FictionReviewWhen JD Salinger's daughter Peggy wrote an account of her life as the great novelist's child, it cost her dear. She was ostracised by her father and brother. She was condemned by the literati. And she became a target for The Catcher in the Rye's obsessive fans. So, asks Julian Borger , why did she do it?

Getting to meet Peggy Salinger is not an entirely straightforward matter. Certain precautions are taken whose very nature I am not permitted to describe, because that is one of the precautions. They are dictated by the "threat management" firm she has hired.

It is Holden Caulfield's revenge. The angry adolescent antihero of The Catcher in the Rye retains his hold on those who worship his creator, the great and mysterious JD Salinger, who stopped writing 35 years ago and withdrew from the world to a fortress of privacy at his home in Cornish, New Hampshire.

But he has been betrayed from within. His 44-year-old daughter, Peggy (Margaret) has written a memoir, from which the writer emerges mostly as an unsavoury weirdo. Now Peggy's father and brother are not talking to her, and a company is protecting her from the assortment of stalkers and weirdos who still apparently tout their paperback editions of The Catcher in the Rye like an avenging bible, 20 years after one such obsessed fan, Mark David Chapman, shot John Lennon dead in New York.

Peggy has her own ideas about why her father's novel of an unhappy youth at an expensive boarding school has become such a fetish and a curse. "It captures the borderline aspects of adolescence brilliantly, beautifully; how well he writes about what it's like to be on your own and appropriately, adolescently crazy - not having anything sorted out. Everyone's the good guys or the bad guys," she says.

"His writing is tremendously seductive. Holden turns aside to the reader and says: 'You would have understood. You would have hated this,' and brings the reader very actively into this sort of circle of elite misunderstood." This is all very well if you are 15, but a bit of a problem if you are in your 30s or 40s, still feel the world is against you, and believe only Holden or JD would truly understand.

It is not just the nutters who are upset. Some of the English professors and literary arbiters at US universities and newspapers are also not too happy with Dream Catcher, her account of growing up as Salinger's daughter. One reviewer in the Indianapolis Star predicted that she would be consigned to a special hell reserved for faithless children who try to capitalise on their parents' fame. The New York Times portrayed her father as a conscientious objector to the "publicity industrial complex", fatally let down by a daughter who failed to understand his art. And the New York Observer declared she had committed something it called an "ontological sin", whatever that is.

In the deliberate elegance of an expensive Boston hotel, Peggy sticks two fingers down her throat in mock disgust. She is unapologetic. For her, Jerome David Salinger is not a literary god but an all-too-mortal father who largely left his children to their own devices while he pursued his art, a string of obscure religions and a series of teenage girls.

Peggy's English mother, Claire Douglas, was 16 when she met the 31-year-old writer in New York. Much later, on what turned out to be their last "family holiday" together, Peggy and her eight-year-old younger brother, Matthew, were thrilled to be flown to London, only to discover that the hidden agenda behind the trip was a rendezvous with her father's besotted female pen pal, who was still in her teens. The hapless girl was ultimately cast out in tears, because JD did not fancy her. "She's terribly homely, poor girl. I had no idea," Peggy recalls him saying.

Peggy describes how she was dispatched to one Colditz-style boarding school after another, and unsurprisingly developed a few personality problems of her own. She drank, ran wild, had occasional blackouts during which she assumed multiple personalities, and suffered from debilitating illnesses. On one occasion when she rang her father for help, he sent her a subscription to a journal put out by the Christian Scientists, his religious gurus of the moment, who teach that all illness is an illusion.

Her devotion to the old man was such that when she finally attempted suicide in 1984, she rang the hospital before she took her cocktail of pills to ensure they would not release her name to the press. "My first instinct at this desperate hour was not to protect myself, but to keep my father's secrets, to obey the family creed," she wrote.

The ties of loyalty only snapped when she was pregnant with her son some years ago (to say precisely when would reveal the age of her son, which she views as a risk - the fewer identifying details the better). She was sick and penniless, and her father advised her to get an abortion. "You have no right to bring a child into the world you can't support," he told her. She was so taken aback that she wrote the words down; this was the start of the long process which eventually produced Dream Catcher.

"Being the mother of a child brought out that lioness," she says now. "You can say what you want to me, but don't go there. That's what knocked down the house of cards.

"Really, the only way I came to understand why it took me so long was reading the literature on cults and people emerging from cults and how when you're forced to believe in the whole package you can't disagree with discrete bits of it. Because really, the whole thing has to fall apart for you to start questioning."

Writing Dream Catcher was not facilitated by the fact that Peggy's father refused to talk to her after word leaked out that she was working on the book. She had to rely on her own memory and the recollections of the various women in the reclusive author's life.

The result is patchily compelling. She writes at great length about episodes she remembers best, which are not always the most absorbing moments of her life. There are seemingly endless quotes from scrawled notes slipped to and from her giggling friends at boarding school.

Unsurprisingly, the best bits throw light on her famously secretive father. He told her almost nothing about his experiences as a soldier in the 1944 D-day landings and in the subsequent advance across Europe, but she has dug out the bloody history of his unit, the 12th Infantry Regiment, which lost more men than it started out with. It was a wonder that Jerry Salinger survived at all. "You never really get the smell of burning flesh out of your nose entirely," he once told her, "no matter how long you live."

For the rest of his life, Peggy believes, he remained essentially a soldier, disciplined and aloof from ordinary civilians. "While the war was often in the foreground of our family life, it was always in the background. It was the point of reference that defined everything else in relation to it," she wrote.

The other dark corner she has taken a torch to is his largely ignored Jewish heritage. Jerome's father was a successful Jewish food importer and his mother was an Irish Catholic who converted to Judaism, making Sonny (as his relatives called him) entirely Jewish. It was an identity he did not embrace.

"My father would get all embarrassed and uncomfortable when the subject would come out. It would be a subject not to be discussed," Peggy recalls. As for her grandparents: "All I knew was that they were incredibly embarrassing people because they spoke with Yiddish accents and they were dismissed."

Some of JD's characters have similar attitudes to their families' histories, but none act out the conflicts in such a bizarre manner as the author, whose first marriage was to a Nazi. Serving as a counter-intelligence officer at the end of the war, he was one of the first soldiers to walk into a newly liberated concentration camp (Peggy is unable to remember its name). He was responsible for interrogating the local Nazis and one of the junior party officials he arrested, Sylvia, he fell for, married and took back to America. According to his sister, Doris, Sylvia remained as anti-semitic as ever, and returned to Germany. The bizarre episode gives new dimensions to the phrase "self-hating Jew".

As far as his daughter knows, JD Salinger is still writing. "He does work from early in the morning till midday every day, and when he can't he's a huge pain in the ass. He starts prowling like a caged beast, and he really has got to get to his typewriter," she says. The output is all carefully filed away and colour coded according to how much editing it requires, waiting to be published after his death. But it is quite possible, she admits, that he will simply change his mind and make a huge bonfire of the past three decades' worth of work, an act that her revelations may have rendered more likely.

In writing Dream Catcher, Peggy has taken an axe to the delicate, residual strands keeping her troubled family together. Her brother, Matthew, wrote a letter to the New York Observer denouncing the book and questioning its accuracy.

Peggy is equally dismissive of her brother, saying she was "embarrassed for him". "He hasn't spoken to me," she says with evident sadness mixed with iron determination. "I'm still his big sister. I'm sorry he didn't have the oomph to say something to me about it and instead wrote a letter to the press. I'm not dwelling on it. I think in a few years he'll probably be quite embarrassed by his own behaviour. I hope for his own sake that he does some sorting through for himself."

She stands by the authenticity of her account, and argues with some degree of pride that if there were factual errors, her father would have taken her to the supreme court, as he did to his previous biographer, Ian Hamilton. She says this with some pride, but it is clearly a melancholy situation for any family when the best thing you can say about relations with your father is that he has not taken you to the highest court in the land, yet. She has not dared to contact her father since word got out that she was writing the book. "I did not want to subject my son to a scene, and I also didn't care to be yelled at, so call me chicken," she says.

When I ask her whether she feels a sense of loss, being cut off from her father and the idol of her youth, she has two answers ready. "Rationally, no, because what I realised was that there wasn't that much there to begin with at that stage. Irrationally, yes, there's always a wish. Certainly I love my father and I want my daddy to be the perfect daddy he was when I was a little girl. The loss of a wish, of something that doesn't exist, can hurt just as much as something that is quite real."

Outside the hotel room, the early afternoon light is already beginning to fade over the snow on Boston common, and Peggy is ready for her photograph. The portrait on the back of her book shows the new Peggy, hap pily married, a mother and seemingly at peace. The woman now adjusting her make-up has cut her hair short and is wearing a no-nonsense suit. She is harried and nervous about the press. A freelance photographer working for a British newspaper has been harassing her family and her neighbours for days. She has taken on the burdens her father has spent most of his life avoiding.

But throughout the two-hour interview her heaviest load seems to be the nagging, unanswerable question of whether she has done the right thing. It is something she returns to again and again.

"Certainly my intention was not to demonise or point the finger at anyone," she says at one point. "My father sets up these sort of guru-acolyte relations where either you're perfect or you're damned, and I really try to sort out for myself who this human being was, is, who I'd never considered as a human being. I don't think it's disrespectful to a human being to take him off a pedestal. Quite the opposite. I feel any time you put a human being on a pedestal . . . it's dehumanising, whether you're pillorying him or worshipping him."

That is what is wrong with the Catcher in the Rye nutters, the Mark Chapmans of this world. They fail to see the human being behind the pages. In her own eyes, Peggy Salinger is only trying to make those pages more transparent.

She says: "If I have discouraged past and present and future readers from seeking out the writer, the creator of a fiction, as someone who will be their catcher, I don't think that's a bad thing."

Dream Catcher by Peggy Salinger is published by Scribner, price £20.

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