#jerry salinger

[dk-thrive]

Some day there will be a story you want to tell for no better reason than because it matters to you

“Some day, Joyce,” he says to me, “there will be a story you want to tell for no better reason than because it matters to you more than any other. You’ll give up this business of delivering what everybody tells you to do. You’ll stop looking over your shoulder to make sure you’re keeping everybody happy, and you’ll simply write what’s real and true. Honest writing always makes people nervous, and they’ll think of all kinds of ways to make your life hell. One day a long time from now you’ll cease to care anymore whom you please or what anybody has to say about you. That’s when you’ll finally produce the work you’re capable of.””

— Joyce Maynard, At Home in the World: A Memoir (Picador; April 1, 2010) 

[filministic]

Rebel in the Rye (2017) dir. Danny Strong

[cinnamonrollwhump]

Rebel in the Rye (2017)

[dk-thrive]

Good writing has got to be unblinkingly honest… She cares more about making a sentence sound good than she does about writing sentences that speak the truth.

J.D. Salinger, in Joyce Maynard’s “At Home in the World: A Memoir” (Picador; April 1, 2010) 

[dk-thrive]

All these years you haven’t been around, and it hasn’t seemed like a problem

“All these years you haven’t been around, and it hasn’t seemed like a problem,” he tells me on the phone. “But now that I’ve met you, and you’re gone, things seem out of balance. This morning I found myself looking over at the chair where you sat, and it seemed unbearably sad that you weren’t in it. I keep wanting to look over at you, and you’re not there.

— Joyce Maynard, At Home in the World: A Memoir (Picador; April 1, 2010) 

[dk-thrive]

little big worries

I have never known anyone besides my parents to choose words with as much precision as Jerry (Salinger). He calls a paragraph “oafish” and another “prose-proud” and another “late-at-night.” He speaks of my absence as my “not-here-ness.” He makes wonderful, small distinctions between one word and another. He loves “permanence,” not “petrification.” He loves “wholeness,” “lastingness.” He doesn’t simply think, he has “grave ruminations,” “grey thoughts,” “elegiac affection,” “nice Jewish considerations,” “little big worries.”

— Joyce Maynard, At Home in the World: A Memoir (Picador; April 1, 2010) 

[filministic]

Rebel in the Rye (2017) dir. Danny Strong

[dk-thrive]

Every damned time we sit down to work, it’s that same blank page again.

“Fun!” he explodes. “Not much fun in writing, I’ll grant you that. No notes on a page for us to fall back on. No amazing, orgasmic rhythms to make the audience melt. No heroism that anyone is likely to detect. Not one goddamn thing to do with the body, except to try wherever possible to ignore one’s own cursed immobility. God, the unnaturalness of writing. And unlike performing music, it never gets any easier, no matter how much you do it. Every damned time we sit down to work, it’s that same blank page again.”

— Joyce Maynard, At Home in the World: A Memoir (Picador; April 1, 2010)