An engrossing read. unusually so in many ways. ( )

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 deadcaulfields.com . 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. ( )

This has to be one of the most wonderful biographical pieces I have ever read. Ms. Salinger glows, and I wish I could know her, for better and worse.

Typically the key to writing a solid memoir is to have had an interesting life. If you haven't had any wild adventures, then you must be capable of telling an excellent story. Margaret Salinger has neither of these qualities. She begins by banking off of the first 10 years of her life in which she lived with her father, J.D. Salinger. Although she mentions that she barely knew that he was writing (let alone publishing Raise High... and Seymour while living with her), she manages to keep the 1st hundred pages of this 500 page memoir interesting by explaining her relationship with her father.

Her father is the interesting part, what people are reading for; no one bought the novel for the transcriptions of Margaret's middle school notes (despite the fact that she includes a lot of them) or her rambling explanation about her chronic fatigue syndrome, bad days at camp, or her frustration at Joyce Maynard (Salinger's short lived lover who's own memoir "At Home in the World" is an excellent read).

The sliding focus from J.D. Salinger to Margaret's own life story is distracting. She forgets that the audience doesn't care about her life or her thesis papers. Throughout the novel you'll notice that she seems to have an unusual desire to go for pages about cults and anti-semitism, both sections are more heavily footnoted than any other part of the book.

In comparison, the first hundred pages of this novel has some good information for those who're desperate to discover more about J.D. Salinger than most of his other biographies. Margaret helpfully points out a few of the factual flaws in the biography of Salinger pieced together by Ian Hamilton.

The cost of getting (somewhat) useful information from a (somewhat) reliable source is that the reader's forced to wade through some atrociously self indulgent writing. If your brain doesn't completely power down while you're reading this book you'll notice entire sentences repeated in full pages after you first read them.

Unless you're really interested in learning what to avoid when writing a memoir, I'd stay clear of this. Even if you're a diehard fan of Salinger's writing, I wouldn't recommend staying with the book past the point when Margaret shifts the focus onto how badly her parents messed her up. It's apt that this nightmare of a memoir is caught within a book called Dreamcatcher-- I wouldn't recommend letting it out. ( )

found today 8/2/2013 1 of 20 books for $10