After being excoriated by a young female writer who considered her appearance in the film Salinger to be nauseating and “self-aggrandizing,” Joyce Maynard writes to the woman—with perhaps more thoughtfulness than the original critic deserved, given the banality of her Twitter feed.

Is it the obligation of any human being to protect the embarrassing secrets of some other individual of greater power and influence? And for what reason? Because he said so.

I might replace the words “protect the embarrassing secrets” with the phrase “never to write”….

It’s an interesting and to my mind convincing piece of writing.