"Please accept from me this unpretentious bouquet of very early-blooming parentheses: (((())))."

I just want to take a minute to acknowledge the loss of the author who probably played the most instrumental role in my life. JD Salinger died at 91 last week. He wrote some of the best prose I’ve ever read. I blame him for my inability to write a proper ending. He is, without a doubt in my mind, the reason I read, the reason I’ve written, and the reason I got a degree in English.

I was not a reader growing up. I wasn’t one of those kids who devoured books or even slogged through them. Reading was for school and I honestly didn’t see much point in doing it on your free time. I hate to admit all this, but it’s true. I liked being read to, but hated reading.

Then, my mom’s friend started coming once a week, giving me assignments and doing just what I wanted: reading to me. We read a lot of the major children’s literature classics, namely the Narnia books and Madeleine L'Engle. I started reading a bit on my own.

But it wasn’t until I was 13 and I read Catcher in the Rye that I realized that this reading thing was really something to cherish. It was my first “adult” novel. I read it because I took a quiz in Teen Magazine that said my ideal boyfriend was Ethan Hawke and the little blurb mentioned that he’d have a dog-eared copy of Cather in his back pocket for some reason. (This is so embarrassing.) So I read it and I couldn’t believe that anyone could write like that; that writing like that was allowed at all! It was so real. It just floored me: books were supposed to be fake. Literature got a lot more interesting with a narrator like Holden. And then there is the Glass family. I have outgrown my initial feelings/obsessions with Salinger, but the Glass family will always be a literary miracle. After that, I just read, and read, and read. And I have to say, I always read the good stuff. I drank in all of those books one should read as a teenager: To Kill a Mockingbird, A Separate Peace, Slaughterhouse-5, One Flew Over the Coo-Coo’s Nest, Brautigan, On the Road, etc, etc. No Twilight-type stuff, ever, thank heavens.

And so, JD Salinger has followed me through my life. Aaron and I basically became friends because of Franny and Zooey. And the rest is history there. I named two of my cats after characters in Salinger stories: Esmé and Sergeant X. And I met my best friend Meghan because I was giving a presentation on Salinger’s uncanny ability to Address the Reader in “Seymour; An Introduction” in a Creative Writing Workshop we were in together and she happened to be reading that story at the same time.

And now, he is gone.