Looking Back Read Free

everything that was wrong with the world, which was very nearly everything.
    I corresponded with Jerry Salinger for the remainder of that spring at Yale. I first met him face-to-face two months after the publication of my story in the New York Times . Shortly after that—with college out of session for the summer—I took a job writing editorials for the New York Times , planning to spend the summer in a four-story brownstone just off Central Park that had been offered to me, free of charge, in exchange for my dog-walking services. The plan was that I’d write a little for the Times , write about the Democratic National Convention for Ms. Magazine , deliver an article titled “The Embarrassment of Virginity” for Mademoiselle , begin work on my book, walk the dogs, and visit Jerry on the weekends.
    Within a few weeks, I’d quit my job at the Times , given up the brownstone and found other caretakers for the dogs, tossed aside a number of magazine assignments. Jerry Salinger had driven into Manhattan in his BMW for the purpose of picking me up and bringing me back with him to New Hampshire to spend the remainder of that summer. That August found me at a sewing machine store in Lebanon, New Hampshire, buying myself a Golden Touch ’N Sew.
    A month or so after that I gave up my scholarship at Yale and my little off-campus apartment, abandoned my old blue Schwinn bicycle and my red record player, and moved the remainder of my possessions to Jerry’s house—believing I would live in that place, with that man, forever. That he was 35 years older than me and the father of a daughter just one year younger than I was (or that on the day I moved in, he pointed out with some disparagement that I was “acting like a teenager”) had no effect on my belief that ours was to be an unbreachable lifelong bond.
    It was in his house, over the course of that fall and early winter—subsisting on a diet of mostly raw food, with a great many additional dietary restrictions, as well as other restrictions extending to the music I listened to and the clothes I wore and the people to whom I spoke, or was instructed not to speak, and above all, the ideas I embraced or rejected—that I wrote Looking Back .
    I can still remember where I sat on Jerry’s velvet couch, writing this book—with a bowl of nuts on a TV tray table next to me, and his old dachshund, Joey, snoring on the rug. (Salinger himself would be in the next room, working on his own writing, though he never said precisely what it was.) Nights in that house, he’d set up a movie projector and (this being years before the advent of videos and the VCR, let alone DVDs) we watched old movies he owned in 16mm print form. The Lady Vanishes. The Thin Man. Laurel and Hardy. Other times we might tune in to reruns of The Lawrence Welk Show.
    Reading over now what I wrote all those years ago, I can hear my young self speaking: that sharp, precocious, slightly know-it-all voice, so well-trained by my mother from all our hundreds of evenings in the family living room, when I read my stories out loud from my yellow legal pads. Certain parts make me smile. Some could make me weep (like my cool assessments—written as if this were no more than a fascinating cultural phenomenon—of the kind of eating disorders that were, in fact, tormenting me). I wrote about the diving under my desk for air raid practice during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the Beatles’ first appearance on the Ed Sullivan show, and catching the first glimpse (via the cover of Life magazine) of what a human fetus looked like in utero. But I was not so adept at revealing my own inner self. That part of my story I kept off the page, mostly.
    I had been offered the impossible assignment to write about my generation and I supposed the way to do this was to smooth over the rough edges of my life and create something of an Everywoman. (Or an Everygirl, anyway. White, middle class, and heterosexual.) I made liberal use of the third