J D Salinger

“This is the only book I read when I was a young adult. I believed it was cursed for me—it was the book I read directly before I had a breakdown. I thought that somehow reading the book had triggered my breakdown. I found Holden when I felt exactly the same as he did. When he was with his sister he wanted to be a child, but he was being thrust into this adult world. And he didn’t want to be. And that’s where so much of my anxiety came from too. I remember reading it. I’ve still got the same copy that I had then and there are little paragraphs and sentences that I’d ringed. With Holden I discovered that there were other people that felt the way I did. When I found out that it had been written so long ago, I found something comforting about that. Before I read this book, it felt to me, that I was alone and going through something unique and unknown. But apparently others, even in the far past had had the same experience. So I took from it that this was a rite of passage—this time was difficult for most people. It was a transformative book for me. And I love it for that. It explained things for me at a time when I couldn’t have explained them myself.” Read more...

The best books on Teenage Mental Health

Rae Earl, Memoirist