Zoë Heller in LRB in 2001: ‘The crabby author and the lost little girl start up a regular correspondence. She goes to see him [J.D. Salinger] in New Hampshire, wearing a baby-doll dress appliquéd with letters of the alphabet that her mother has made specially for the occasion. A few months later, having by now secured a contract to write a book about growing up in the 1960s, she drops out of Yale and moves in with him.’

And: ‘[Joyce Manard] can’t help being excited by the minor celebrity that her forthcoming book will afford her.’

Also: ‘Much of her retrospective disgust with Salinger has to do with his preference for very young women – a preference which she depicts as sinister and vampiric. Yet it seems fairly clear that, at the time, she understood and catered to it.’

Nowadays, nobody would dare to write such a sentence anymore. A loss.

(a sf 2167)