i know its been trendy to flip out about j.d. salinger's death, which is something ill try not to do, because dying is always the second best thing to do if your readership is down. but i have to tell you, i read catcher in the rye back in highschool, and surfaced relatively the same. probably because my adolescence was feminine and not the other way around. however, i read franny & zooey my sophomore year of college and i couldnt have identified with a book more. there has never before been a character that i knew so intimately and unequivocally. franny's entire breakdown. it was nothing foreign. i was in the middle of it. franny's resentment and disillusionment with everything touching her was sooo pervasive, it literally ached in my head everyday. in an attempt to save myself from criticism, my crisis was much more emotional than hers, which was for the most part, intellectual, but all the same, it was oppressive, immutable, and smothering: this part...

"It's everybody, I mean. Everything everybody does is so--I don't know--not wrong, or even mean, or even stupid, necessarily. But just so tiny and meaningless--and sad-making. And the worst part is, if you go bohemian or something crazy like that, you're conforming just as much as everybody else, only in a different way."