There are many writers that I love.

Writers that change how I see the world and how I approach expression.

Their words feel like invitations to far away places.

But there is one whose words feel like home. When I read them, I drink them. They feel as if they could be my own. They don’t change how I see the world, they reflect it. I am, of course, talking about Joan Didion. But namely, about her essay Goodbye to All That (1967).

JOAN DIDION

I first read this essay when I was nineteen and getting ready to visit New York alone for the first time.

It was May. I remember sitting in my apartment in California and getting chills as I read the lines “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,”. She continues, “In retrospect it seems to me that those days before I knew the names of all the bridges were happier than the ones that came later, but perhaps you will see that as we go along”.

And see as I went along, I did.

By the end, tears were falling down my face. I felt as if Didion had cut me open and explained everything that was inside of me better than I ever could. It was like hearing my own innermost thoughts, desires and fears, all from the mouth of a stranger. Other writers, they show you the inside of their minds. But Didion, she showed me the inside of mine.

GOODBYE TO ALL THAT ESSAY ANALYSIS

She begins by describing how New York felt on her skin the very first time it touched her and how she knew with a strange certainty that it would never feel exactly that way again. She was right, of course. The rest of the essay details her kaleidoscopic memories of being very young and very in love with a city that she did not yet know would not always feel so impossibly bright. She writes of Park Avenue and Sixty-second Street as if they were old lovers and how when walking with them, “Nothing was irrevocable; [and] everything was within reach.”.

As the essay unravels, so too does Didion’s youthful, dreamy tone. You watch as little by little, her love for the city disintegrates until it is falling like dust through her fingertips that are reaching back towards California. New York becomes a place she used to know; a place she would always love, but in memory. For as beautiful and bright as it might be, “it is distinctly possible to stay too long at the Fair”.

I love this essay because it captures the feeling of being young and in love with New York. It captures how when you are twenty, you’re starving and New York is like a sandwich that you can barely begin to wrap your hands around. You think you can eat it all. You want it consume it and have it become a part of you. But as you eat, tearing bits and pieces apart until you can see exactly what everything is made of, it becomes disassembled, spread out, and all over your hands. You grow satiated. You realize that you can’t eat all of it and that you perhaps simply don’t want to anymore.

LOVING NEW YORK

That part breaks my heart. I like to pretend it’s not true. I, like every other writer in love with New York, like to imagine that I will never grow up and out of the youthful infatuation for this new place of possibility. But I’m twenty and starving and “It is easy to see the beginnings of things, and harder to see the ends”. I have yet to even begin eating, let alone imagine walking away from the table. But that’s okay. That’s how it’s supposed to be.

I dated a guy who loathed my obsession with New York. He would always find ways to put it down and to place California on an eternal pedestal, one that I should never leave. He knew that I planned to move there and it seemed to gnaw at him. He would joke about it being cold and harsh and crowded. He would shame it for lacking wilderness, for being something else. And I would laugh, never needing him to understand. And I never thought anything of it, until I was breaking up with him and he looked right at me and said he just had one thing to ask: “Why New York?”.

At the time, I was thrown off. It wasn’t his job to believe in my dreams, it was mine. So what right did he have to question them?

But looking back, I see that I was sure about New York in all the ways that he wanted me to be sure about him. New York was his competition, and for the life of him, he couldn’t understand why he lost.

Why would I leave Southern California for that concrete jungle of invariable heartbreak? I didn’t have an answer that would satisfy him, and I don’t think I ever will. For unless you are so unlucky as to fall in love with an amalgamation of concrete and glass, it will never make any sense. So I walked away, realizing what he seemed to have understood all along: that I chose New York. And that is a decision that I can only logically explain through a piece like Goodbye to All That.

FURTHER READING

I am not the only one who has felt this way, for two books have been published in honor of this singular piece. Each one is a collection of essays that writers composed from their own experiences of “loving and leaving New York”, as inspired by Didion herself. Edited by Sari Botton, they can be found here and here, and are some of my favorite indulgences.

While each one is about New York, they can all be placed in the larger context of saying goodbye to anything that you once loved with a passion that you thought could go on forever. For we are always stretching love out like taffy, wishing it could never end.

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