![]() ![]() “For Esmé” helped to inspire “The National Cage Bird Show,” a story in Homes’s new collection, Days of Awe. In Homes’s view, the relationship depicted in the story is a good model for the one between writer and reader: a pure association that redeems without grasping toward the messiness of everyday life. We discussed how the Salinger story “For Esmé-With Love and Squalor” celebrates missed connections, reminding us that even brief, glancing encounters can be enough to change a person for the better. Homes explored her own relationship to Salinger-the strange coincidences tying his work to her life, her brief, disappointing brush with the real-life author, and how she ultimately learned to let him go. Why do some books make us want to know an author personally, identifying so thoroughly with the public work that we try to lay claim to the private self? In a conversation for this series, the writer A.M. I badly wanted a letter back from Salinger-something to prove the connection I felt to his work was as profound and extraordinary as I suspected. ![]() The additional offering, I hoped, might help me seem as precocious, eccentric, and generous as his famous child characters, and make my words stand out in the author’s flood of unanswered mail. Salinger a letter, enclosing a blue dollar bill from the 1930s I’d gotten back as change from the diner. ![]()
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