Franny’s Papers

What was lost when Claire Douglas’s archive burned.

By Satya Doyle ByockJanuary 23, 2026

• Memoir & Essay

• Biography & Autobiography

WHEN I LEARNED that Claire Douglas’s archives had burned in the 2025 Pacific Palisades wildfire, I was at home in Portland, Oregon. It was a gray early morning, and I stumbled around in the darkness of the house, switching on lights, heating water for tea, trying not to buckle at the knees. All of her papers would have been in boxes: the draft of her autobiography, the research and correspondence that I’d hoped to be able to read come March. My dog was wide awake and nudging me with her nose. “Okay,” I told her and clipped on her collar. In gloves and my partner’s jacket, I threw her ball over and over while enumerating what had been lost. The rain created a surreal juxtaposition with the desperate need for water in a neighboring state. My cousin’s home had already gone up in flames, along with any sense of stability for the three generations living under that roof. I had friends living in hotels. I kept checking on my sister to make sure she and her family were okay. All of the sadness I was feeling should have been for them, I knew. Still, despite myself, I was most overwhelmed by Douglas’s papers, which I’d never now be able to pore over and protect.

At my writing desk, my eyes drifted from the screen to Douglas’s books lined up in a row. Two works of psychology, a biography of a woman whom she’d pulled from the shadows of history, and two thick volumes that she’d masterfully edited and introduced. Beside them was a worn paperback copy of Franny and Zooey (1961). Seeing its thin green spine, I finally burst into tears.

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This wasn’t the first time Douglas’s papers had burned.

When she married J. D. Salinger, she was 21 years old. Salinger—Jerry—was 36 and nearly a decade out of his first marriage, which had only lasted a year. They first saw each other at a party in 1950 when she was 16 and had just entered her senior year at Shipley, a Quaker boarding school for girls in Pennsylvania. Her parents were art dealers with an apartment in the same Upper East Side building as the party’s hosts. That summer, Douglas was modeling for the designer Nan Duskin, and she wore her favorite dress to the party, blue linen with a dark blue velvet collar. Salinger had already published six short stories in The New Yorker: “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” (1948) had made him a literary star; “Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut” (1948) had just been adapted into the film My Foolish Heart (1949). He was handsome and, by all accounts, a captivating presence. He and Douglas made eye contact repeatedly, but they were both there with dates. The next day, he got her address from the host and wrote to her at school.

Over the following months, they spoke on the phone and wrote letters. Salinger was finishing work on 1951’s The Catcher in the Rye. (Not by coincidence, Holden Caulfield’s friend Jane Gallagher goes to Shipley.) Their correspondence continued when Douglas started at Radcliffe the next fall, and she would frequently go down to the city to spend weekends at his apartment on 57th Street. She was a junior in college in 1953 when Salinger proposed, but it came with an ultimatum: she’d have to drop out of college and join him in Cornish, New Hampshire, where he’d recently purchased a home. When Douglas told him no, that she wanted to stay in school, he cut off contact for almost a year. “When I stood up to him on that one thing, college,” Douglas later told their daughter Margaret, “he vanished.” In his absence, Douglas became disoriented, a young woman struggling to make sense of the actions of a man nearly twice her age, and she was soon hospitalized for depression. When Salinger finally returned, the sense of relief was overwhelming; she would have done anything to have him around. He gave her the same marriage proposal, with the same stipulations, and this time Douglas said yes. She dropped out of school just four months before graduation and, at his request, relinquished all the artifacts of her life at college, including her writing. She carefully gathered together her short stories, plays, and essays and burned them to ash.

They were married without ceremony by a justice of the peace in Bradford, Vermont, in February 1955. The house in Cornish, where Douglas had already been living for some months, was secluded and rustic. It had no bathroom or hot water and only minimal heat, though Salinger expected Douglas to prepare three meals a day and wash and iron the sheets twice a week. Douglas soon found herself cut off from friends and family. Without even a neighbor to ease the loneliness, her depression returned and a rift opened in the couple’s relationship. She hoped that the prospect of a child might revive their emotional intimacy, but he apparently found her pregnancy disgusting, cementing her isolation.

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Just weeks before they were married, Salinger had published the short story “Franny” in The New Yorker. He gave Douglas a copy of the story as a wedding present. Both of them knew that the new character was based on her. In her memoir, Margaret Salinger discusses Douglas’s frustration with that publication, her sense that it was just another thing Salinger had taken from her: “It wasn’t even ‘Franny’s’ story, it was mine,” she recalls her mother saying.

The details of Douglas’s life and mind are at the heart of Franny’s character, and she would appear in other tales of the precociously gifted, spiritually restless Glass siblings. In “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters” (1955), which takes place in 1942, Franny is eight years old, meaning she was born around the same year as Douglas. In a letter to her brother Buddy, Boo Boo, the eldest sister, asks if he’d heard Franny recently on the radio program It’s a Wise Child, which all the Glass children had appeared on as guests over the last 15 years. “She went on at beautiful length about how she used to fly all around the apartment when she was four and no one was home,” Boo Boo writes, and when the host questioned the veracity of her story, “the baby stood her ground like an angel. She said she knew she was able to fly because when she came down she always had dust on her fingers from touching the light bulbs.” This was one of Douglas’s earliest memories from her childhood home in London (which she had to leave in the evacuation of children during World War II and which burned to the ground during the Blitz). She would quietly sneak downstairs in her white nightgown and fly throughout the passageways. “She knew she hadn’t been dreaming,” Douglas’s daughter writes, “because when she awoke on mornings after flight, there would be dust on her fingertips where she had touched the ceiling.”

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I spent an inordinate amount of time in my late twenties thinking and writing about Franny Glass and the familiarity of her crisis, the particular blend of privilege, spiritual proclivities, nascent feminism, embarrassment, and blood sugar crashes, that produced an all-encompassing anguish. I was, at the time, a few years out of my master’s program and continuing my research on the developmental stage of early adulthood, gathering evidence of breakdowns in this age group from well before the identification of the “quarter-life crisis” as a new phenomenon among millennials. Here was Franny, in the 1950s, at the onset of adulthood with everything a young woman was supposed to crave—beauty, intelligence, an excellent education, money, and a handsome young man—yet she was consumed by existential malaise and a sense of meaninglessness. She was ping-ponging between misery and apologies for her misery because she couldn’t yet explain why she was so miserable.

In the scene that makes up the majority of the story, Franny is at a long lunch with her boyfriend, Lane, who is boring her to tears with what she feels is a performance of intellectualism. Yet she is embarrassed by her behavior and a bad mood that she can’t seem to shake. Not yet able to own her needs, she just feels sorry that she’s not meeting his better:

“I’m lousy today,” she said. “I’m just way off today.” She found herself looking at Lane as if he were a stranger, or a poster advertising a brand of linoleum, across the aisle of a subway car. Again she felt the trickle of disloyalty and guilt, which seemed to be the order of the day, and reacted to it by reaching over to cover Lane’s hand with her own. She withdrew her hand almost immediately and used it to pick her cigarette out of the ashtray. “I’ll snap out of this in a minute,” she said. “I absolutely promise.”

The buried desires and self-hatred combine with martinis, cigarettes, and no food, leading Franny to faint on her way to the bathroom.

I was obsessed with this story in my early adulthood in part because I’d had an eerily similar experience while in college. Reading it again as a woman in my forties, I want to pull Franny aside and tell her: “You’re exactly right about everything! Stop apologizing. Stop interrupting yourself. Leave this boring, self-important man and all the dull, passionless professors and trust your own instincts.” Like Franny, I couldn’t escape the feeling that the linear climb toward graduation was filled with false promises more than whatever high-minded ideals might have originally seeded a liberal arts education. Something about the point had gone missing. College, as Franny puts it,

was just one more dopey, inane place in the world dedicated to piling up treasure on earth and everything. I mean treasure is treasure, for heaven’s sake. What’s the difference whether the treasure is money, or property, or even culture, or even just plain knowledge? […] You never even hear any hints dropped on a campus that wisdom is supposed to be the goal of knowledge.

Throughout the story, Franny is carrying around a small green book, which she protects like the inner life she’s not yet ready to reveal. When Lane insists on knowing what she’s reading, she tentatively begins to tell him about The Way of a Pilgrim, a 19th-century Russian spiritual classic that recounts the journey of an anonymous wanderer as he seeks to “pray without ceasing.” It is a central piece of their conversation before she faints, as well as a subject—and point of conflict—with her brother Zooey, when he finds her in the throes of a spiritual and emotional crisis, in the companion story “Zooey.” This significant detail, too, belonged to Douglas: decades later, she still had the receipt from Brentano’s for the purchase of the little book. (This, too, may have been with her papers destroyed in the fire.)

Nothing that I wrote about Franny ended up in the book I published in 2022 on early adulthood, but in one of those uncanny moments when disparate lines of the universe appear to cross just in front of you, I discovered that this fictional embodiment of the college-aged existential crisis was based on Claire Douglas, a Jungian analyst whose writing had sat on my bookshelf for years and had influenced my understanding of psychology in important ways.

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When I first spoke to Douglas’s son, Matt Salinger, in the fall of 2024, he was in California, having traveled from his home in Connecticut to start the work of cleaning out his mother’s Malibu house and dispersing her things. I had reached out a few months earlier, shortly after Douglas had died, and Matt and I had exchanged a few tentative emails. Now he was calling to tell me that he’d compiled boxes of his mother’s research and pages of an autobiography she had started but never finished.

I was sitting cross-legged on a bed in my own mother’s home, facing an arched bed frame and the small wooden dresser I knew from my childhood. When he said those words, “part of an autobiography,” I felt my body buzz. Not wanting to betray too much eagerness or to pressure him, I said I’d love to read those pages and, if he’d be open to it, possibly prepare them for publication. I told him how much his mother’s scholarship had meant to me and that I hoped we could develop a plan for the preservation of her archive.

As the co-executor of J. D. Salinger’s estate, Matt is accustomed to managing archives, preparing previously unpublished manuscripts, and fielding questions from researchers, but I’m not sure he’d anticipated that anyone would be interested in his mother’s unpublished work. For my part, I was surprised that no one else had reached out to him about Douglas’s archive, and frustrated that her colleagues had not encouraged her to make a plan; her death at 90 hardly came as a surprise.

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Douglas divorced Salinger in 1967, finished college, raised her children, and participated in the anti-war movement. In 1976, she moved to the Oregon coast and co-founded a rural health clinic with a group of friends. It was in Oregon that she first entered Jungian analysis, which helped her heal and introduced her to her path. In California in the early 1980s, she received her PhD, became a clinical psychologist, and trained to become an analyst herself. Over the coming decades, in Los Angeles, she worked with patients and wrote prolifically on a range of topics in Jungian thought, managing a balance between incisive intellect and emotional depth that stands out in a field where one tends to dominate the other.

Douglas’s books were formative to my thinking as a Jungian and as a feminist within the field. Equally, she has helped keep me oriented amid the political catastrophes of recent years. She framed the way patriarchy functions as a psychological system as much as a social one, mutilating parts of all of us, regardless of gender, ruining our capacity for intimacy on an epidemic scale. I find myself coming back to the seams of her work again and again, pulling my needle through the same lines, stitching the same esoteric thread about the inner feminine, the necessity of relationship, the hidden essence of Eros buried by the patriarchal obsession with Logos. She wrote of the need for each person to come back into wholeness by integrating the lost half, and of Jung’s psychology as an antidote to the illusion of gendered perfection. To my mind, she read Jung as he was meant to be read.

In her 1990 book The Woman in the Mirror: Analytical Psychology and the Feminine, Douglas traces the idea of the feminine in Jung’s thought and that of his many followers and interpreters. My copy is heavily underlined in black and blue pen—notes in the margins, scribbled stars. The remarkable intellect that Salinger had depicted in the confused anguish of Franny Glass, spinning herself in circles through a combination of guilt, empathy, and spiritual yearning, is recognizable in Douglas’s book, now honed with clarity and confidence. Douglas’s brilliance was anything but neurotic. The utter sanity of her writing could almost be read as revenge. Franny’s breakdown was brought on by the disorientation of moving through a sexist landscape. Douglas diagnosed this personal and collective injury and brought her own feeling and thinking selves back together, protecting her intuitive knowing from being destroyed by the blazing heat of patriarchal words and power.

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A month before the Palisades Fire, the Franklin Fire burned through Malibu. That was two months after Matt Salinger and I had spoken on the phone. We had been in intermittent contact, but he wasn’t yet sure if he could trust me, I felt, or if I was capable of taking care of his mother’s archive. When news of the Malibu fire began circulating, I wrote him an email of concern. He wrote back a couple of hours later: “The smoke was insane, but the fire never got closer than a quarter mile or so.” Still, I think we both felt a newfound urgency along with relief. “It’s definitely one more good reason to further discuss a suitable home for my mother’s papers,” he wrote, “and I still look forward to doing that with you. I hope to be out there again in March, so perhaps then?”

Yes, I thought, March. It wasn’t quite a plan but a step in that direction.

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There is a mirroring in my interest in Douglas and her interest in Christiana Morgan. The subject of her 1993 book Translate This Darkness, Morgan played a significant but underappreciated role in the history of Jungian psychology and the development of the field of psychology in the United States. When she traveled to Zurich in 1926 to begin analysis with Jung, Morgan was a 28-year-old wife and mother of a small child. From an affluent Boston family, she’d been treated for depression in her teens and felt perpetually out of place among the women in her social circle. She suffered from the sense that she lacked a maternal instinct. Despite an intense interest in books and ideas, her father had denied her a college education, so she secretly pursued the study of psychology and philosophy on her own.

In analysis, Jung taught Morgan how to “trance” or “vision,” a form of engaging with the archetypal unconscious that came to be known as “active imagination.” In active imagination, unlike in lucid dreaming or daydreaming (or psychedelic hallucinations, for that matter), the individual practices connecting the conscious mind with the unconscious, with a faith that whatever arises via the ego’s immersion in the inner world is as real as the outer world. Once the mind can release in this way, there is a quality of traveling beyond known space and time, encountering parts of the world and one’s own being that had previously been hidden. Active imagination involves finding a bridge between the rational and the irrational, the conscious and unconscious, where knowledge and fantasy can intertwine, each gaining a greater understanding of the other.

Jung discovered that Morgan was unusually—and almost immediately—adept at this form of inner work. What poured out of Morgan in her exploration of the unconscious provided Jung with a lens into what Joseph Campbell would later term “The Hero’s Journey,” but through a woman’s psychology. Morgan’s personal transformation entailed both the descent into the underworld, familiar from the stories of Inanna and Persephone, and the classically male quest. Her visions and analysis began to open Jung’s eyes to female psychology and spiritual transformation, ultimately leading him to a number of critical conclusions, including his rebuke to the patriarchal culture of monotheism: “[T]he divine form in a woman is a woman, as in a man it is a man.”

The images and stories that emerged from Morgan’s inner journey contained, Jung felt, “material for the next two or three hundred years.” Just as his inner journey had provided him a window into the coming destruction of World War I, so Morgan’s visions were a real-time response to a similar cycle beginning again. As the clouds of Nazi Germany gathered over Europe in the mid-1930s—just around the time Douglas was born—Jung delivered a series of lectures on Morgan’s visions. He emphasized her attempt to resurrect the “dark feminine” from the European colonial, patriarchal ruins. He told his students that the images Morgan had brought up from the collective unconscious held untold potential to teach others, and maybe even to transform society—if they could be understood.

Douglas encountered the transcripts of these lectures when she began Jungian analysis in the late 1970s. Her analyst, a woman who had trained in Zurich, handed Douglas old mimeographed copies of the unpublished Vision Seminars and encouraged her to read them. Although Jung discusses at great length the visions and related paintings that she created, Morgan herself goes unnamed in these lectures, and her identity as the source of these visions remained known only to a small group of Jungian clinicians. Ostensibly meant to protect her privacy, this veil of secrecy elevated the products of Morgan’s unconscious while burying the name of the woman from whom they’d come.

In her years of research into Morgan’s life, Douglas learned that Jung’s lectures weren’t the only place from which Morgan’s name had been erased. After Zurich, Morgan became a lay psychotherapist and co-director of the Harvard Psychological Clinic, where she served as lead researcher and author of the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT), which still ranks, nearly 100 years later, among Harvard’s best-selling publications. Yet when it was published, Morgan’s name was removed entirely and remains absent today. (Bessel van der Kolk includes a discussion of the value and history of the TAT in his 2014 bestseller The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma, but he makes no mention of Morgan, though he has acknowledged privately that she’s known to be the primary author.) Nearly all of Morgan’s work from her years at Harvard was instead attributed to psychologist Henry Murray, her lover and collaborator for 40 years. While Murray’s photo stands tall on the walls of the Pusey Library at Harvard, alongside Robert Oppenheimer’s, no image or mention of Morgan is to be found. Her papers have been partially preserved, but they’re spread out and mostly indexed as subcategories within Murray’s archive.

In 1997, Douglas edited and introduced a new edition of The Vision Seminars, which had so captivated her when she began Jungian analysis. In clear strokes, she highlighted the importance of the original visions to Jung’s psychology:

Not only was Jung exploring women’s unconscious but also his own and the collective unconscious as well; there the excluded feminine incubated its ferment of creation and destruction. […]

Part of Jung’s quest was to bring the dark aspect of the rejected feminine up into the light and examine its return.

Douglas elucidated the often impenetrable and contradictory ideas on the masculine and feminine within Jung’s work. Like decoding hieroglyphics without a key, she somehow found ways to translate these dense concepts, separating men’s ideas of the feminine from women’s lived experience, and miraculously communicate them clearly to meet the historical moment.

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I’d known for days that Douglas’s house was likely gone. I told friends as much, but with so much destruction, so many lives threatened, I didn’t want to announce that I was mourning an archive. I never bargained or tried to convince myself that those remnants of her life had somehow survived the flames; I’d seen the images. With so many structures fallen into blackened earth, the devastation couldn’t possibly have spared the pages of an autobiography and old research notes packed into cardboard boxes. When Matt Salinger’s email came through, I was sitting on the edge of my couch in the dark, the white light of my phone staring back at me. “We did indeed lose my mother’s house last week,” he confirmed.

I’m very sorry to tell you that absolutely nothing was spared, including many very cherished pieces of art from her parents, love letters from my father, and all our family photos. I’d lived through two big fires and two big earthquakes during my time in Malibu, but nothing like this.

I know this isn’t the answer you were hoping for, and one of my big regrets will be that I hadn’t preserved her papers. The fact that I had mostly organized them already, and they were all boxed up waiting for me to come out and engage the mover, just makes it worse. I will have to believe that the books, papers, and reviews she had published when she was alive were the kind of contribution to all things Jung, but it doesn’t dilute my regret or sadness.

For days, I wrestled to find sense in a narrative that didn’t make any. While one of the United States’ major cities burned, just a week before we inaugurated a twice-impeached felon as president, as the worst men around the world were consolidating power, another woman’s legacy was destroyed. A woman whose work was about the balm to this specific pain. Gone. Burned. Once again disappeared into the shadows.

Another of Douglas’s books, The Old Woman’s Daughter: Transformative Wisdom for Men and Women (2006), has a line that seems always to be with me, echoing so much of my own daily grief: “I cannot get away or separate myself from my alien culture, as I am part of it: born of warlike people in a warring age and, like them, divided and contentious.” But what meaning could possibly be made from this loss of her work and its improbable timing? Just weeks left to go and one fire already dodged. The emptiness of that question tumbled through my insides until I realized finally, with a laugh, that the attempt to make meaning was the issue.

When, later, I began to write a final reply, I saw in Matt’s email a link that I’d missed. It was to an essay his mother had published in The New York Times in 1993, “Malibu, My Malibu,” about yet another fire that had forced her to evacuate. Reading it, I was captivated by the uncanny experience of time, or timelessness; of being spoken to across decades:

The flames never reached my apartment. But four days after the fire, I walked the hillside community I love and stopped at the remains of a small house I had hoped to buy. Its chimney, a little stone fountain and a birdbath stood alone amid the rubble. […]

Last Thursday, some friends held a barbecue out at the end of the street their first night home. Even in the few houses that remained, no one had electricity or gas; people gathered to see each other, to celebrate and to mourn together. My little grandson wandered about, feeling at home—as he was. The end of all our lives, if we have any luck, is followed by a new beginning.

I still don’t think that there is meaning in any of this destruction. But in reading this last line of hers, which I had never read before, about an event I hadn’t known she’d experienced, I felt a shout into my time from hers, and a little comfort. Maybe this is a time to trust Claire Douglas, I thought. Maybe this sense of encounter or synchronicity suggests something beyond mere meaninglessness. Perhaps, as she’d said, somehow, all of this, everything right now, is both an end and a beginning.

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Featured image: Photo of Claire Douglas by Olive Pierce, ca. 1970–80. Cambridge Public Library Archives and Special Collections. © Family of Olive Pierce. Image has been cropped.