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Joanna Rakoff

Goodreads Author

Born

Suffern, NY, The United States

Website

http://joannarakoff.com

Twitter

jrakoff

Genre

Literature & Fiction, Memoir

Member Since

March 2012

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Joanna Rakoff's novel A Fortunate Age won the Goldberg Prize for Fiction, and was a New York Times Editors' Choice, an Elle and Booklist Best Book of 2009, and a San Francisco Chronicle Best Seller.

Her memoir, My Salinger Year, is a semifinalist in the 2014 GoodReads Choice Awards! You can vote for it here! ...more

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Popular Answered Questions

Hi Joanna I m currently reading your novel and it quite touches my soul as I am an aspiring writer myself and I can almost recognise with your thoughts about the love of books and literature. Do you really believe that it is alright to take up literature and writing as your career and not just as a heartfelt passionate thing you love to do?

Joanna Rakoff Hi Akshita,

I've waited a long time to answer this question, as I have perhaps too much to say on the subject. The short answer is: Yes! Of course! If…moreHi Akshita,

I've waited a long time to answer this question, as I have perhaps too much to say on the subject. The short answer is: Yes! Of course! If it's what you want to do, more than anything else in the world, then you must do it. But I would add: The key, here, is to regard writing as a career. Which means that you must regard it as work. (And it is, indeed, rather hard work!)

All my best,
Joanna(less)

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In one of your previous answers, you mention that it took a while for you to come around to the idea of writing a memoir instead of a novel. I can totally sympathize! But I'm wondering--did you learn anything surprising (good or bad) in the writing or publication process of putting out a memoir? Do you think you'll write more, or return exclusively to novels?

Joanna Rakoff Ami, hi! It's funny, you're the second person today to ask me this question! It's a very serious one for me, as the process of writing My Salinger Yea…moreAmi, hi! It's funny, you're the second person today to ask me this question! It's a very serious one for me, as the process of writing My Salinger Year radically changed the way I think about memoir, the way I think about writing (and the way I write), and feelings about first-person narration. Before starting work on the book, I wasn't a huge reader of memoir. Back in the late 1990s--when memoir emerged as a dominant form of our time--I attempted to read a few of the big, best-selling memoirs that lined the windows of bookstores, and found myself enormously frustrated with the artifice necessitated by the form. As in, I'd be reading, thinking "Okay, this scene is set when the author is FOUR. All this dialogue is invented. Why didn't he/she just write a freaking novel?"But, also, the point of view in so many seemed so limited. And then I'd hurl the book across the room.

When I write fiction, or essays, or journalism, or even poetry, I'm writing to fill a void. Particularly with fiction, I'm writing the novel or story that I want to read. Or when I write an essay, it often comes out of a feeling that something, somehow, some crumb of my experience, some idea about the world, is missing from the cultural conversation. There's an urgency that fuels this work, and I know what I want from it, what to demand of myself.

But in 2011, when I sat down to write My Salinger Year, I realized I had no idea what I wanted from a memoir. Because I'd hardly read any, and I'd never felt a burning drive to write one. I faltered for a few months--taking notes, continuing work on my new novel--then realized (of course) that I needed to start reading. For nearly a year, I read memoir after memoir, and that frustration I'd felt a decade earlier, well, it was gone, this time around. So many of the memoirs I read were so fantastic, as rich and complicated as novels. Those earlier memoirs had struck me as limited in terms of their points of view--they were so much about the "I," the examination of the self, with the other characters serving only to further our understanding of the narrator--but the great memoirs of that reading binge were broad and social. My favorites--Claire Dederer's Poser, Carlene Bauer's Not That Kind of Girl--reminded me of 19th century fiction in the scope of their stories, their cultural engagement. I realized that the contemporary memoir is, in a way, a novel for a society that demands transparency. And I realized that I could write a memoir that read like a novel, by thinking of myself as a character. (And I did: As I wrote, I thought of myself as "Joanna," rather than "I.") There's a particular challenge to memoir: It's more like putting together a puzzle than designing a house. You have all the pieces and need to figure out what goes where. And I love puzzles.

Anyway, point is: I loved writing it. And I have two more potential memoirs in the works. One *may* be my next book (after the novel I'm finishing up). Though it deals with rather heavier material than My Salinger Year, so we'll see if I have the emotional reserves to tackle it!(less)

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Joanna Rakoff’s books

Average rating: 3.7 · 12,539 ratings · 1,771 reviews · 5 distinct works • Similar authors

	My Salinger Year 3.77 avg rating — 11,234 ratings — published 2008 — 40 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	A Fortunate Age 3.13 avg rating — 1,304 ratings — published 2009 — 21 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	One for Each Night: The Greatest Chanukah Stories of All Time by Sholom Aleichem, Elie Wiesel, S.Y. Agnon 4.30 avg rating — 10 ratings	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	The Fifth Passenger 0.00 avg rating — 0 ratings — 2 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	My Salinger Year 0.00 avg rating — 0 ratings	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars

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Blood Will Out: The True Story of a Murder, a Mystery, and a Masquerade

by Walter Kirn

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Nov 11, 2014 04:34AM

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The Days of Abandonment

by Elena Ferrante

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The Chronology of Water

by Lidia Yuknavitch (Goodreads Author)

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Quotes by Joanna Rakoff (?)

“Writing makes you a writer,” he’d told me. “If you get up every morning and write, then you’re a writer. Publishing doesn’t make you a writer. That’s just commerce.”
― Joanna Rakoff, My Salinger Year: NOW A MAJOR FILM

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“So we’re all doing a pretty good job not revealing our emotions, right? But if you can’t reveal your emotions, how do you go on? What do you do with them? Because, you see, I keep crying at odd moments.”
― Joanna Rakoff, My Salinger Year: A Memoir

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“I know, I said reflexively, but I didn't. I didn't want to be normal. I wanted to be extraordinary. I wanted to write novels and make films and speak ten languages and travel around the world.”
― Joanna Rakoff, My Salinger Year

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“War is what happens when language fails.”
― Margaret Atwood

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