movie and the constant publicity, I think about it too. It can be very difficult to get immersed in a job when you know the subject is going to be a bit painful. My year Salinger came out of a lengthy essay I published in 2002 on Responding to Salinger Fan Mail, which gained attention and I started getting calls from editors and agents asking me to ‘expand into a book. I told them all, no, but over the years this idea of ​​turning the essay into memory kept popping up: I would meet an editor at a party and he would say, “Oh! I read your Salinger essay. Have you ever thought about making a book out of it? But I kept saying no. I just felt like there weren’t enough stories there. In 2010, after Salinger’s death, I wrote another essay for Slate, which the BBC asked me to turn into a radio documentary. When the documentary aired, the editors started asking again, and this time I said yes. Editing the documentary made me see that the story was bigger than I initially thought. But after signing the contract with my publisher, I was afraid I had made a terrible mistake. I then spent a year procrastinating and researching as a way to procrastinate.

Now I see that I needed this year of research to muster the courage to face the past and also to understand, as I said of the magazine articles, “What’s the real story here?” When I sat down and wrote the book, it fell into place very quickly.

It was a very different experience than writing my novel A lucky age, on which I worked for six years. This novel was born out of my thinking about how nothing had changed in 50 or 60 years for women, and I wanted to write a novel that addresses that, but not in a pedantic way. So I spent a whole year thinking: “Who are my characters? What are their life situations? Literally just thinking – I didn’t even write anything down. Then I spent a whole year writing the first hundred pages. I am a person who needs a lot of time to think; the internal process takes longer than the writing.

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