Seymours — Rhi Myfanwy Kirkland

I loved My Salinger Year when I first read, back what seems like a long time ago.

It was easy for me to love it, it felt like it could have been about me. I’d done the writing internship thing. I’d done the long distance thing. I had trod those paths just as she had.

One of the handy things about being a writer is that it’s not hard to relate to stories about and by other writers. When Cheryl Strayed talks about books and her desperate desire to be a writer in Wild I know exactly how she feels. I share this longing and passion. It’s not much of a stretch.

This was back the first time I was living in Vancouver, back when I was still trying to be a writer though I was steadily giving up on that dream. I was learning to create content and churn out words. I was taking my worn notebooks to cafes and scrawling out a first draft of Set Your Watch to Moscow Time. I was trying very hard to be a writer — maybe one of these days I will make good on those efforts.

I too had failed to read much Salinger so I took his books out of the library and meandered through them. Catcher in the Rye never really did it for me but then again I was never a teenage boy so perhaps it’s not my cup of tea. I loved Franny and Zooey, and couldn’t help but notice the Seymours all around me as I wandered around Vancouver.

I’ve been meaning to watch the movie and finally did. It’s a good adaption of what is a fairly introspective memoir. It feels about right based on what I remember.

Really, it’s a bit weird and surreal to watch, to reach back in time to the version of myself that resonated so much with a story that felt like it was basically about me. It’s not my story anymore, at least not in the present tense.

Vancouver doesn’t feel the same, I don’t feel the same. I’m no longer enchanted by these streets and it has become a lot harder to imagine a future here. I’m no longer trying to make a living off my words, I have other far more pleasant options at my disposal. A lot of things have happened to me over the last six years and they have changed me.

I bristle at Jerry’s admonition: write everyday. I do a version of morning pages ever since my hand recovered enough for me to be able to write again, the novelty of being able to perform this act the impetus for overly ambitious daily journaling goals, so I suppose that I do write. But it’s much harder to take those lists, those drafts, those ideas, that love of books and make it into something. Life takes up so much time. Mostly I manage to tread water. I want to make things but I don’t know where the energy comes in.

I am working on it. As I try to take Set Your Watch to Moscow Time across the finish line from draft with potential to real actual thing other humans might read I reach across time to the versions of myself that went on the trip, that wrote the first draft out by hand in several notebooks, that typed it up, that edited it, that thought about working on it but never quite got around to it. I re-read Country Driving by Peter Hessler recently as part of my research for Set Your Watch to Moscow Time, and it was a lovely reminder of how I got to be who I am and why I am so determined to finish this book in the first place. Talking to my therapist about the book I said that Hessler and the other writers I loved at different points in my adolescence raised me. It might be a puzzling thing to talk about in therapy compared to all the other things one might discuss but some books can take me back to a moment in time, to who I once was, to what was going on in my life and what was important to me. My Salinger Year was one of those books.