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The Long Goodbye

By Alex Williams

• Nov. 22, 2013

“New York was no mere city,” Joan Didion wrote in her landmark 1967 essay, “Goodbye to All That,” explaining why she abandoned her adopted home of New York, seemingly for good, at the age of 29. “It was instead an infinitely romantic notion, the mysterious nexus of all love and money and power, the shining and perishable dream itself.”

Ms. Didion, who was originally from California, did more than just capture, and explode, the enduring image of the young writer chucking it all to make it in New York. She spawned a new literary cliché: the not-quite-so-young writer beating a hasty retreat from the city, but transforming the surrender into a literary triumph via a “Goodbye to All That, Redux” essay.

The literature may be thin when it comes to “See ya, Chicago” or “Later, Los Angeles” odes, but ever since Ms. Didion set the standard 46 years ago, the “Goodbye New York” essay has become a de rigueur career move for aspiring belle-lettrists. It is a theme that has been explored continuously over the years by the likes of Meghan Daum in The New Yorker and Luc Sante in The New York Review of Books .

Lately, the “Goodbye” essay has found renewed life, as a new generation of writers works out its love-hate relationship with the city in public fashion. Recently, opinion-makers like Andrew Sullivan and David Byrne have scribbled much-discussed New York-is-over essays; literary-minded Generation Y writers have bid not-so-fond farewells to the city on blogs like Gawker and The Cut; and a dozen-plus writers, including Dani Shapiro and Maggie Estep, published elegies to their ambivalence toward New York in “Goodbye to All That: Writers on Loving and Leaving New York,” an anthology published last month.

“If you can make it here, you can make it anywhere, the song goes,” Mr. Sullivan wrote in a Sunday Times of London column last week, explaining his decision to flee New York after only a year and return to Washington. “But why would anyone want to make it here? The human beings are stacked on top of one another in vast towers that create dark, narrow caverns in between. Gridlocked traffic competes with every conceivable noise and every imaginable variation on the theme of human rage and impatience.”

New York, I can’t quit you. Or maybe I can.

On first glance, contemporary entries to the genre tend to follow the same arc as Ms. Didion’s essay. Basically, it is a classic femme (or homme) fatale story, with New York as siren, New York as lover-substitute, an eight-million-headed stand-in for those sexy bad-news types we all fall for, to our peril, when we are young.

“No man could compete, in my mind, with the lure of a summer night in Greenwich Village,” writes Hope Edelman in “You Are Here,” her contribution to the anthology.

To Ann Friedman, whose essay “Why I’m Glad I Quit New York at Age 24” recently ran in the New York magazine blog The Cut, New York is not just a guy, it’s that guy. “I’ve always been partial to the friendly guy who doesn’t know how hot he really is (Chicago) or the surprisingly intelligent, sexy stoner (Los Angeles),” Ms. Friedman wrote, “as opposed to the dude who thinks he’s top of the list, king of the hill, A-number-one.”

The New York-you-broke-my-heart essay has become such a trope for young female writers that Jezebel recently asked, “Is Dumping New York City a ‘Girl Thing?’ ”

(Apparently not. Mr. Sullivan also invoked the romantic-love theme in a recent blog post, describing New York as his “mistress,” though he felt “married to Washington,” his once and future home. And in a 2010 exit essay on The New York Times blog City Room , Christopher Solomon, who came from the Pacific Northwest, wrote: “Oh, I pursued you. We went to the opera, to plays, to gritty little restaurants in Queens. You — the city — were always my date. But you never belonged to me. Eventually you, too, moved on, taking your buzzing neon promise of fame to the next newcomer.”)

By framing the relationship as a love affair, it makes the inevitable breakup with the literary capital seem less like a career failure than a coming to the senses after a youthful infatuation.

“In my early twenties, I felt that my life could be one big experiment, and in my mid-twenties I am coming to terms with the fact that no, my life is actually my life ,” wrote Chloe Caldwell in her anthology entry, “Leaving My Groovy Lifestyle.”

In putting it so, Ms. Caldwell echoed Ms. Didion’s description of how she rationalized the move that she and her husband made to Los Angeles (they returned to New York in the 1980s): “I talk about how difficult it would be for us to ‘afford’ to live in New York right now, about how much ‘space’ we need. All I mean is that I was very young in New York, and that at some point the golden rhythm was broken, and I am not that young anymore.”

For Ms. Didion, in other words, money was simply an excuse. The reality was, in the relatively cheap New York of the 1960s, even a Vogue junior staff member like her — making $70 a week — could secure a centrally located Manhattan apartment with a view of, she thought, the Brooklyn Bridge (“It turned out the bridge was the Triborough,” she dryly amended) and pay for taxis to parties where she might see “new faces.” Sure, the early days were tough — “some weeks I had to charge food at Bloomingdale’s gourmet shop in order to eat,” she wrote. But in general, she could afford to hang around long enough to determine when she had stayed “too long at the Fair.” In sum, she could afford to fall out of love with the city slowly.

Not so for the would-be Didions of today. In their New York, the nice apartments with the bridge views tend to go to the underwriters of bond issues, not to the writers of essays for literary anthologies. The unaffordability of New York on a writer’s budget is a theme running through several contemporary variations on the theme.

Cord Jefferson, who wrote lyrically about leaving New York, ultimately for Los Angeles, on Gawker last year, was, for a time, able to appreciate “the camaraderie built while feeling a stranger’s breath on your neck on a packed rush-hour train,” as if that were a good thing. Even so, the stark economic realities forced him out of the city as the banzai adventure years of his mid-20s drew to a close.

“New York makes it easy to forget that many Americans would probably find paying $950 for a 10-by-10 room overlooking garbage cans either unaffordable or unappealing, or both,” wrote Mr. Jefferson, who added that sometimes he was “so broke that a $3 falafel” from Oasis in Williamsburg “was all I’d eat for a day.”

(His description called to mind another widely linked article from The Onion in 2010: “8.4 Million New Yorkers Suddenly Realize New York City A Horrible Place To Live.” “At 4:32 p.m. Tuesday,” the article read, “every single resident of New York City decided to evacuate the famed metropolis, having realized it was nothing more than a massive, trash-ridden hellhole that slowly sucks the life out of every one of its inhabitants.”)

Money is not just crowding out writers; it is crowding out ideas, according to Mr. Sullivan. “If you think you’ll find intellectual stimulation, you’re thinking of another era,” he wrote. “The conversations are invariably about money or property or schools. I’ve never been more bored by casual chat.”

No less a New Yorker than David Byrne — Mr. Talking Heads, Mr. Downtown — threatened to bolt the city he epitomizes in a much-discussed Guardian essay if it continues to morph into a clubhouse for money shufflers, like Hong Kong or Abu Dhabi. “Those places might have museums, but they don’t have culture,” he wrote. “Ugh. If New York goes there — more than it already has — I’m leaving.”

No wonder that Sari Botton, who edited the anthology, titled her own essay in the book “Real Estate.” The essay recounts how she was forced to bolt upstate in 2005 after the rent on her below-market loft on Avenue B tripled, to $6,600, and was rented out to a movie star.

“A really big factor in why I did this book now is that more and more people are finding they can’t afford to live in New York if they’re in a creative field,” Ms. Botton said.

In an era when rents are spiking, book advances shrinking and magazines shuttering, New York may no longer be a necessary destination for the young writer, she acknowledged. It may not even be a feasible one.

“If you are a young writer,” she added, “you’re going to have to share an apartment with a number of people, you’re not going to have any privacy, you’re barely going to be able to make a living in whatever job you’re going to get. It’s just not conducive to a creative life.”

In a more innocent era, it seems, writers chose the moment in life that they were ready to serve the city its “Dear John” letter. These days, New York is likely to dump them first.

Perhaps the next anthology will be titled simply “Good Riddance.”

An article last Sunday about writers whose love of New York City has soured misstated the location of the Oasis restaurant in Brooklyn in a quotation from the writer Cord Jefferson. It is on North Seventh Street, not North Sixth Street.

When we learn of a mistake, we acknowledge it with a correction. If you spot an error, please let us know at [email protected] . Learn more

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Goodbye to All That: Writers on Loving and Leaving New York

By maria popova.

The magnificent Cheryl “Sugar” Strayed — one of the finest hearts, minds, and keyboards of our time, whose Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar is an existential must and was among the best psychology and philosophy books of 2012 — had a rude awakening to NYC. On the warm September afternoon of her twenty-fourth birthday, she saw a man get stabbed in the West Village. He didn’t die, but the shock of it — and the shock of the general bystander-indifference as a waiter assuringly said to her, “I wouldn’t worry about it,” while pouring her another cup of coffee on the sunny sidelines — planted the seed of slow-growing, poisonous worry about the greater It of it. Strayed writes:

I couldn’t keep myself from thinking everything in New York was superior to every other place I’d ever been, which hadn’t been all that many places. I was stunned by New York. Its grand parks and museums. Its cozy cobbled streets and dazzlingly bright thoroughfares. Its alternately efficient and appalling subway system. Its endlessly gorgeous women clad in slim pants and killer shoes and interesting coats. And yet something happened on my way to falling head over heels in love with the place. Maybe it was the man getting stabbed that no one worried about. Or maybe it was bigger than that. The abruptness, the gruffness, the avoid-eye-contact indifference of the crowded subways and streets felt as foreign to me as Japan or Cameroon, as alien to me as Mars. Even the couple who owned the bodega below our apartment greeted my husband and me each day as if we were complete strangers, which is to say they didn’t greet us at all, no matter how many times we came in to buy toilet paper or soup, cat food or pasta. They merely took our money and returned our change with gestures so automatic and faces so expressionless they might as well have been robots. … This tiny thing … grew to feel like the greatest New York City crime of all, to be denied the universal silent acknowledgment of familiarity, the faintest smile, the hint of a nod.

That realization was the beginning of the end. On a cold February afternoon, Strayed and her husband began packing their New York lives into a double-parked pickup truck. They were done after dark, long after they had anticipated — for living in New York is the art of transmuting a shoebox into a bottomless pit of stuff, only to have it unravel into a black hole of time-space that swallows you whole each time you move shoeboxes — and all that remained was that odd morning-after emptiness of feeling, which Strayed captures with her characteristic blunt elegance:

I’d entered the city the way one enters any grand love affair: with no exit plan. I went willing to live there forever, to become one of the women clad in slim pants and killer shoes and interesting coats. I was ready for the city to sweep me into its arms, but instead it held me at a cool distance. And so I left New York the way one leaves a love affair too: because, much as I loved it, I wasn’t truly in love. I had no compelling reason to stay.

Dani Shapiro , author of the freshly released and wonderful Still Writing: The Pleasures and Perils of a Creative Life — had a rather different experience:

The city, was what people from New Jersey called it. The city, as if there were no other. If you were a suburban Jewish girl in the late 1970s, aching to burst out of the tepid swamp of your adolescence (synagogue! field hockey! cigarettes!), the magnetic pull of the city from across the water was irresistible. Between you and the city were the smokestacks of Newark, the stench of oil refineries, the soaring Budweiser eagle, its lit-up wings flapping high above the manufacturing plant. That eagle — if you were a certain kind of girl, you wanted to leap on its neon back and be carried away. On weekend trips into the city, you’d watch from the backseat of your parents’ car for the line in the Lincoln Tunnel that divided New Jersey from New York, because you felt dead on one side, and alive on the other.

She moved to the alive side at nineteen, to live with a boyfriend she soon married, only to find herself divorced at twenty. (“How many people can claim that?,” Shapiro asks clearly rhetorically — and, clearly, she’d be surprised.) Now, thirty years later, she has a Dear Me moment as she looks back:

I wish I could reach back through time and shake some sense into that lost little girl. I wish I could tell her to wait, to hold on. That becoming a grown-up is not something that happens overnight, or on paper. That rings and certificates and apartments and meals have nothing to do with it. That everything we do matters. Wait , I want to say — but she is impatient, racing ahead of me.

And though she became a writer — a Writer in the City — Shapiro found herself strangely, subtly, yet palpably unfitted for the kind of life the city required:

I could lecture on metaphor; I could teach graduate students; I could locate and deconstruct the animal imagery in Madame Bovary . But I could not squash a water bug by myself. The practicalities of life eluded me. The city — which I knew with the intimacy of a lover — made it very possible to continue like this, carried along on a stream of light, motion, energy, noise. The city was a bracing wind that never stopped blowing, and I was a lone leaf slapped up against the side of a building, a hydrant, a tree.

Writing now from her small study in scenic Connecticut, two hours north of the city, she reflects on her choice to leave after — and despite — having attained her teenage dream:

My city broke its promise to me, and I to it. I fell out of love, and then I fell back in — with my small town, its winding country roads, and the ladies at the post office who know my name. I did my best to become the airbrushed girl on its billboards, but even airbrushed girls grow up. We soften over time, or maybe harden. One way or another, life will have its way with us.

Roxane Gay , author of the beautiful Ayiti , recalls her first impressions of New York as a child in Queens — its city-street grit, its Broadway glitter, its daily human tragedies and triumphs unfolding on every corner. Above all, however, the city sang its siren song of unlimited diversity and unconditional acceptance to her — a young black girl with an artistic bend — as she became obsessed with attending college there:

If I went to school in New York, surely all my problems would be solved. I would learn how to be chic and glamorous. I would learn how to walk fast and wear all black without looking like I was attending a funeral. In adolescence, I was becoming a different kind of stranger in a strange land. I was a theater geek and troubled and angry and hell-bent on forgetting the worst parts of myself. In New York, I told myself, I would no longer be the only freak in the room because the city was full of freaks.

But despite being admitted into NYU — her most dreamsome fulfillment of idyllic fantasy — her parents had their doubts about the city’s dangers and distractions, so they sent her to a prestigious school a few hours away. And yet Gay continued to fuel the fantasy of New York’s make-or-break magic wand of success — a fantasy especially entertained by aspiring writers:

New York City is the center of the writing world, or so we’re told. New York is where all the action happens because the city is where the most important publishers and agents and writers are. New York is where the fancy book parties happen and where the literati rub elbows and everyone knows (or pretends to know) everything about everyone else’s writing career. At some point, New York stopped being the city of my dreams because it stopped being merely an idea I longed to be a part of. New York was very real and very complicated. New York had become an intimidating giant of a place, but still I worried. If I wasn’t there as a writer, was I a writer anywhere?

And yet she did became a writer — a great one — even though she left the fairy Gotham godmother for a tiny Midwestern town, where she now teaches, writes, and revels in the unconditional unfanciness and comforting underwhelmingness of it all. After a recent visit to the city to meet with her agent — for though a Real Writer may live anywhere, a Real Writer’s agent invariably lives in New York — she reflects:

New York was a strange land, and I was still a stranger and would always be one. Overall, that visit was fun. The city was good to me and I looked forward to returning and soon. But. There was nothing for me to say goodbye to in New York because I never truly said hello. I became a writer without all the glamorous or anti-glamorous trappings of New York life I thought I needed.

Goodbye to All That: Writers on Loving and Leaving New York is an exquisite read in its entirety and a wonderful addition to these 10 favorite nonfiction reads on NYC . For an antidote, complement it with some cartographic love letters to the city from those who decided to stay and the mixed experiences of those who came and went.

— Published October 9, 2013 — https://www.themarginalian.org/2013/10/09/goodbye-to-all-that-book/ —

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Joan Didion, 'Goodbye to All That' and the struggle to see yourself clearly

Anyone who's completed the climb out of their early twenties hopefully has the wits to remember when life was as vivid as Kodachrome and the experience to recognize that perhaps all those new colors were duller than they seemed. Perspective, after all, is one of the great pleasures of getting older. But at the date of her death Thursday at the age of 87, Joan Didion's 1967 essay "Goodbye to All That" remains the permanent sunspot obscuring the center-vision of many maturing writers even contemplating leaving a place like New York and telling other people about it. Only a great artist creates and ruins a genre at the same time. For millennial writers who grew into the body of essays, novels and literary journalism Didion already had waiting for them, it was like sitting down to grainy footage of a party that ended long before they would ever arrive.

Re-reading "Goodbye to All That" today — in the era of online, shortform oversharing — it's striking to a contemporary reader how those 1967 sentences trail on and curl over themselves, like smoke lifting off a cigarette in a breezeless room. "When I first saw New York I was twenty, and it was summertime, and I got off a DC-7 at the old Idlewild temporary terminal in a new dress which had seemed very smart in Sacramento but seemed less smart already, even in the old Idlewild temporary terminal, and the warm air smelled of mildew and some instinct, programmed by all the movies I had ever seen and all the songs I had ever sung and all the stories I had ever read about New York, informed me that it would never quite be the same again," Didion writes in an opening sentence of the piece. "In fact it never was." That first sentence has six commas and six and s. It then lands with the kind of five-word Didionism that marked her career's dehumidified approach to writing and evaluating her own experiences.

A certain degree of ruthlessness with yourself conveys honesty, and it's true that some naivete comes with being young. But not everybody might be so hard on themselves when it comes time to take stock of getting older. "Was anyone ever so young?" Didion wonders, recalling how she was afraid to call a hotel front desk to turn down the air conditioning when she was frigid, feverish and alone. "I am here to tell you that someone was. All I could do during those three days was talk long-distance to the boy I already knew I would never marry in the spring." A husband shows up, along with some furniture, after Didion film-dissolves through a couple pages of life in minimally furnished apartments and all-night parties with strange piano salesmen and various failed writers and self-promoters of her acquaintance.

The essay is so classically a New York story, a journal entry about an outlander's temporary harmonic alignment with a place that most Americans only recognize from their televisions. But the most universal appeal of "Goodbye to All That" is less about New York than its depiction of youth itself, the only city we've all lived in. "I had a friend who could not sleep, and he knew a few other people who had the same trouble, and we would watch the sky lighten and have a last drink with no ice and then go home in the early morning light, when the streets were clean and wet (had it rained in the night? we never knew) and the few cruising taxis still had their headlights on and the only color was the red and green of traffic signals." Think about the last time you really admired the violence of how a stoplight red looks against wet pavement on an empty street. After a while, you realize that's just how the world looks when you're alone.

Looking back, Didion seems frustrated that she couldn't see herself clearly, couldn't more sharply perceive at the time that being wowed has a natural expiration date that was rapidly approaching. "You see I was in a curious position in New York: it never occurred to me that I was living a real life there," she writes. "In my imagination I was always there for just another few months, just until Christmas or Easter or the first warm day in May." She stayed eight years.

Eventually she got tired. Many do. Finally, Didion left for Los Angeles, where the essay wraps up so suddenly that the white space arrives with the stopping power you'd meet in an electric fence. "The golden rhythm was broken," she shrugs. After her essay appeared in the Saturday Evening Post and her book "Slouching Towards Bethlehem," Didion went on to have a distinguished career, which included a lot of formidable books, including 2005's classic "The Year of Magical Thinking," a painful memoir about grieving the sudden death of her husband, John Gregory Dunne. "It was in fact the ordinary nature of everything preceding the event that prevented me from truly believing it had happened, absorbing it, incorporating it, getting past it," she writes of his death. Almost 40 years later, there she was, still struggling to perceive herself clearly, while offering herself to readers to be seen.

It takes time to see clearly after a departure. She knew that.

This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times .

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The Uses of Disenchantment: A New Generation of Writers on Loving and Leaving New York

Didion moved to New York as a starry-eyed 20 year old — “was anyone ever that young? I am here to tell you that someone was” — and spent eight years in love with the city before her enchantment was replaced by exhaustion and despair. By the time she turned 28, she writes, “I was discovering that not all of the promises would be kept, that some things are in fact irrevocable and that it had counted after all, every evasion and every procrastination, every mistake, every word, all of it.”

In the years between her arrival at the bus station in a smart new dress and her departure for Los Angeles, Didion stayed out all night and went to lots of parties and was struck by her share of indelible moments. She met everyone there was to meet and skulked around her under-furnished apartment, whose windows she had hung (foolishly, and therefore glamorously) with “fifty yards of yellow theatrical silk.” The longer she stayed, though, the more depressed and impatient she got. None of it felt worthwhile, except as material for the deeply romantic cautionary tale that became “Goodbye to All That.”

As laid out by Didion and the anthology’s contributors, it happens like this: First there’s anticipation, imagining how your life will finally make sense when you arrive. The actual experience of living here is one of finding your place, followed by an intense feeling of ownership. You can stay at that point for years. But eventually, sometimes without knowing it, you begin the slow slide toward a moment of decisiveness. Sometime after that, there’s the actual leaving. And then, the having left. Living in New York turns out to be a process of earning nostalgia — hoarding enough memories to give you the kind of claim on a place that makes it possible to leave it. When you reach your limit and set out elsewhere, memories are your consolation prize. (Bonus points for writing about them.)

If you’re tired of hearing about how New York is the center of the universe, you’re not alone. Even those of us who live here and love it get annoyed at the relentless fascination with the city, the way people project so much onto it and then feel betrayed when it doesn’t live up to their expectations. ( Emma Straub , who grew up here, captures this tension nicely in her essay, writing, “because my hometown is New York City, everyone else thinks it belongs to them, too.”) But even in basic ways, the city is still special enough to justify the fixation. It’s concentrated. It’s diverse. It’s where a lot of important things have happened and influential people have lived, and so it is full of history and legend. It’s a place of ideals, “where anything is possible.” And yet it’s also a place of limits, one people leave when their desire for more space or stability — or very often, a family — begins to clash with reality.

It’s not clear how much it matters that Didion’s disillusionment unfolded in New York. There are things about the city that can hasten that feeling, but “Goodbye to All That” doesn’t focus on them. Still, the essay is so inextricable from its setting that when she writes, “Of course it might have been some other city, had circumstances been different and the time been different and had I been different, might have been Paris or Chicago or even San Francisco, but because I am talking about myself I am talking here about New York,” it’s not entirely convincing. The anthologized writers, for the most part, are talking very specifically about New York: its pressures, disappointments, contradictions, cross-streets, and clichés. And they tend to reinforce time-honored New York mythology rather than complicating it. The question of whether or not New York should matter is overwhelmed by the extent to which it plainly does.

In these pages, New York is “the one that got away” and “love at first sight.” It’s personified as a drug, and a seductress. We read about day-to-day things: tiny apartments and crappy jobs and drinking too much. Residents’ (overstated) preference for wearing black, the competing smells of roasting nuts and sweltering garbage — the word “urine” comes up regularly — and the annoyance of shopping for groceries without a car. Some of the writers here have left New York only to return, others have left for good (at least so far). Some are wistful, others recall their time in the city with relief that it’s over. They note the ways New York has changed, and how they’ve changed along with it, in one case raging at the city for not being as cool as it once was. Some say they left because they couldn’t be their “true self” here. Others leave, only to return because they realize this is the only place that thee authentic self can thrive.

Many of them come to New York, as contributor Marie Myung-Ok Lee observes, “with an inchoate sense that writers went there and then stuff happened.” That stuff, they hope, will include excitement and inspiration and connections and book deals, seasoned with just enough struggle to make the whole thing feel raw and real and earned. All of the writers in Botton’s anthology have stories to tell about their lives in New York, things that happened to them here that they’ll forever associate with this place. But then other things happen. Relationships end and rents rise and favorite restaurants close and jobs are lost, and the whole city loses its luster. Those things become stories, too — and in some cases, reasons to live their next chapter somewhere else.

A number of the essays here are thoughtful and vivid, though the anthology as a whole is undercut by repetition. Elisa Albert , who now lives in Albany, N.Y., brings a rare sense of urgency to her essay about coming to terms with her new home. “You actually love it here, it turns out,” she insists, speaking to the difficulty of making her mark in the city she left behind. “Look closely: it’s a promising place…Put your money and effort and energy here , where it’s possible to make a dent.” Melissa Febos , back in New York after a stint upstate, reflects, “Leaving gets harder as you age. You don’t leave out of anger or from coming to your senses, but because your love is not as a strong as your reasons for going.” Roxane Gay grew up fantasizing about living in New York, until she realized she didn’t actually want to: “I had learned the difference between being a writer, which can happen anywhere, and performing the role of Writer, which in my very specific and detailed fantasies could only happen in New York.”

It helps to see New York in contrast to places these writers lived before and after: among them two Portlands (Maine and Oregon), Madison, Wisconsin; a nameless town in Connecticut, Moscow, Paris, and Montreal. One of the best essays comes from Ruth Curry , whose story begins and ends in New York but otherwise unfolds in Christchurch, New Zealand, where Curry moved to be with a boyfriend. The unraveling of their relationship is spurred on by Curry’s status as a foreigner, a resident of an objectively beautiful place where “differences were not so much differences as they were inversions or transpositions just similar enough to fool you into thinking nothing had changed.”

Fittingly, Meghan Daum’s essay “My Misspent Youth” is reprinted here. First published in The New Yorker in 1999, Daum’s unsparing look at how the dream of New York is undone by the all too real cost of living in it has become a kind of next-generation “Goodbye to All That.” Introducing the piece in this collection, Daum says that she regularly hears from people who just discovered her essay for the first time and “felt it to be describing his or her own life…and grieved alongside me for a version of New York — and by extension, a version of adulthood, of being human, or being alive — that was discontinued long ago and may have, in fact, never been the commodity we like to crack it up to be.”

Disenchantment is remarkably consistent across generations, so “Goodbye to All That” invites endless imitation even as it’s praised for being timeless. Reading Didion’s essay today, it’s easy to think nothing has really changed since 1967. Whether you find that comforting or troubling will depend in part on your capacity for moving on — which might have something to do with the amount of time you’ve spent living in New York.

Eryn Loeb lives in New York, where she writes a lot about nostalgia and old things. Follow her on Twitter @erynloeb .

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Goodbye to All That (Revised Edition): Writers on Loving and Leaving New York Paperback – April 6, 2021

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• Print length 368 pages
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• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Seal Press; 2nd edition (April 6, 2021)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 368 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1541675681
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1541675681
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 11.2 ounces
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.5 x 1.35 x 8.2 inches
• #225 in Travelogues & Travel Essays
• #289 in Essays (Books)
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About the author

Sari botton.

Sari Botton is a writer, editor, and teacher living in Kingston, NY. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times and many other publications. She edited the award-winning anthology "Goodbye to All That: Writers on Loving & Leaving NY" and its New York Times bestselling follow-up, "Never Can Say Goodbye: Writers on Their Unshakable Love for NY" and for five years served as Essays Editor at Longreads. She teaches creative nonfiction courses at Catapult and in the MFA program at Bay Path University.

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Joan Didion in The New Yorker

The novelist and essayist Joan Didion has died, at the age of eighty-seven, after a battle with Parkinson’s disease. The author of sixteen books, including “ Slouching Towards Bethlehem ” and “ The Year of Magical Thinking ,” Didion established a deeply personal literary style that influenced a generation of journalists and critics. Her essay “Goodbye to All That” became a touchstone for those dealing with feelings of dislocation and ambivalence about New York City. (Didion, famously, left.)

Didion began writing for The New Yorker , from her native California, in 1988, contributing a regular column about politics and culture in her home state. Her dispatches, which ran under the rubric Letter from Los Angeles, combined meticulous prose with arresting insights about everything from the ravages of wildfires to the consequential history of the Los Angeles Times . Didion’s missives were keenly observant, full of language that cut like a skean. Two of my favorite Didion pieces are a riveting Profile of Martha Stewart , published in 2000, and an immersive essay on the Spur Posse scandal , in Lakewood, California, published in 1993. Both reveal Didion’s incisive, exacting approach to her subjects. Assessing the business mogul four years before her conviction for obstruction of justice in an insider-trading scandal, Didion dissects the complex feminist sensibility behind Stewart’s self-presentation as an “Everywoman” domestic goddess. “This is the ‘woman’s pluck’ story, the dust-bowl story, the burying-your-child-on-the-trail story, the I-will-never-go-hungry-again story, the Mildred Pierce story, the story about how the sheer nerve of even professionally unskilled women can prevail, show the men; the story that has historically encouraged women in this country, even as it has threatened men,” she writes.

One of Didion’s great gifts was an ability to see the story behind the story—to crack the enigmas stitched into individual lives. In her report on the Spur Posse, she takes a small-town scandal involving sexual violence by teen-age gang members and explodes it into a bristling opus about gender politics and the corrosion of the suburban middle class. “When times were good and there was money to spread around, these were the towns that proved Marx wrong, that managed to increase the proletariat and simultaneously, by calling it middle class, to co-opt it,” she writes. “When towns like these came on hard times, it was their adolescent males, only recently the community’s most valued asset, who were most visibly left with nowhere to go.”

Didion’s essays are indelible portraits of events and figures that, for good or ill, shaped American culture. Her pieces linger with us, continuing to unfurl crisp new layers of discovery at every turn. We’ve collected a few of her articles from our archive and listed them below.

—Erin Overbey, archive editor

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Saying goodbye to New York

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We don’t often think of it that way, but New York is a city for the young. There’s something about its myth, its promise, and also about its hardness; it lures us and then it breaks our will. This is the point of Joan Didion’s 1967 essay “Goodbye to All That” (published in her landmark collection “Slouching Towards Bethlehem”); “All I mean is that I was very young in New York,” she writes, “and that at some point the golden rhythm was broken, and I am not that young anymore.”

Didion’s line serves as the epigraph for “Goodbye to All That: Writers on Loving and Leaving New York” (Seal Press: 270 pp., $16 paper), edited by Sari Botton and featuring essays by 28 writers including Hope Edelman, Roxane Gay, Dani Shapiro, Rebecca Wolff, Meghan Daum and Cheryl Strayed. In many ways, it can be read as a follow-up to Kathleen Norris’ 1995 anthology “Leaving New York: Writers Look Back,” which reprinted, along with work by Frank Conroy, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Mona Simpson, the original Didion piece, although that book took a more historical overview.

Both collections get at the sense of hope (or ambition) with which New York seduces us, as well as how living in the city can turn, leaving us with wistfulness and regret. I am, I should admit, very susceptible to such a message; as a native New Yorker, I know firsthand the highs and lows of living in the city; I left, also, in my late 20s, although to this day, I continue to feel its pull.

And yet, I’m no longer very young, which is why, perhaps, I relate most viscerally to the writers in “Goodbye to All That” I have mentioned, to their experience and their years. When Edelman tells us, “I felt certain I’d cycle back some day: it didn’t seem possible for me to ever break free of New York’s gravitational pull. But married life developed its own momentum,” I know exactly what she means. I, too, came to California for a couple of years at most – a couple of years that have now lasted longer than two decades.

And when Ann Hood describes, in her magnificent “Manhattan, Always Out of Reach,” the experience of losing her 5-year-old daughter Grace to “a virulent form of strep,” she exposes the key lie we tell ourselves about iconic places: that they will save us, protect us, in some way, from ourselves. “New York didn’t matter,” Hood writes of the aftermath of Grace’s dying. “Nothing mattered.... I locked myself in my bedroom and thought, I will never leave here .”

Unfortunately, such depth is missing from a lot of “Goodbye to All That,” which in places reads like a scrapbook of notes about New York as fantasy turned sour. Too many of the essays are too similar, too safe, reflections on the desire to become a writer, on living in a small apartment, or the realization that, as Didion so brilliantly put it, “not all of the promises would be kept, that some things are in fact irrevocable and that it had counted after all, every evasion and every procrastination, every mistake, every word, all of it.”

That’s a tricky but essential point, and it infuses Didion’s essay with a sense not just of loss but also of inevitability, of the innocence that living strips away. Still, for all that they refer back to her – Didion’s name comes up in most of these pieces – too much of the writing here does not share her depth.

That’s because so many of the contributors seem inexperienced somehow, lacking perspective, as it were. This leaves their work unsettled, a litany of impressions – “Even before I’d ever set foot on its teeming streets,” Marie Myung-Ok Lee declares in “Misfits Fit Here,” “New York City represented to me the perfect place” – that feel less lived than received. What they lack is Didion’s sense of tragic understanding, her recognition that the lesson of her time in the city “was that it was distinctly possible to stay too long at the Fair.”

Does this seem unfair? Perhaps. But “Goodbye to All That” begs such comparisons by setting itself up as a response.

“Maybe you’ll be an actress. Maybe you’ll do stand-up.... maybe you’ll wear intense glasses and make dramatic proclamations into a swank office telephone,” Elisa Albert writes in “Currency” – one of the strongest essays in the collection because of its longing for “the reckless girl” the author once was.

In the end, though – and despite the good stuff – not enough of the work here feels quite reckless enough.

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David L. Ulin is the former book critic of the Los Angeles Times. A 2015 Guggenheim Fellow, he is the author or editor of nine books, including “Sidewalking: Coming to Terms with Los Angeles,” the novella “Labyrinth,” “The Lost Art of Reading: Why Books Matter in a Distracted Time” and the Library of America’s “Writing Los Angeles: A Literary Anthology,” which won a California Book Award. He left The Times in 2015.

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