Revenge, much like calamari, is a dish best served cold

I gave up my scholarship and dropped out of Yale, cut off communication with my friends and moved (with a suitcase of miniskirts and record albums I was forbidden to play) back to my home state of New Hampshire to be with him. Seven months later, during a trip we’d taken to Florida, with words as devastating as they had once been captivating and entrancing, he put two $50 bills in my hand and instructed me to return to New Hampshire, clear my things out of his house and disappear.

Believing Salinger to be the most spiritually elevated man I would ever know, I accepted his assessment of me as unworthy, and for the next quarter-century I barely spoke of my experience …

—Joyce Maynard[^1]

An amazing essay.