Not to be confused with Stephen King's Dreamcatcher, though, strangely enough, I received both books at the same exact time (also a copy of Gone With the Wind and a giant book of quotes, but shush).
This is the memoir of JD Salinger's daughter. Her memoir, though I picked it because I saw the name and was like JD SALINGER'S DAUGHTER WROTE A BOOK ABOUT HIM. I know what a memoir is, but come on, let's be real, probably almost all of the people who bought this book bought it for that reason. Prior to the halfway point I actually got rather agitated because she was talking so much about herself. Sorry. Once I remembered that the words "memoir" were on the cover though, I got over it. Also, JD Salinger wasn't a great father, so there's a point where you kind of want to push him out of the way. He didn't beat his kids or anything like that, but he refused to give them real medicine even when they were dangerously ill (homeopathic meds are always a good idea), let them stay with their mother who was unstable--he suspected her of burning their house down (as did Margaret herself), kind of peaced out on showing up for parental events like graduations and such (though he almost went to Woodstock--it's too bad he changed his mind. Can you imagine??), kind of was a messianic guy (or at least his daughter likens him to a cult leader, drawing women in and kind of breaking them down. I kept on thinking of Ken Kesey and the Mountain Girl, or whatever her name was, from The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. In any case, it was an interesting comparison.) and so on. It wasn't--I don't like calling it neglect, but it was bad parenting.
Anyways. It's a memoir. Do I need to say more? Most of my complaints/comments came early on when I was still like "TALK ABOUT YOUR DAD MORE"--or comments. He was an interesting guy (JD Salinger died in 2010). The bad parenting or less than pretty picture of him didn't really make me question my life or personal heroes or anything like that--he's not one of them. That sounds mean, but what I'm trying to say is, I'm not idolizing him over Catcher in the Rye. As you can see, the second reading of the book didn't even end up that well. When you're fifteen or sixteen, the book is your little teen angst Bible, and when you're eighteen, after a while you just want to shut Holden up. (Actually, this makes me want to reread Franny and Zooey really badly, because I liked that twice as much as I ever did Catcher.) It did weird me about a little because there's something about JD Salinger's face that reminds me of Jack Kerouac. (They have the same haircut, actually.) So at times the image in my head of this person acting this way was Kerouac, and it was like "No, no, no--that's not right. Not at all."
The first thing that worried me is that her introduction starts off with tons of quotes, poems, song lyrics, etc. Immediately I got worried, because that's like rubbing it in someone's face that you're ridiculously educated (sure enough, she is--I don't even know what an M.Phil is). Such annoying (and often seemingly unneeded) interludes became scarcer and scarcer as she moved away from the subject of her father, however.
The second thing that got me were the footnotes. She berates a biographer of her father's very rudely--apparently her father had the nickname Sonny since childhood. This biographer mistakenly said that he got the nickname in ninth grade, given to him by his friends. "Ian Hamilton... claimed that it was at the McBurney school... that 'he was nicknamed "Sonny" by his chums, perhaps with a hint of sarcasm.' Please, chums? On the West Side of Manhattan, perhaps? Several of my dad's army buddies in the foxholes and bloody battlefields of World War II were referred to, by the same scholar, as his colleagues. 'Let me confer with my colleagues, Rocco,' Jerry said. 'Oh, Rocco, would you be so kind as to pass the ammo?' 'Right-o, Sonny old chum,' Rocco expostulated laconically... I can't stand it" (Salinger 17). So the guy screwed up on something! Sorry he didn't have the advantage of being born in your family. Hell, there's a whole year where no-one (to this day, apparently) knows where Salinger (JD) went, after Margaret's mother refused to drop out of school to marry him. Also, sorry he uses admittedly odd phrasing like chums and colleagues. Maybe it's a little old-fashioned, but it's not like the guy just threw HP Lovecraft call-words in there. And what's with her little sarcastic reverie at the end there? No need to get bitchy. Just state that he was incorrect and move on. Jeez. (I don't know why this annoys me so much, but it makes me very mad.)
My next note was on another footnote that annoyed me--she explains a Hindu concept as being like excommunication, or "the WASP favorite, disowning or disinheriting, but more to the bone" (Salinger 23). For some reason this made me mad (because I am a WASP, maybe? That's honestly the only explanation I can make for my reaction...)--because only WASPs disinherit or disown? Yeah okay. She could just say "or disowning or disinheriting". Again, I don't know why this agitated me so. (Perhaps it would help to mention that I am PMSing and all my irrational moods and acts are ten times more so?) In any case, the concept she's trying to describe--sitting shiva
My next bit is quick--Margaret recalls that at the time her father was writing Catcher, he told a friend that he was writing an autobiographical work at the time. Also, this book is--before I forget--very heavy in drawing connections between Salinger and his characters, predominantly in the first half of the book. That was very interesting, and made me wish I had bothered to read more of Salinger's works before reading this. On the plus side, I'm all inspired to read Nine Stories now. (If I can find a nice copy--I've never seen a library copy of any Salinger book that didn't look like it had been gnawed on. One time Wallingford had a nice, almost-new copy of Catcher, which would have been perfect if some idiot teenage girl hadn't wrote "I [heart] Gerard Way" [with a real heart, not an HTML heart] on the cover. Ugh. Help.) It's interesting because Holden is definitely autobiographical--I've never really had a doubt about that. Franny and Zooey, however, seemed like a logical procession of thought (at least at the time), more than an illustration of the inner personal mechanisms of a mind.
Oh, I also thought that it was interesting that Salinger left his wife (Margaret's mother--apparently Salinger had a very extensive list of lady friends over the years--where/how did he meet them all!?) after he discovered she was pregnant. Despite the fact that he loved kids, he got disturbed and... I don't want to use the phrase "grossed out", but I don't have all those fancy degrees, so I am. This is also the popular explanation for why Oscar Wilde only had two children, and why Elvis only had one. Also, is it too early to mention that Salinger also reminds me of a demented Atticus Finch? Like, he seems like he would be a really good, awesome dad from certain descriptions by Margaret, and then it's like haha, just kidding. Like if Atticus Finch was anything less than the perfection that he is. I love Atticus Finch.
Oh yeah, apparently JD wrote a short story entitled "For Esme--with Love and Squalor". Immediately I thought of A Series of Unfortunate Events--Remember Count Olaf's girlfriend... Esme Squalor? What's uuuup. And don't even be like, "but Angela, it's just simple word association!", because there's is no way it's not. Lemony Snicket (wait, is it cool to call him Dan Handler now? Is that cat out of the bag? I've also seen his face before. Do people still wonder about that?) was a smart guy and definitely did do that on purpose. It is 100% fact now.* Also, this led to a half-hour researching frenzy on the series, which I used to be obsessed with, but, oddly enough, did not survive rereading either. I looked at the Wikipedia page for the first book, though, and felt the same feeling when I first picked it off the shelf and looked at the picture on the inside and everything. Man.
(Also, my cousin met Dan Handler. What.)
Margaret also mentions that in one of her father's stories, a boy named Seymour throws a rock at a beautiful girl, permanently destroying her beauty in the form of a scar on her forehead. (Make your own Harry Potter joke here.) She says that she didn't quite understand it, though all the characters in the story did. The closest she came to understanding it is when her son was two and they would hug and cuddle and all of a sudden he would hit her. I think I kind of understand it (in a different way). I think it's like Fight Club, when the narrator says that he wants to destroy everything beautiful that he could never have or hope to have. He couldn't have it, so he didn't want to be reminded of it, and he wanted to punish the people who did have it. Of course, I haven't actually read the JD Salinger story, so take that with a grain of salt....
Oh, and Margaret related an event that again, reminded me of To Kill a Mockingbird. They lived in the country--obviously--and at one point one of the known poor kids gets his tooth knocked out at school. Margaret's mother took the child to the dentist, where the nurse there asked her "'Why'ja bother? All them Courdelaines lose their teeth anyways'" (Salinger 139). She then tells them to just go home. It's a superficial connection, but it was kind of like how Scout knew everything about all the families. These kids were the white trash, this family was poor but they paid back every penny given to them no matter how long it took, et cetera.
Oh, and very young (I want to say seven or eight?) Margaret broke her arm. I thought I was going to die laughing--wait for it--: "Some idiot moved my arm to place it on the X-ray plate. Screaming agony. They did it an eternal hell number of times. I had a compound fracture: one bone was splintered, the other was sticking out and covered with dirt. A mask came over my face. Some nurse, with a cheery stewardess voice, actually asked me to count! Jesus. Now?" (Salinger 169). Obviously it was just that last part that I thought funny--the rest of it is kind of gross. But that reaction cracked me up.
Oh, and when the parent Salingers decided to get divorced, Margaret explains it to her brother, including this: "'They both love you. They just hate each other'" (Salinger 205). Again, hilarious, though maybe I'm a bad person for thinking that. (But I wish someone had explained it to me like that!)
JD Salinger's advice to his daughter on marriage: "'Make sure you marry someone who laughs at the same things you do'" (Salinger 226).
I think the major change in my opinion on Margaret came when she was talking about her crush on Paul McCartney. No, Paul isn't my favourite Beatle, but she imagined kissing, or going to kiss him, while he sang "All My Loving", which just so happens to be my favourite Beatles song. Touche.
Oh, and Margaret went to a boarding school. I can't say I liked this part--the only time I've ever seen a boarding school portrayed in a way that wasn't terrible was in a Mary-Kate and Ashley book--but it was familiar. The first memoir I ever read was Roald Dahl's, then James Joyce's, and... Okay, there's basically no school ever in Running With Scissors. But at least Margaret didn't get caned, or beaten with a pandybat! (Or have to fag for the older children. Ugh.) There was some intense psychological abuse from the headmistress in Margaret's case, like Captain Hardcastle, but... Well, without the caning. But just as scary and awful. Her letters were also censored, which I was surprised when she found out and was surprised by that fact. (Well, Boy wasn't even published then, to be fair.) I was half-expecting to see examples of such letters in the following pages in the same manner as Dahl's--with the same explanation for their being there, her mother kept them and bound them all in green ribbon... But no such luck. And yes, I did read that book about a million times as a kid, okay??
Oh, JD Salinger was also apparently invested in orgone boxes. (Look them up for yourself. I can't really give a good, concise explanation of what they are, but they're basically supposed to fill you with good energy or whatever. It's super homeopathic. [Sort of] Big in the fifties.) The only reason why I mention it is because... So was William S Burroughs! Yay! Kerouac mentions it in the original version of On the Road (I can't vouch for the shorter version, though...).
Oh, and she never mentions the murder of John Lennon. Skips right to 1982. Granted, it's not necessarily something you would want to mention, "My dad's book caused John Lennon's murder and somebody to take potshots at Ronald Reagan!", but it's one hell of an elephant in the room. (And it's strange too, considering the things she does choose to write about. It couldn't be any worse than some of the other things she chronicles...) I wonder if JD Salinger even knew? He had to have known, though, even if he was a recluse. I mean, come on. John Lennon. He knew who he was, he made a vague promise to introduce John to Margaret by way of his publisher or something that never came to fruition... I never thought about it before this, but I'd really like to read up on Salinger's reaction to John Lennon's death.
Margaret eventually has a fight with her father, and her father's policy is pretty much, make me mad and we're done. They had a few fights prior to this where he promised her that he would still love her, but he'd be done with communicating with her. That's a harsh policy especially when applied to your daughter. Margaret said that that was the last "real" conversation she had with her father, so I imagine they talk, but small talk, stranger talk. That's too bad--I wonder if they reconciled at all before his death... Anyways, she talks about how students who had read the book would try to find him--one such girl interviewed said that she'd ask him "'if he'll be our catcher, our catcher in the rye'" (Salinger 427). Margaret couples this with the fact that she felt like one of those children running alone in the rye, and that her father simply wouldn't be a catcher. He couldn't, and his raising and treatment of her (and her brother) kind of proved that. He'd like to save, but he simply didn't have that ability for this or that reason. The irony makes me a little queasy.
Okay, one last comment on the book itself. Margaret occasionally copies her father's tendency to emphasize random parts of words. I always find myself saying such words over and over in Salinger's books, trying to figure out the point of a certain emphasis is, or even if such an emphasis could flow naturally. I found myself doing the same thing in this. And no, they rarely seemed to flow naturally or have a point. If the whole word was emphasized, or even two syllables together instead of the odd one... Uuuuuugh.
I don't really have a comment on whether this book was good or bad. I don't feel comfortable judging a memoir in such terms. It was interesting, and at times very eerie or difficult to read--but still interesting. It's too bad that she is nearly overshadowed by the fact that her father was JD Salinger, but she pulls through, and the information given on him is definitely cool, because prior to this I knew him as that author who was a recluse and may or may not have drunk his own pee (Margaret confirms that this is in fact true). A bigger JD Salinger fan might have been more into it than I was--and it's an interesting sort-of companion to his works. I liked the book, at least, and I don't regret reading it or anything like that; however, this isn't the sort of book I'd just pick up again and read for fun. I'm probably going to end up giving it to Fabrizzles or Stubs if either of them are interested, or send it off to the Jerome Harrison book fair. Again--no judgment on the book itself, Margaret is a very talented author and the book is interesting--but I know I'm not going to read it again, at least not in the next ten years or what have you. (And if she wrote some sort of addendum after her father's death I would definitely read it! And... Now that I'm thinking about it, did JD Salinger know about this book? Did he read it? Probably not, if he was "done with" his daughter like he said, but still. It would be interesting, albeit impossible, to know his reaction to it if so, or the idea of the book in general.)
MLA citation information: Salinger, Margaret A. Dream Catcher. Washington Square Press: New York, 2000.
*No, it is not.
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