David Shields, J.D. Salinger, and the book "How literature saved my life"

A new biography/oral history is about to be published about J.D. Salinger;  I'm looking forward to reading it.  The book, which been getting a great deal of attention, in advance of its publication (September 3rd), is co-written by David Shields and Shane Salerno. Salerno is also the director of a documentary about Salinger, which will be opening in theatres September 6th (and will air on PBS in 2014).  

http://www.amazon.com/Salinger-David-Shields/dp/1476744831/

Shields, who is an old friend from college, has written many other books, including the two non-fiction works The Thing About Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead (Knopf, 2008), a best-seller, and the much-discussed Reality Hunger (Knopf, 2010).

(Please see a lengthy post about Reality Hunger, which appeared in 2010 on my other blog: 
http://www.andrewleefielding2.blogspot.com/p/books.html.)

Shields's most recent book, prior to Salinger, is the non-fiction work How literature saved my life.  It was released this February (also by Knopf). 

Shields is a terrific writer, and How literature saved my life is a fine book.  While the book is, of course, about literature, it is also very much about the self.  Such as:  the keen awareness of self, in relation to the writing and reading of literature (and the very personal ways texts are read, and responded to);  and the self, as it reads and interprets life beyond the page.

It is intriguing to me that Shields--who in his non-fiction, over time, has written, quite personally, about his life--is now the co-author of a book about J.D. Salinger, who for decades revealed so little about himself, publicly.  

Yet there is this, concerning Salinger, in How literature saved my life:

"When I can't sleep, I get up and pull a book off the shelves.  There are no more than thirty writers I can reliably turn to in this situation, and Salinger is still one of them...What is it in his work that offers such solace at 3:00 A.M. of the soul?  For me, it's how his voice, to a different degree and in a different way in every book, talks back to itself, how it listens to itself talking, comments upon what it hears, and keeps talking.  This self-awareness, this self-reflexivity, is the pleasure and burden of being conscious, and the gift of his work--what makes me less lonely and makes life more livable--lies in its revelation that this isn't a deformation in how I think; this is how human beings think."

http://www.amazon.com/How-Literature-Saved-My-Life/dp/0307961524/