Re: First Catcher memories?
laura c. jessup (neilj@lightspeed.net)
Sat, 29 Nov 1997 21:48:16 -0800
in the past couple of days i have felt quite at home here because of
this thread, even though i just subbed. my first experience with any
salinger was reading catcher. i was leaving for a month or so of the
summer, being shuttled all over and across the u.s. with various members
of my immediate and extended family. i cried through most of it,
because of how humanly teenager holden is. i read the majority of it
sitting outside on the porch of my second-cousin's house at around 9 pm
out in the middle of the pennsylvania in the poconos as it rained,
absolutely hating it and loving it at the same time. i was in shock for
a while. i was really lonely because no one i was around really knew
me, and reading catcher at the beginning of a month semi-alone made me
all at once among friends and even lonelier. but in a way i was really
at ease with, because it made me grow up just a little bit more. every
time i've read it since then i love it just as much, but it becomes more
like remembering a memory of a passage in life. and then other books
will remind me of the same thing once in a while, paul auster's moon
palace.
~*laura.