Franny and Zooey, J.D. Salinger’s third book, was published in 1961. The the two long stories had been published previously in The New Yorker, in the Fifties.

I had a hard-cover copy. I suspect I had requested it as a Christmas gift. I was in the eighth grade; I can’t imagine where I had heard of it. The New Yorker was unknown. No books in the house of my youth. I had schoolbooks. I used the library.

I wore my hair in a long bob that required sleeping in painful brush curlers. I loved clothes, and boys, and peacock blue ink, which I spilled on the hall carpet. I loved Franny and Zooey above all else. I had never been to New York, known anyone who had been near Yale or Princeton, in fact barely knew any adult who had gone to college at all. But that Glass family. Were people really like that? And could someone really tell stories like that?

Yes. Yes.

Read the three essays in this week’s New Yorker, in “The Talk of the Town” section, one of them by Lillian Ross, a memoir of her fifty year friendship with the writer. (http://www.newyorker.com)

But don’t miss Adam Gopnick either:

“Writing, real writing, is done not from some seat of moral judgment but with the eye and ear and heart; no American writer will ever have a more alert ear, a more attentive eye, or a more ardent heart than his.”

Writers are notorious for their superstitions and fixed habits. Certain pens, chairs, desks, talismans, even teacups. I’m at work on a novel, set in 1932 Hollywood. I seem to have to start working in the dark. If I can see the dawn, the day is already making its claim on my imagination.

A disadvantage is that one may feel sleepy at 10:00 a.m. The real payoff though is watching light. When I am in my writing cottage, dawn slips through two big pine trees across the street. A glory.

Right now the cottage is too damp. So I write in the house, and watch the light advance through the mullioned windows in the living room. For a few moments, it lies silky across the dining table, like a scarf.

My forty-year affair with Chekhov began innocently enough, with the plays. Perhaps it was The Cherry Orchard. Not quite sure. But when I read his short stories, and then the letters — oh those letters — no retreat was possible. He was mine.

We had a 150th birthday party for him here in Los Angeles, on January 17. Twenty people; herring, beet borscht, stuffed peppers, chicken paprikash, a zakooska table with piroshki, pickled everything, and sour cream above all. Shots of vodka, Russian champagne. Desserts with sour cherries, apples, poppyseed.

(Russian sour cherries are small, and tart. Chekhov liked to eat them by shoving five or six in his mouth, juice running.)

White flowers, many white flowers, and branches of barely awakened quince and forsythia.

We might have bored him. But — we had gardeners in attendance. Gardening was his great passion. That cherry orchard was just the beginning.

I read his story, “Fish Love” aloud. Short, and witty. Rain was falling. We could hear it through open windows.

Through the window could be seen grey sky and trees wet with rain; since there was nowhere to go in that kind of weather, there was nothing to do but tell stories and listen.

These are my dear friends, the writers Maryann Macdonald (light) and Patricia Marx (dark). They are standing in a miraculous place — the damp, underground (o.k., basement) room where Marilynne Robinson wrote one of the great novels of the late 20th-century — Housekeeping.

Maryann and Trish, who live in Manhattan, visited me in Northampton, Mass. this weekend, where we have a beloved home, usually rented out. A few years ago I learned that Marilynne Robinson had lived on our street (Massasoit) with her then-husband and children and had written Housekeeping there, in a room in the basement. The kind current owners of the house invited us in to see where this act of faith and art had taken place.

There is a single window where one can peer out to see the lawn and a few shrubs, but that’s all. At least she was able to see some natural light, and rain, and, of course, snow. (Snow and rain figure prominently in the novel.)

Housekeeping is a novel that encourages you, teaches you, admonishes you to be one hundred times more alive than you were before you opened its cover.

This, from page 13 from my Picador paperbound edition:

The years between her husband’s death and her eldest daughter’s leaving home were, in fact, years of almost perfect serenity. My grandfather had sometimes spoken of disappointment. With him gone they were cut free from the troublesome possibility of success,, recognition, advancement. They had no reason to look forward, nothing to regret. Their lives spun off the tilting world like thread off a spindle, breakfast time, suppertime, lilac time, apple time.

The book was published in 1980; I read it for the first time in 1988 or so; I lived on Massasoit Street for four years before I ever knew she had lived in Northampton at all.

Writers, look at that basement window and know any- and every- thing is possible.