I was saying to Sam's mum Mary this morning on our 7am drop-off that maybe I should re-read 'Catcher In The Rye'. Books are like people; how you get along with them depends on your level of maturity, your current state of mind. If I remember it correctly, I read the book when I was in college; there was a copy in my Tito Benny's library in Fairview.
I can say for sure that it didn't affect me as much as the Chronicles of Narnia did which I all read when I was 11, or Sidney Sheldon which I started reading at 12. So in hindsight, I wasn't at all the alienated adolescent that I thought I was. Holden Caulfield aside, I can identify more with JD Salinger.
I'm going to be a writer when I grow up, I declared to anyone who asked when I was 13 and unlike JD who was inspired/moved/influenced by his experiences in the war, Hemingway by his extensive travels or Tolstoy having a profound moral crisis, I was a child who was simply imaginative. And bored. And friendless for the first 16 years of my life. And well provided for by nearly perfect parents who didn't beat me up, let me starve or be sexually molested. In short, what the hell was I going to write about?? This is generalising I know, but something profound, something really important could have been a start- and I think that what I had wasn't just enough of a catalyst. Wasn't enough material.
I actually came across this trailer on Jessica Zafra's blog- yes, I check on the old girl once in a while to see if she's still alive (!)- and watching it made me cringe; nearly every line uttered in the trailer was me, that old writer me.
1. All I know is how to be a writer
2. My life is dull
3. Fiction is more truthful than reality
4. "I write short stories"
5. Write another story and another one after that
6. How is writing a real profession?
7. I don't know if I'm cut out for this
8. Are you willing to devote your life to telling stories?
9. Dumb it down once in a while
10. You can enrapture people, move people
11. I just want my writing to be truthful
12. You got to stick out these dry spells
13. Imagine a book that you'd want to read and go write it