We lost one of the American literary greats this past week. Fringe celebrates J.D. Salinger’s ineffable legacy with posts from writers who have been affected by his work.

Today, Laura van den Berg, author of What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us,  remembers what it was like to read Salinger as a teenager and as an adult:

Growing up, I was a decidedly non-literary child—the kind who had to be routinely prodded to complete assigned readings for school—but that began to change when I encountered J.D. Salinger, the first writer I fell in love with on my own volition. Like many others, I felt an immediate kinship with Catcher in the Rye. At the time, I felt as though the book, with its brilliant exploration of coming-of-age angst and loneliness, had been written for me; I longed to be like Holden, a see-er of the truth in a world populated by phonies—which is, I suppose, as good a reason as any to become a writer.

When I revisited Catcher in the Rye in later years, my view of Holden grew more nuanced. I could see that he was unreliable, at once see-er of the truth and also in the grips of a kind of blindness. And yet his essential loneliness still called out to me, like an old friend. I was also struck by the extent to which the novel was governed by voice, more specifically by the idiosyncrasies of Holden’s voice—an early lesson in the writing of first-person narrators.

Before Salinger, most of the fiction I’d read involved ordinary people caught up in unusual circumstances—a perfectly good and enduring model—but Holden Caulfield and the Glass family were among the first characters I encountered that were emphatically un-ordinary, precocious, eccentric, and one-of-a-kind. From this I learned that in fiction, what is real and what is ordinary can be whatever the author, and the world they create, decides. This is hardly a novel observation, but for me it was, at the time, transformative.

Salinger has been quoted as saying “I am a kind of paranoiac in reverse. I suspect people of plotting to make me happy.” For some, unhappiness can become a kind of religion—another Holden-esque quality I glamorized until I was old enough to realize that life is hard enough when you’re happy and near impossible when you’re miserable—and I’ve long wondered if that was the case for Mr. Salinger. Nevertheless I always liked to imagine him puttering around on his farm in New Hampshire, an artist with a monkish devotion to his work. In Catcher in the Rye, Salinger writes, “Don’t ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody,” a line that seems to echo the author’s seclusion and public silence. But if Salinger did in fact want to stop telling people things, he failed in that enterprise. With his fiction, Salinger continues to tell the world so much; he has given me voices that I can call to mind so vividly, I feel like they’re in the room; characters that have alerted my way of seeing myself, the world, and the fictional enterprise; enduring insight into that delicate and troubled thing we might refer to as the human spirit. Salinger himself spoke one of my favorite quotes on writing, one that I often call to mind when struggling with a new project: “an artist’s only concern is to shoot for some kind of perfection, and on his own terms, not anyone else’s.”

Goddamn, Mr. Salinger, I’ll miss you.