“For Esmé” helped to inspire “The National Cage Bird Show,” a story in Homes’s new collection, Days of Awe. Like Salinger’s original, the story features a shell-shocked soldier and a troubled teenager who forge an unlikely, fleeting bond (this time, in an online chat room). In 12 stories, the book explores the ugly legacy of war, the unease of the modern American spirit, and the ways alienated people seek connection in the most surprising places.

A.M. Homes is the author of 12 books, including the memoir The Mistress’s Daughter and the novel May We Be Forgiven. A recipient of fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, she teaches writing at Princeton. We spoke by phone.

A.M. Homes: For almost as long as I can remember, I’ve felt a deep sense of connection to J.D. Salinger’s work. It starts with the pervasive sense of loss in his books—the way his characters seem to be trying to bridge the gap between innocence and an awful kind of knowing, one that involves an awareness of trauma and grief. Part of it, too, is the way he often breaks from the action to talk directly, informally to the reader. It’s easy to feel, Oh, he’s talking to me. But there have also been these eerie points of resonance between Salinger’s books and my own life that have made me feel a special kinship with his work.

I had an older brother who died before I was born. Unarticulated grief was a key part of my childhood. And as a young person, I was stunned to encounter the part in The Catcher in the Rye where Holden Caulfield talks about his dead brother and the baseball mitt he left behind. Weirdly, growing up, we’d always kept my brother’s baseball mitt, too. At some point, without realizing how much it meant to me or anyone else in the family, my dad gave it away because no one was using it. It was a super practical decision that just killed me. And it was impossible not to feel addressed by The Catcher in the Rye when it shared such a close detail with my own my life.

There have been other points of connection. Several years ago I had a strange thing happen with my cousin, who is in her 80s and now suffers from Alzheimer’s. That family grew up in Paris and was on the run in France during World War II and the Holocaust. She said to me, “I’m going to give you something, and only you will understand what it means.” She handed me this little box, and inside of it was what I would describe as the heart of a watch—just the inner workings of it. Her father had traded the outside gold case during the war for food or transportation.

One reason her gift resonated so deeply with me was because the same image—a broken watch—is at the core of one of my favorite Salinger stories, “For Esmé—With Love and Squalor.” The watch in the story is an emblem of what Salinger’s work is so often about: trying to find connection in a world that can both disappoint and damage. It’s about stopped time and what is lost, and also refers to Esmé’s hope that her correspondent has returned from war with his faculties intact. Clearly a broken watch is not exactly intact.