My Salinger Year Ending Explained [SPOILER!]

SPOILER ALERT: the following article contains massive spoilers, including the ending. If you have not yet seen the movie, proceed at your own risk, or better, come back to this article later!

New York in the 90s: After leaving graduate school to pursue her dream of becoming a writer, Joanna (Margaret Qualley) gets hired as an assistant to Margaret (Sigourney Weaver), the stoic and old-fashioned literary agent of J. D. Salinger.

Fluctuating between poverty and glamour, she spends her days in a plush, wood-paneled office — where dictaphones and typewriters still reign and agents doze off after three-martini lunches — and her nights in a sink-less Brooklyn apartment with her socialist boyfriend. Joanna’s main task is processing Salinger’s voluminous fan mail, but as she reads the heart-wrenching letters from around the world, she becomes reluctant to send the agency’s impersonal standard letter and impulsively begins personalizing the responses.

The results are both humorous and moving, as Joanna, while using the great writer’s voice, begins to discover her own.

SPOILERS AHEAD

My Salinger Year Plot Summary and Synopsis

In 1995, Joanna, an aspiring writer, and poet leaves Berkeley, California with her boyfriend Karl and moves to New York City where she takes a job at one of New York’s oldest literary agencies run by Margaret.

Unbeknownst to Joanna, the agency looks after the interests of the notoriously reclusive writer J. D. Salinger. She has not read any of Salinger’s books, including The Catcher in the Rye. She moves into an apartment with a new boyfriend, Don. Margaret does not believe that computers are helpful and makes Joanna type letters for her using a typewriter.

In her time at the agency, Joanna’s responsibilities include responding to the large volume of fan mail that Salinger is sent.

As was agency policy, Joanna responds with a generic response that explained that Salinger did not read fan mail however, she is tempted to give a proper reply to some of Salinger’s fans.

Her period at the agency coincides with Salinger’s proposed publication of the Hapworth 16, 1924 short story that had previously been published in The New Yorker. She helps liaise with the small publisher and goes to Georgetown University for a meeting between Salinger and the publisher, which also coincides with a concert in Washington D.C. that her old boyfriend is performing.

Margaret starts to trust Joanna more and lets her read some manuscripts and articles.

Don and Joanna are invited to the wedding of Don’s best friend, but Don does not initially tell Joanna as he wants to go on his own.

My Salinger Year Ending

While Don is away, Joanna decides to leave him and move out. Joanna sells her first book for the agency and is offered a bigger role at the agency however, she wants to pursue her dream of becoming a writer and quits.

Source: Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 3.0).