My Salinger Year Q&A with Author Joanna Rakoff

A special Film at Lincoln Center New Wave event featuring My Salinger Year author Joanna Rakoff. Moderated by writer and editor Joe McGovern. Learn more about New Wave membership here: New York in the ’90s: After leaving graduate school to pursue her dream of becoming a writer, Joanna (Margaret Qualley) gets hired as an assistant to Margaret (Sigourney Weaver), the stoic and old-fashioned literary agent of J. D. Salinger. Fluctuating between poverty and glamour, she spends her days in a plush, wood-panelled office—where dictaphones and typewriters still reign and agents doze off after three-martini lunches—and her nights in a sink-less Brooklyn apartment with her socialist boyfriend. Joanna’s main task is processing Salinger’s voluminous fan mail, but as she reads the heart-wrenching letters from around the world, she becomes reluctant to send the agency’s impersonal standard letter and impulsively begins personalizing the responses. The results are both humorous an