don't tell anyone anything. if you do, you start missing everyone.

Well, friends, I'm back.

And JD Salinger is dead.

I'm taking it pretty hard, I have to admit. I know everyone probably has that Catcher in the Rye moment, the memory of reading it at some pivotal moment in your life. For me, it was the loft at the cottage we used to go to. I was thirteen, and pimply, and I read it because I'd just finished an article in Seventeen where they asked a bunch of people their favourite and most influential book and a whole load of them said Catcher. And I admit, at the time, I didn't really get it. I sure did wish I could get my hands on a copy of the Little Shirley Beans record, though.

A few years later I read Franny and Zooey, and that was the book that sealed the deal for me. I loved how weird the Glass family was, and I loved all the 50s details, the train stations and the radio programming and smoking cigarettes in the bathtub and all that. And the perfectly articulated spiritual and existential malaise, the trap of your own family, the love and the hate and all the emotions running together till you don't really know what you're doing anymore. After that I devoured Nine Stories and had nightmares about Bananafish for years. Raise High the Roofbeam, Carpenters and Seymour: an Introduction followed. I've since read my way through Salinger many, many times, usually while incredibly freaked out about something going on my life. I have a distinct memory of reading Franny and Zooey on a plane from Vancouver to Toronto, sleepy and confused and wondering whether I was flying to my home or away from it. Last summer an incredibly clever person at my library put Raise High the Roofbeam out on a Home Repair book display and I lauded them for their ingenuity and then picked it up again. God, I hope my wedding is that chaotic and anticlimactic (and as much of a non-event, now that I think about it). Like the Times obit says, he just had this knack for writing the way people speak. I could hear those voices in my head. Sure, maybe the slang was dated and the references went right over my head, but my oh my, did I ever want to be a fly on the wall in the worlds he created.

One time I went on a date with a guy who had somehow gotten his hands on what he said was Salinger's unpublished manuscript. He showed it to me, and I got through about three sentences before we started making out, and was it ever a romantic moment. Maybe I should have gone on a second date with that one, just to see how it ended. I guess I'll never know now.

Au revoir, JD.