Dream Catcher: Reflections on Reclusion by Margaret Salinger (2000-09-18) Hardcover

Peggy Salinger, who is J D Salinger's daughter, holds nothing back in this tell-all tale about her dysfunctional family. Well, most of them anyway. She has nothing particularly bad to say about her younger brother, the actor Matthew Salinger. Her mom doesn't fare too well, but her famous and reclusive father is portrayed as an insensitive, self-centered kind of monster. Which, I have to say, didn't really surprise me all that much. Because I did struggle through Franny and Zooey, as well as the other book, Raise High ... and Seymour ... back when I was in college. Those two books kinda left me thinking, "Huh? Is this the same guy that wrote Catcher in the Rye and Nine Stories?" Because they are so dense and strange as to be nearly unreadable, as far as I was concerned. But I kept on trying to understand the guy who'd created Holden Caulfield. I even tracked down a copy of a New Yorker with his last "major" work, Hapworth 1924. It was awful - just an incoherent rant, as far as I could tell. I wish I'd stopped after Catcher and the Nine Stories book, but I didn't. So I always wondered about Salinger. What I hadn't known, and learned from Peggy's memoir, was that her father landed on Omaha Beach on D-day and fought his way across much of Europe, had a mental breakdown near the end of the war and was briefly hospitalized, but managed to talk his way out of that and got a normal discharge. He was, in short a decorated WWII veteran. But he came home from the war a damaged and shaken man, judging from those later things he wrote - and from what his daughter reports about him and his strange behavior, not just as an author, but as a husband and a parent. He was abusive and tyrannical to all of the women in his life, and seemed to be most attracted to young, innocent, virginal schoolgirl types. (Think Brittany Spears' first video here.) Once that blush of innocence was gone, Salinger had very little use for his women, and showed his true colors - and showed the women the door. In short, J D Salinger is just not a very nice man. Peggy's own story is a sad one of neglect and emotional abuse. She experimented with drugs and was sexually active from her early teens as she was shunted about between boarding schools and sought shelter with friends' families when her own parents were too busy to bother with her, which was most of the time. She had several boyfriends and affairs as a teenager and young woman and ended up with a grab bag of health problems later on. And yet she managed to graduate with highest honors from college in her mid-twenties and spent a few years at Oxford. There is much to admire about Margaret Salinger, and also much to pity her for. But most of all I have to respect her for telling her story. One of the things that intrigued me most about this book was finding out about all the other J D Salinger stories that have never been published in book form - many of them never at all. And from what Peggy says about them, I think I'd like to read them. They sound gentler, more human, than the ones I have read. If Salinger fans are interested in reading some of these stories they can be found at a website called [...]. But, I've babbled on long enough. This is a good if perhaps a bit painful read. Bravo, Peggy. Be well and live your life. Finally, while Salinger may be an ogre, Holden Caulfield will always remain one of my favorite fictional characters. - Tim Bazzett, author of SOLDIER BOY: AT PLAY IN THE ASA

This is a difficult book to read, discursive, sometimes repetitive, but most of all painful, just as it must have been for J.D. Salinger’s daughter to compose. She tells the now oft told tale of the great artist who was, surprise!— an inferior father and atrocious lover and husband. The penultimate chapter reads like one of those stream-of-conscious monologues psychiatrists suggest their patients perform to exorcice the demons, and as cathartic as it may have been for the author to write, we are somehow left unsatisfied. The memoir begins and ends with the saga of all American Jewry, and finally one family in particular.This man, so fascinated by Asian religions, we are told, was nothing more than an errant Jew ashamed of his heritage. We learn that J.Ds mother, memorably fictionalized in some of his best work, was in truth an Irish colleen from County Cork who converted and kept her secret from her boy, much as Chris Hitchens’ mother was to do in another generation. Somehow, without spelling it out, Salinger's apparent trauma, his subsequent rejection of his real roots, and consequently his real and not imagined family is the Rosebud his daughter sets out to uncover. The journey, the mess of her life, is recounted in great detail.It has become fashionable these days to blame Mommy Dearest or, in this case, Daddy Dearest for the misfortunes of one’s own life, and one cannot help but sympathize with the obvious problems of growing up in the shadow of a famous and reclusive man, but there seems to be more to the story than an angry daughter can neither understand nor tell with total clarity. In time someone else may.

Catcher in the Why?When asked why she wrote a book on her famous reclusive father, Margaret Salinger said it was not so she could write a "daddy dearest", but more of a "daddy why?". Why was J.D. Salinger so eccentric is really the cornerstone of this "memoir" and it is partially answered in an interesting account of his early life and family history. There is no doubt that Margaret, or "Peggy" as she is called, has inherited both a family talent for writing and a family "reclusiveness". She grants herself permission to delve into the private and personal life of her father under the guise of exploring her own life and making a better world for her son by not repeating the mistaken ideas of the past. Yet, she remains opaque and coy about herself and thus, there is an uncomfortable lack of resolution to the book for she fails to find herself which was ostensibly why she wrote the book. She can't jump over her own shadow. Most people can't. But most can't afford all the therapy and education she has pursued to do so. If you are going to announce that you are trying to get to the bottom of the "mysterious family curse" of silence and eccentricity then, you better come up with some sort of answer or we just went through four hundred some odd pages for nothing. And that's the problem: where there should be a crescendo in this memoir there is only a squeak because Salinger edits herself, or "catches" herself every time she is going to reveal something important about her own current state of adulthood.Peggy feels free to talk about her father's relationships and by extension to take that information and examine why she has had so many bust-ups (one even leading to a suicide attempt on her part). Yet, when it comes to a moment where she should be giving an explanation of some breakthrough; how she came to choose her husband, she scarcely gives two sentences. All that we come to know is that he is from the Midwest and sings. She gives more space to a baby-sitter she had in junior high than what should be the most significant relationship she enters into aside from the one with her father. There aren't even any photos of her husband in the book so an observer could compare him physically with her father. She doesn't even give his last name, so we don't know if he is Jewish. She keeps daddy's name. (Now, isn't that telling?). Not that it matters to us...but it seems to matter to her to the extent that she purposely overlooks these details; these revelations of her own character which she purports to be exploring but then blithely glosses over as if we won't notice.The same is true of her spirituality. Here, she goes into some detail on her father's dabblings in mysticism and religion and sites his long-standing sensitivity to being Jewish. But when it comes to fully revealing why she became a Chaplain, she is mum as to what "religion" or God she follows. All we find out is that she went to some ecumenical Episcopal church where it is not clear what they believe. She doesn't say precisely if she is following the Bible, Christ or some Jewish teaching. This is a central point in her father's life, and in hers, but when it comes time for her to "fess up" about why she became so enlightened as to be a Chaplain and what enlightened her exactly (was it the readings of Buddha? Augustine? What?) she is mute. This is somewhat unfair and infuriating because after all, she becomes a hospital Chaplain!! It is as if, like her father who once contemplated becoming a monk, she has found her own "monkdom" and fails to see that maybe her dad had something to do with that.In fact, she seems to have little spiritual breakthrough at all. When she toys with the idea about writing this book she contacts a friend who has connections with other worldly "spiritual guides". This friend, via these "spiritual guides" must have given her a green light to fink on her dad. Peggy does not, it seems, have enough spiritual power on her own to get the signal. So what kind of a Chaplain is that, I ask you. (If I am in a hospital I want someone "connected" to explain the eternality of my soul, not just a well wisher.)For all of his oddities and irascibileness, J.D. comes across as sort of likeable and a man fighting his own demons, trying very hard in his own way to tackle them. He has crazy notions of homeopathic cures for his kids when they get sick but at least he hits the books and tries to help them. How many dads do that? At one point Peggy accuses her dad of being neglectful. He corrects her. "Detached", maybe, but never neglectful. And he is right. That is what he was and for whatever reasons, Peggy has never ceased of wanting more from him than he was capable of giving. He admits these failings in the same way he makes objective pronouncements on some people in academia ("tin-eared" egoists) to people who quilt (they do not have "very fine minds").Old J.D. hit a nerve in literary circles speaking through the voice of the adolescent, Holden Caufield, because he saw that most people can't make the leap into adulthood - they are stuck in a high school of emotions and reactions. By the end of Peggy's book you feel she is stuck there as well (more pages devoted to uninteresting junior high and high school pursuits than adulthood revelations like marriage, parenthood, dealing with the sick and dying in hospitals, etc.) and has become precisely what her father feared: a phony, an overindulged, needy, talented daughter who is detached from herself and unable to honestly examine and courageously proclaim what she has learned.

Having just re-read both 'Catcher in the Rye' and Joyce Maynard's memoir of her relationship with Salinger, I was very interested to read this memoir written by his daughter Margaret. Certainly a very interesting account of a dysfunctional family and a rather traumatic childhood, this book sheds light on the character of American literature's most reclusive author. Salinger was surprisingly easily enticed into alternative, esoteric beliefs/lifestyles which he seemed to embrace and then abandon on a whim. Margaret's mother Claire was someone who could rightly be described as a 'piece of work'. Together, Salinger and Claire created a tumultuous and stressful home environment for Margaret and her brother Matthew. Margaret's journey through her life up to the age of 40 is fascinating and a must read for those interested in the life of J D Salinger. Small complaint: the book has many footnotes, most of which are distracting and unnecessary.

This is an older book. I'd just seen the film Salinger and knew some of the material was based on this book so I thought I'd have a read. Most of the book is about the author, Margaret A. Salinger, J.D. Salinger's daughter. She had a brutal childhood but that seems to be the work of her mother, while her father was busy with his job in a building on the same remote property. The tone of the book as Margaret talks about dad gets very dark and ugly by the end. She seems to have forgiven her mother's brutality while shifting to blaming her father for his lack of parenting abilities and his rather esoteric approach to life. I began to feel along the way that this woman didn't have the right therapist because her insights--while they might be true in full or in part--lack a mature understanding by the end, and there's a lack of kindness on her part that I didn't enjoy reading. She could have come out of this with a bit less preachiness and more acceptance of who he is while still not ignoring what she missed from him: forgive but not forget. I didn't see forgiveness towards him. Still, there are plenty of personal bits that give us insight into the writer and the man and for that reason I gave this a good rating. It's well written, if a little pretentious, using the poetry at each chapter, and other references to show she is 'literate'. I came away thinking that neither J.D. nor his daughter are people I'd like to meet. And in a sense this has colored my view of his writing in a way where I wish I hadn't read this biography/autobiography. It's awfully hard to mix the person with the art.

I enjoyed it. She does talk about her own life quite a bit but it's still an interesting read. She writes very well.

Fabulous insight into one of my favourite authors in my younger years.