Novelist Joseph O'Connor reflects on the enduring power of JD Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye, 75 years after its publication, describing how the novel's opening lines sparked his own passion for writing when he first read it as a 17-year-old in 1981. He argues the book remains as bold and transgressive as ever, comparing its impact to hearing punk band the Sex Pistols for the first time, and places it among the rare novels—alongside Ulysses and The Handmaid's Tale—that regenerate their meaning depending on the reader's age.

O'Connor recounts the novel's slim plot, set over three days and nights in December 1949, following 17-year-old narrator Holden Caulfield after his expulsion from Pencey Prep boarding school. Holden flees to Manhattan, inventing lies and posturing at adulthood while awaiting a reckoning with his parents, and the book's distrust of storytelling itself—dismissing film, biography and even Shakespeare as "phoney"—is highlighted as central to its enduring subversiveness. O'Connor describes returning to the novel repeatedly over decades, each time discovering it anew.