Friday, March 26, 2010

From the memoir of J.D. Salinger's 18-y.o. lover...

...when he was 52! - she was a precocious writer that he wooed by letter, and she dropped out of Yale and lived with him for a year though they never had sex because she suffered from constricted vagina - in this section leading up to where they are about to try to make love for the 1st time, she reflects on how at that time she knew so little about sex (from Joyce Maynard's "At Home in the World: A Memoir", pp. 119-121):

Sex is the movie they show us in seventh-grade gym class, about the miracle of menstruation, and my own terrible shame when, a couple of years later, the miracle finally happnes to me, and I cannot bring myself to tell my mother. So a full year goes by, until the day she confronts me, having cleaned my closet, and found, at the very back, a brown paper bag filled with a year's worth of sanitary napkins, now crawling with bugs. "How could you?" she says. Now I am more ashamed than ever.

J.D. Salinger was a fucked-up little puppy. He loved young girls that had this innocence about them, but he wanted them to be sexually precocious. He would be very nice at 1st and fill their minds with his eclectic Eastern religious stuff, and then eventually begin to criticize them, telling them not to take things personally, and finally end up accusing them of belonging to the world and saying that he never really knew them. So fucked up.

2 comments:

JUSIPER said...

Was this a pattern, or was it more about, um...

el blogador said...

Def. a pattern. More about what, though?