To A Personal Hero

Dear Mr. Salinger,

Fuck you and fuck your Glass Family. Fuck Franny. Fuck Zooey. Fuck Seymour and Buddy. Also, for extra measure, fuck Esme with her precocious verbal ability and her slender beauty.

"I'm just too beautiful and gifted and smart. It is so hard to know as much as I do and not be unhappy. Oh, I am so ruined by all this knowledge and innate talent. It is incredibly difficult to understand human nature as deeply as I do. I wish I didn't judge other people so harshly. Yet, I am so kind for finding other people's flaws charming and human."

They are disgusting.

What about the rest of us, Salinger? Us mediocre folk? Those of us that are plain? We who are left by our lovers for others more beautiful? Who are only of average intelligence? Who don't know everything? With childhoods untainted by the curse of others' curiosity?

Please permit me tell you:

We don't want the Glass family's understanding or pity. We don't want their compassion. It is appalling. They are right to feel self contempt. But a whole book of their self contempt due to their dismay at human nature? Several books? Also, we don't want to read an author writing sentences for one character that he then has another character describe as "clever." That, Mr. Salinger, is egotistical.

Fuck you. Understand that your navel gazing self pity makes you ugly.

Ugly just like my handsome genius manchild of an ex-lover.

Which is why I am so mad, of course. I know. I am as transparent as this empty glass. But fuck, I feel like Franny all the time. We all do. So why did you have to make them so golden? So much better than us? I can forgive your Glass family for feeling superior to everyone else. You created them to be superior. But you create the sense that when I feel superior to others, your Glass family would be horrified, disgusted. Zooey would be astonished that a simpering average adult like me feels such contempt for those around her. Or, perhaps, he would find this flaw of mine charming. He and Franny would judge me as they would a child who boasts about running faster than her younger sister.

I understand, though, perhaps. It isn't that you don't understand that average people feel the same way as your brilliant Glasses. It's that you know that no one cares about average people.

Can't wait for a new book,

A Fan