joan didion 1967 essay goodbye to all that

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

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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.

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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.

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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.

Remembering Joan Didion: A look back at her writing, interviews and more

The celebrated prose stylist, novelist and screenwriter who chronicled American culture and consciousness died Dec. 23 at 87.

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Matt Pearce was a reporter for the Los Angeles Times from 2012 to 2024. He previously covered the covering internet culture and podcasting, the 2020 presidential election and spent six years on The Times’ national desk, where he wrote stories about violence, disasters, social movements and civil liberties. Pearce was one of the first national reporters to arrive in Ferguson, Mo., during the uprising in 2014, and he chased Hurricane Harvey across Texas as the storm ravaged the Lone Star State in 2017. A University of Missouri graduate, he hails from a small town outside Kansas City, Mo.

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Read 12 Masterful Essays by Joan Didion for Free Online, Spanning Her Career From 1965 to 2013

in Literature , Writing | January 14th, 2014 3 Comments

Image by David Shankbone, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

In a clas­sic essay of Joan Didion’s, “Good­bye to All That,” the nov­el­ist and writer breaks into her narrative—not for the first or last time—to prod her read­er. She rhetor­i­cal­ly asks and answers: “…was any­one ever so young? I am here to tell you that some­one was.” The wry lit­tle moment is per­fect­ly indica­tive of Didion’s unspar­ing­ly iron­ic crit­i­cal voice. Did­ion is a con­sum­mate crit­ic, from Greek kritēs , “a judge.” But she is always fore­most a judge of her­self. An account of Didion’s eight years in New York City, where she wrote her first nov­el while work­ing for Vogue , “Good­bye to All That” fre­quent­ly shifts point of view as Did­ion exam­ines the truth of each state­ment, her prose mov­ing seam­less­ly from delib­er­a­tion to com­men­tary, anno­ta­tion, aside, and apho­rism, like the below:

I want to explain to you, and in the process per­haps to myself, why I no longer live in New York. It is often said that New York is a city for only the very rich and the very poor. It is less often said that New York is also, at least for those of us who came there from some­where else, a city only for the very young.

Any­one who has ever loved and left New York—or any life-alter­ing city—will know the pangs of res­ig­na­tion Did­ion cap­tures. These eco­nom­ic times and every oth­er pro­duce many such sto­ries. But Did­ion made some­thing entire­ly new of famil­iar sen­ti­ments. Although her essay has inspired a sub-genre , and a col­lec­tion of breakup let­ters to New York with the same title, the unsen­ti­men­tal pre­ci­sion and com­pact­ness of Didion’s prose is all her own.

The essay appears in 1967’s Slouch­ing Towards Beth­le­hem , a rep­re­sen­ta­tive text of the lit­er­ary non­fic­tion of the six­ties along­side the work of John McPhee, Ter­ry South­ern, Tom Wolfe, and Hunter S. Thomp­son. In Didion’s case, the empha­sis must be decid­ed­ly on the lit­er­ary —her essays are as skill­ful­ly and imag­i­na­tive­ly writ­ten as her fic­tion and in close con­ver­sa­tion with their autho­r­i­al fore­bears. “Good­bye to All That” takes its title from an ear­li­er mem­oir, poet and crit­ic Robert Graves’ 1929 account of leav­ing his home­town in Eng­land to fight in World War I. Didion’s appro­pri­a­tion of the title shows in part an iron­ic under­cut­ting of the mem­oir as a seri­ous piece of writ­ing.

And yet she is per­haps best known for her work in the genre. Pub­lished almost fifty years after Slouch­ing Towards Beth­le­hem , her 2005 mem­oir The Year of Mag­i­cal Think­ing is, in poet Robert Pinsky’s words , a “traveler’s faith­ful account” of the stun­ning­ly sud­den and crush­ing per­son­al calami­ties that claimed the lives of her hus­band and daugh­ter sep­a­rate­ly. “Though the mate­r­i­al is lit­er­al­ly ter­ri­ble,” Pin­sky writes, “the writ­ing is exhil­a­rat­ing and what unfolds resem­bles an adven­ture nar­ra­tive: a forced expe­di­tion into those ‘cliffs of fall’ iden­ti­fied by Hop­kins.” He refers to lines by the gift­ed Jesuit poet Ger­ard Man­ley Hop­kins that Did­ion quotes in the book: “O the mind, mind has moun­tains; cliffs of fall / Fright­ful, sheer, no-man-fath­omed. Hold them cheap / May who ne’er hung there.”

The near­ly unim­peach­ably author­i­ta­tive ethos of Didion’s voice con­vinces us that she can fear­less­ly tra­verse a wild inner land­scape most of us triv­i­al­ize, “hold cheap,” or can­not fath­om. And yet, in a 1978 Paris Review inter­view , Didion—with that tech­ni­cal sleight of hand that is her casu­al mastery—called her­self “a kind of appren­tice plumber of fic­tion, a Cluny Brown at the writer’s trade.” Here she invokes a kind of arche­type of lit­er­ary mod­esty (John Locke, for exam­ple, called him­self an “under­labour­er” of knowl­edge) while also fig­ur­ing her­self as the win­some hero­ine of a 1946 Ernst Lubitsch com­e­dy about a social climber plumber’s niece played by Jen­nifer Jones, a char­ac­ter who learns to thumb her nose at pow­er and priv­i­lege.

A twist of fate—interviewer Lin­da Kuehl’s death—meant that Did­ion wrote her own intro­duc­tion to the Paris Review inter­view, a very unusu­al occur­rence that allows her to assume the role of her own inter­preter, offer­ing iron­ic prefa­to­ry remarks on her self-under­stand­ing. After the intro­duc­tion, it’s dif­fi­cult not to read the inter­view as a self-inter­ro­ga­tion. Asked about her char­ac­ter­i­za­tion of writ­ing as a “hos­tile act” against read­ers, Did­ion says, “Obvi­ous­ly I lis­ten to a read­er, but the only read­er I hear is me. I am always writ­ing to myself. So very pos­si­bly I’m com­mit­ting an aggres­sive and hos­tile act toward myself.”

It’s a curi­ous state­ment. Didion’s cut­ting wit and fear­less vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty take in seem­ing­ly all—the expans­es of her inner world and polit­i­cal scan­dals and geopo­lit­i­cal intrigues of the out­er, which she has dis­sect­ed for the bet­ter part of half a cen­tu­ry. Below, we have assem­bled a selec­tion of Didion’s best essays online. We begin with one from Vogue :

“On Self Respect” (1961)

Didion’s 1979 essay col­lec­tion The White Album brought togeth­er some of her most tren­chant and search­ing essays about her immer­sion in the coun­ter­cul­ture, and the ide­o­log­i­cal fault lines of the late six­ties and sev­en­ties. The title essay begins with a gem­like sen­tence that became the title of a col­lec­tion of her first sev­en vol­umes of non­fic­tion : “We tell our­selves sto­ries in order to live.” Read two essays from that col­lec­tion below:

“ The Women’s Move­ment ” (1972)

“ Holy Water ” (1977)

Did­ion has main­tained a vig­or­ous pres­ence at the New York Review of Books since the late sev­en­ties, writ­ing pri­mar­i­ly on pol­i­tics. Below are a few of her best known pieces for them:

“ Insid­er Base­ball ” (1988)

“ Eye on the Prize ” (1992)

“ The Teach­ings of Speak­er Gin­grich ” (1995)

“ Fixed Opin­ions, or the Hinge of His­to­ry ” (2003)

“ Pol­i­tics in the New Nor­mal Amer­i­ca ” (2004)

“ The Case of There­sa Schi­a­vo ” (2005)

“ The Def­er­en­tial Spir­it ” (2013)

“ Cal­i­for­nia Notes ” (2016)

Did­ion con­tin­ues to write with as much style and sen­si­tiv­i­ty as she did in her first col­lec­tion, her voice refined by a life­time of expe­ri­ence in self-exam­i­na­tion and pierc­ing crit­i­cal appraisal. She got her start at Vogue in the late fifties, and in 2011, she pub­lished an auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal essay there that returns to the theme of “yearn­ing for a glam­orous, grown up life” that she explored in “Good­bye to All That.” In “ Sable and Dark Glass­es ,” Didion’s gaze is stead­ier, her focus this time not on the naïve young woman tem­pered and hard­ened by New York, but on her­self as a child “deter­mined to bypass child­hood” and emerge as a poised, self-con­fi­dent 24-year old sophisticate—the per­fect New York­er she nev­er became.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Joan Did­ion Reads From New Mem­oir, Blue Nights, in Short Film Direct­ed by Grif­fin Dunne

30 Free Essays & Sto­ries by David Fos­ter Wal­lace on the Web

10 Free Sto­ries by George Saun­ders, Author of Tenth of Decem­ber , “The Best Book You’ll Read This Year”

Read 18 Short Sto­ries From Nobel Prize-Win­ning Writer Alice Munro Free Online

Josh Jones  is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at  @jdmagness

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Comments (3) |

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Comments (3), 3 comments so far.

“In a clas­sic essay of Joan Didion’s, “Good­bye to All That,” the nov­el­ist and writer breaks into her narrative—not for the first or last time,..”

Dead link to the essay

It should be “Slouch­ing Towards Beth­le­hem,” with the “s” on Towards.

Most of the Joan Did­ion Essay links have pay­walls.

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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.

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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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“Goodbye to All That” by Joan Didion

From the Essays of E.B. White , particularly “Here Is New York” and “Good-bye to Forty-eighth Street,” and a little bit from “On a Florida Key,” I got swept over to this essay, because I wanted to figure out how they did place so particularly. That is, the particularity of a place, but the fact too that it’s so personal, that even the one Florida Key in the one year when White was there is not the same for anyone else as it was for him. I annotated this essay for the place-details Didion uses, and her zooming in and out.

“Goodbye to All That” is about a time in Didion’s life when she had a relationship with a place. She moved to New York City in the mid-1950s, and away again in the mid-1960s; she writes here of New York “beginning” and “ending” for her. The story of the essay is of the way the specialness of the place ended for her, what she could see from one end of the experience that she couldn’t see from the other. It is a fine blend of particular details and of generalities, or philosophical statements, such as: “one of the mixed blessings of being twenty and twenty-one and even twenty-three is the conviction that nothing like this, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, has ever happened to anyone before.” Or, that New York is “a city for only the very young.” There is a definite “Paris is a moveable feast” tone: elegiac, loving of a particular experience indelibly aligned with time and place.

In just over ten pages, Didion memorializes the New York City she loved upon arrival. It is a lovely study of this place, peppered with anecdotes and scenes–parties, snips of dialog–as well as those generalized philosophies; and it retains a feeling of pulled-back nostalgia and reflection. Didion’s choice of details creates that place that is so particular and personal. “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… and the warm air smelled of mildew…” The hotel room in the second paragraph super-cooled to thirty-five degrees, and the young Didion’s fear to call for help “because I did not know how much to tip whoever might come–was anyone ever so young?” (A lovely aside, addressing the reader there, and again maintaining a reflective distance in time.) The bridge viewed from the window. These details continue to make the place of this essay a specific place–the Triborough bridge, all the street names and addresses named as “the Nineties” and “the Eighties”–but they also give it sensory specificity: “I could smell lilac and garbage and expensive perfume.”

I can’t wait to read more Didion. Up next is The White Album .

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Filed under: book reviews | Tagged: creative nonfiction , essays , memoir , nonfiction , sense of place , WVWC MFA reading list |

3 Responses

[…] “Goodbye to All That”, Joan Didion – nonfiction […]

Finally reading this essay after perusing your 2017 best-of list. It’s definitely skilled as you say; and evocative of place, intimately personal. But also so much more; certainly a significant cultural time (with perspective now growing with age) intertwined with timeless youthful naiveté; and the ageless romance of conceived places. It made me think of London or Den Haag, at a particular time.

I also noted clever references, likely the tip of an iceberg I’m missing; e.g. a 60’s Streisand song ‘I Stayed Too Long at the Fair’ or Shakespeare’s ‘canker in the rose’ Sonnet.

I will likely be seeking out the whole essay collection…

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

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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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12 Goodbye to All That by Joan Didion

Goodbye to All That

It is easy to see the beginnings of things, and harder to see the ends. I can remember now, with a clarity that makes the nerves in the back of my neck constrict, when New York began for me, but I cannot lay my finger upon the moment it ended, can never cut through the ambiguities and second starts and broken resolves to the exact place on the page where the heroine is no longer as optimistic as she once was. 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 heard sung and all the stories I had ever read about New York, informed me that it would never be quite the same again. In fact it never was. Some time later there was a song on all the jukeboxes on the Upper East Side that went “but where is the schoolgirl who used to be me,” and if it was late enough at night I used to wonder that. I know now that almost everyone wonders something like that, sooner or later and no matter what he or she is doing, but one of the mixed blessings of being twenty and twenty-one and even twenty-three is the conviction that nothing like this, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, has ever happened to anyone before.

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. That first night I opened my window on the bus into town and watched for the skyline, but all I could see were the wastes of Queens and big signs that said MIDTOWN TUNNEL THIS LANE and then a flood of summer rain (even that seemed remarkable and exotic, for I had come out of the West where there was no summer rain), and for the next three days I sat wrapped in blankets in a hotel room air-conditioned to 35 degrees and tried to get over a bad cold and a high fever. It did not occur to me to call a doctor, because I knew none, and although it did occur to me to call the desk and ask that the air conditioner be turned off, I never called, because I did not know how much to tip whoever might come—was anyone ever so young? 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. I would stay in New York, I told him, just six months, and I could see the Brooklyn Bridge from my window. As it turned out the bridge was the Triborough, and I stayed eight years.

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. Part of what I want to tell you is what it is like to be young in New York, how six months can become eight years with the deceptive ease of a film dissolve, for that is how those years appear to me now, in a long sequence of sentimental dissolves and old-fashioned trick shots—the Seagram Building fountains dissolve into snowflakes, I enter a revolving door at twenty and come out a good deal older, and on a different street. But most particularly I want to explain to you, and in the process perhaps to myself, why I no longer live in New York. It is often said that New York is a city for only the very rich and the very poor. It is less often said that New York is also, at least for those of us who came there from somewhere else, a city only for the very young.

I remember once, one cold bright December evening in New York, suggesting to a friend who complained of having been around too long that he come with me to a party where there would be, I assured him with the bright resourcefulness of twenty-three, “new faces.” He laughed literally until he choked, and I had to roll down the taxi window and hit him on the back. “New faces,” he said finally, “don’t tell me about  new faces. ” It seemed that the last time he had gone to a party where he had been promised “new faces,” there had been fifteen people in the room, and he had already slept with five of the women and owed money to all but two of the men. I laughed with him, but the first snow had just begun to fall and the big Christmas trees glittered yellow and white as far as I could see up Park Avenue and I had a new dress and it would be a long while before I would come to understand the particular moral of the story.

It would be a long while because, quite simply, I was in love with New York. I do not mean “love” in any colloquial way, I mean that I was in love with the city, the way you love the first person who ever touches you and you never love anyone quite that way again.

Consider this:

• Joan Didion has called this her love letter to New York.  What details in the story show you the author’s love for the city?
• How did the experience of living in the city impact the author?
• Have you ever been in love with a city, town, or other place?  How did the experience of being in that place impact you?

This excerpt  of “Goodbye to All That” is from Didion’s work  Slouching Toward Bethlehem and made available to the public by NPR and is made available in this course under the educational purposes guidelines of fair use.

Goodbye to All That by Joan Didion Copyright © by Ryna May is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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essays: reading Joan Didion’s “Goodbye to All That”

The essay, inspired by Joan Didion’s “Goodbye to All That”, was originally written in October 2019. I felt like sharing it now and made only a few minor edits.

(Joan Didion is one of my favorite authors. In most cases, I have little understanding of the things she writes about, but there are some essays that are less centered on documenting other people and their lives, and more about Joan herself. I do believe I have a fairly better understanding of those.)

In “Goodbye to All That”, Joan Didion writes about New York—New York as a city with an emphasized dream-like quality for a young woman who is relentlessly exploring its streets, its bridges, and its people. Something I am familiar with, only a different city (I mean Paris, which, by the way, she mentions in the essay as well).

I would start my story about the city on a positive note. I’m not sure how, but I could talk about all those places I had created in my head—exquisite gardens with blooming flowers and fountains, wide streets with tall buildings and small balconies, and lovely squares with ornate benches to sit on. I could talk about how I found all these imaginary places in Paris and how I thought I would never leave them by my own will; because if you have flowers, and birds, and fountains, and these places give you shelter from bad thoughts, how could you possibly want (or need) anything else, anything more?

Joan’s first sentence: “It is easy to see the beginnings of things, and harder to see the ends” , she mentions the difficulty to pinpoint “the exact place on the page where the heroine is no longer optimistic as she once was” . Beginnings are intoxicating, full of promises and hopes, especially if they’re going according to the plan, but if something goes wrong, it’s not easy to determine at what point. In my case, it was probably a cumulative effect of nagging fears, a consequence of complete disregard for some realistic aspects of life. It was a bittersweet love story, and my decision to leave Paris could be easily explained in simple, down-to-earth terms (and I actually do that when people ask me, I give them “certain stock answers” as she puts it—I tell them about work, about loneliness, about bureaucratic hell), but I refuse to do that here.

“When I first saw New York I was twenty, and it was summertime” —when I first saw Paris I was seventeen, and it was summertime. And I was nineteen when I came back, determined to make it my (new) home. It was great being naïve, romantic, impractical when living in Paris. It was probably one of the best feelings in the world. I feel like I was awarded with my real childhood there, with a sense of wonder and fantasy I had only experienced through books before.

“[…] one of the mixed blessings of being twenty and twenty-one and even twenty-three is the conviction that nothing like this, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, has ever happened to anyone before” —I still have this conviction, probably because I’m twenty-three.

“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” —yes.

Joan tries to convey that New York is a city for “only the very young” . While I don’t mean to contradict the things I said a couple of paragraphs above, I don’t think that Paris is the city for only the very young. Joan also mentions trying to meet “new faces” . I never wanted to meet any new faces. What I enjoyed the most were fleeting interactions with strangers, and in most cases, they were older people. I remember seeing so many extraordinarily elegant women and men. One particular scene comes to my mind. Late autumn, I was in Jardin du Palais Royal, and an older gentleman was walking his dog. The color of his dog, a light brown springer, matched the color of the trees behind him, and the color of the man’s coat matched the façade of a palace behind him; so there were trees and a dog, and there was a man and a building—two perfect combinations, a curious union of alive and non-alive elements.

Another thing to add, there is this fashionable idea that Paris is all about terraces, slow afternoons, reading newspapers, never rushing anywhere, standing in museums for hours, joie de vivre and all that, but how many people (young people) actually enjoy something like this, and could do that on a daily basis? I mean, sit in one place for, let’s say, six hours, enjoying the company of one’s own thoughts, not demanding attention from anyone? Not feeling a compulsive need to make a conversation, because there are too many conversations going on in your head already? Paris gave me a lot of material for such conversations, because “Nothing was irrevocable; everything was within reach. Just around every corner lay something curious and interesting, something I had never before seen or done or known about.”

“You see I was in a curious position in New York: it never occurred to me that I was living a real life there” —nothing about Paris felt real, especially when I was studying. As the studies were approaching their end, many things I had previously ignored caught up with me, and I could not take care of them easily. Suddenly I realized I was living a very real life. (To be fair, Joan was talking here about an impression of staying in the city only for a couple of months and the fact that you do not lead a “real” life in a “temporary” place; as for me, I was sure of the fact that I would stay in Paris forever).

“That is what it was all about, wasn’t it? Promises? Now when New York comes back to me it comes in hallucinatory flashes, so clinically detailed that I sometimes wish that memory would effect the distortion with which it is commonly credited” —when Paris comes back to me, it doesn’t come back in “hallucinatory flashes”, I carefully select what I want to remember, and I prefer to remember places and feelings, rather than people. Deep down, I’m ashamed of the relationships I cultivated, and I no longer recognize myself in most of the social situations I participated in back then. I feel like I have undergone a violent transformation. It didn’t manifest outwardly in an accentuated way, perhaps, but I feel the implications very clearly.

“I began to cherish the loneliness of it, the sense that at any given time no one need know where I was or what I was doing” —I loved the idea of keeping my location secret… Obviously, I use this word very loosely here, and of course, my close ones could have a vague idea that I was probably sitting somewhere by the Seine or in Luxembourg Gardens, those traditional Parisian places especially attractive for the new habitants of the city. They could just call me, ask and I would tell them where I was. But what if I was not by the Seine, not in famous gardens, what if I was sitting on a shabby bench by Canal Saint-Martin instead? Or wandering in Boulevard de Sébastopol? Maybe somewhere in the thirteenth arrondissement, walking under the aerial metro tracks, following the itinerary of the line six train? In my last year in Paris, that was often the case. I tried to expand my perimeter and change my usual walking routes. On weekends, I would come up with a special plan to go somewhere relatively far, to some placethat was probably not Paris anymore, and I would follow the unknown streets back to the heart of the city.

I tried to think of some more responses I could have given had someone asked me “So where are you now, exactly?” Exactly? I was walking a long way from the Communist Party headquarters, and now I am on a hill somewhere in the twentieth arrondissement, there are no people around me, and I can see Sacré-Coeur through rose bushes; now I am standing in front of Musée Montmartre, calculating if I have enough time to go in there before the classes; now I am in a restaurant near Place de la Bourse, waiting to meet somebody from my own country, who wants to know how I am keeping up here; now I am lost somewhere in Parc des Buttes Chaumont, and I am not really looking for an exit, because somebody told me this is a charming place to disappear in; I am in metro station Laumière and people around me are really scary, so I would better go home quickly! I would better go home quickly…

(Me coming back home—is it a “curious aberration” ?)

Ready for more?

“Goodbye to All That” by Joan Didion Essay

In “Goodbye to All That,” Joan Didion writes that the “lesson” of her story is that “it is distinctly possible to remain too long at the Fair.” Throughout the story, the author implies that one may have magical places in his or her imagination, but living in a place that he or she imagines as magical or dreamy can turn into a very upsetting experience. The purpose of Didion’s writing was to provide evidence for this idea, and she managed to do it by revealing her understanding of the situation in which she had found herself after eight years spent in New York City, describing her feelings about this understanding, and explaining the consequences of learning this lesson.

First of all, the author came to the understanding that it was possible to remain too long at the fair when she analyzed the life she was living. She realized that, despite the idealistic image of New York she had, the place to which she had dedicated eight years of her life was not so splendid after all. An example of this realization is the fact that, in New York, according to Didion, everyone was trying to meet “new faces,” but everyone failed to do so. When going with her friend to a party where she had been promised to meet new faces, Didion was made fun of my friend, as he laughed and revealed that, at the party, they were going to, “he had already slept with five of the women and owed money to all but two of the men.” Over the years, the magical place Didion had been in love with was becoming more and more boring.

The author’s feelings about this understanding were primarily associated with being depressed. She says that she “cried until [she] was not even aware when [she] was crying and when [she] was not, [she] cried in elevators and in taxis and in Chinese laundries.” Didion was experiencing the emptiness and meaninglessness of her life in New York, the city that kept disappointing her, not because it was a bad place to live but because it was not the place she had been dreaming of living in.

Finally, the main point of the story is that the author got to learn the lesson after all. After she had moved to Los Angeles, her life became significantly more enjoyable, and when she visited New York again, she saw that “everyone was ill and tired.” Upon realizing that illusions are not a good place to live in, Didion left her illusion and created a different life for herself. This shows how living in New York City and perceiving it as a dreamy place ultimately taught her the lesson of appreciating real experiences more than illusionary ones.

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1. IvyPanda . ""Goodbye to All That" by Joan Didion." October 29, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/goodbye-to-all-that-by-joan-didion/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . ""Goodbye to All That" by Joan Didion." October 29, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/goodbye-to-all-that-by-joan-didion/.

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Summer Books 2007: Excerpts

Excerpt: 'goodbye to all that'.

Joan Didion

Hear Mia Dillon Read a Passage.

Mia Dillon's reading of "Goodbye to All That" is included in Selected Shorts: Travel Tales , an audio compilation of short stories.

More Recommendations:

See book critic Alan Cheuse's reading picks for the season.

Selected Shorts: Travel Tales

List Price: $28.00

How many miles to Babylon?

Three score miles and and ten—

Can I get there by candlelight?

Yes, and back again—

If your feet are nimble and light

You can get there by candlelight.

It is easy to see the beginnings of things, and harder to see the ends. I can remember now, with a clarity that makes the nerves in the back of my neck constrict, when New York began for me, but I cannot lay my finger upon the moment it ended, can never cut through the ambiguities and second starts and broken resolves to the exact place on the page where the heroine is no longer as optimistic as she once was. 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 heard sung and all the stories I had ever read about New York, informed me that it would never be quite the same again. In fact it never was. Some time later there was a song on all the jukeboxes on the Upper East Side that went "but where is the schoolgirl who used to be me," and if it was late enough at night I used to wonder that. I know now that almost everyone wonders something like that, sooner or later and no matter what he or she is doing, but one of the mixed blessings of being twenty and twenty-one and even twenty-three is the conviction that nothing like this, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, has ever happened to anyone before.

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. That first night I opened my window on the bus into town and watched for the skyline, but all I could see were the wastes of Queens and big signs that said MIDTOWN TUNNEL THIS LANE and then a flood of summer rain (even that seemed remarkable and exotic, for I had come out of the West where there was no summer rain), and for the next three days I sat wrapped in blankets in a hotel room air-conditioned to 35 degrees and tried to get over a bad cold and a high fever. It did not occur to me to call a doctor, because I knew none, and although it did occur to me to call the desk and ask that the air conditioner be turned off, I never called, because I did not know how much to tip whoever might come—was anyone ever so young? 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. I would stay in New York, I told him, just six months, and I could see the Brooklyn Bridge from my window. As it turned out the bridge was the Triborough, and I stayed eight years.

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. Part of what I want to tell you is what it is like to be young in New York, how six months can become eight years with the deceptive ease of a film dissolve, for that is how those years appear to me now, in a long sequence of sentimental dissolves and old-fashioned trick shots—the Seagram Building fountains dissolve into snowflakes, I enter a revolving door at twenty and come out a good deal older, and on a different street. But most particularly I want to explain to you, and in the process perhaps to myself, why I no longer live in New York. It is often said that New York is a city for only the very rich and the very poor. It is less often said that New York is also, at least for those of us who came there from somewhere else, a city only for the very young.

I remember once, one cold bright December evening in New York, suggesting to a friend who complained of having been around too long that he come with me to a party where there would be, I assured him with the bright resourcefulness of twenty-three, "new faces." He laughed literally until he choked, and I had to roll down the taxi window and hit him on the back. "New faces," he said finally, "don't tell me about new faces. " It seemed that the last time he had gone to a party where he had been promised "new faces," there had been fifteen people in the room, and he had already slept with five of the women and owed money to all but two of the men. I laughed with him, but the first snow had just begun to fall and the big Christmas trees glittered yellow and white as far as I could see up Park Avenue and I had a new dress and it would be a long while before I would come to understand the particular moral of the story.

It would be a long while because, quite simply, I was in love with New York. I do not mean "love" in any colloquial way, I mean that I was in love with the city, the way you love the first person who ever touches you and you never love anyone quite that way again.

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Goodbye To All That Essay Summary By Joan Didion

Table of Contents

“Goodbye to All That” is a celebrated essay written by Joan Didion , published in her 1968 collection of essays titled “Slouching Towards Bethlehem.” The essay serves as a memoir and reflection on Didion’s experience of living in New York City during the 1950s and 1960s and her eventual departure from the city.

Goodbye To All That Essay Summary By Joan Didion- In the essay, Didion begins by recounting her arrival in New York at the age of twenty, describing her wide-eyed fascination with the city’s allure and the excitement she felt at being part of its vibrant cultural scene. 

She delves into her experiences as a young woman navigating the city’s social circles, discussing her relationships and encounters with various influential figures in the literary and artistic world.

Goodbye To All That Essay Summary By Joan Didion- However, as the essay progresses, Didion’s tone becomes increasingly disillusioned. She describes the challenges and hardships of living in New York, including the high cost of living, the intense competition, and the feeling of constantly being on the outskirts of success. 

Goodbye To All That Essay Summary By Joan Didion- She reflects on the transitory nature of relationships and the loss of innocence and idealism that often accompanies the pursuit of personal and professional fulfillment in the city.

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Goodbye To All That Essay Summary By Joan Didion- Didion also explores the idea of impermanence and change, discussing how New York’s ever-shifting landscape mirrors the internal changes she undergoes as a person. She realizes that her initial infatuation with the city has waned, and she no longer feels a sense of belonging or connection to it. 

The essay reaches its climax as Didion makes the decision to leave New York behind and move to California, symbolizing her farewell to the city and the lifestyle it represents.

Goodbye To All That Essay Summary By Joan Didion- “Goodbye to All That” is not just a personal account of Didion’s experience in New York but also a reflection on the broader themes of disillusionment, identity, and the passage of time.

Goodbye To All That Essay Summary By Joan Didion- It has resonated with many readers who have experienced similar feelings of ambivalence and the need for change in their own lives. The essay is regarded as one of Didion’s most influential works and has become a classic in the genre of personal essays.

About Joan Didion

Goodbye To All That Essay Summary By Joan Didion- Joan Didion is a highly influential American writer known for her distinctive style and insightful observations of American culture and society. She was born on December 5, 1934, in Sacramento, California. Didion’s writing career spans several decades, and her works have had a profound impact on literature, journalism, and the field of creative nonfiction.

Goodbye To All That Essay Summary By Joan Didion- Didion attended the University of California, Berkeley, where she studied English and won an essay contest sponsored by Vogue magazine, which launched her career as a writer. 

She worked as an editor for Vogue in New York City and later transitioned to writing essays and articles for various publications, including The New York Review of Books and The Saturday Evening Post.

Goodbye To All That Essay Summary By Joan Didion- One of the hallmarks of Didion’s writing is her distinctive style characterized by spare and incisive prose. Her works often explore themes of identity, memory, loss, and the complexities of American society. She has a keen eye for cultural trends and has been hailed for her ability to capture the spirit of different eras, particularly in her essays that provide insightful commentary on the political and social climate of the time.

Some of Joan Didion’s most notable works include “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” (1968), “The White Album” (1979), and “Play It as It Lays” (1970). In addition to her essays and novels, she has also written screenplays, including the adaptation of her own novel “Play It as It Lays” for the film released in 1972.

Goodbye To All That Essay Summary By Joan Didion- Throughout her career, Joan Didion has received numerous awards and accolades for her writing, including the National Book Award for Nonfiction for “The Year of Magical Thinking” (2005), which is a memoir about the year following the death of her husband. 

Her works continue to be celebrated for their insightful exploration of the human experience and their lasting impact on the literary landscape.

Joan Didion’s essay “Goodbye to All That” is a poignant and introspective reflection on her time living in New York City during the 1950s and 1960s. Through her personal experiences and observations, Didion captures the initial excitement and allure of the city, followed by a growing disillusionment and the eventual decision to leave.

Goodbye To All That Essay Summary By Joan Didion- The essay explores themes of disillusionment, the transient nature of relationships, the pursuit of personal and professional fulfillment, and the passage of time. Didion’s departure from New York symbolizes not just a physical farewell to the city but also a symbolic shedding of her old self and a quest for a new beginning.

Goodbye To All That Essay Summary By Joan Didion- “Goodbye to All That” has resonated with readers for its relatability and its exploration of universal themes of change, identity, and the complexities of urban life. It remains a significant work in the realm of personal essays and stands as a testament to Didion’s skill as a writer in capturing the essence of a time and place while delving into the depths of her own psyche.

Q: Who is Joan Didion? 

A: Joan Didion is an American writer known for her works in various genres, including essays, novels, and screenplays. She was born on December 5, 1934, in Sacramento, California. Didion is renowned for her distinctive writing style characterized by concise and incisive prose, as well as her keen observations of American culture and society.

Q: What is “Slouching Towards Bethlehem”? 

A: “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” is a collection of essays written by Joan Didion, published in 1968. The book’s title is taken from the W.B. Yeats poem “The Second Coming,” and it reflects the themes of societal unrest and cultural decline explored in the essays. The collection covers a range of topics, including Didion’s experiences in California, her reflections on the 1960s counterculture, and her observations of American society at the time.

Q: What is the significance of “Goodbye to All That”? 

A: “Goodbye to All That” is one of the most notable essays in Joan Didion’s collection “Slouching Towards Bethlehem.” It stands out for its introspective portrayal of Didion’s experience living in New York City and her decision to leave the city behind. 

The essay has resonated with many readers due to its exploration of disillusionment, the pursuit of personal fulfillment, and the themes of change and identity. It has become a classic in the genre of personal essays and is often referenced as a powerful reflection on the complexities of urban life.

Q: What are some other notable works by Joan Didion? 

A: Joan Didion has written numerous notable works throughout her career. Some of her other well-known books include “The White Album” (1979), a collection of essays reflecting on the 1960s and ’70s, “Play It as It Lays” (1970), a novel that explores themes of existentialism and disillusionment in Hollywood, and “The Year of Magical Thinking” (2005), a memoir recounting the year following the death of her husband. Didion’s works have received critical acclaim and have had a significant impact on literature and the field of nonfiction writing.

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ebook ∣ Writers on Loving and Leaving New York

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Joan Didion Says ‘Goodbye to All That’: Literary Icon Dead at 87

• By Jon Blistein

Jon Blistein

Joan Didion , the storied author and New Journalism icon best known for books like Play It as It Lays , The White Album, and The Year of Magical Thinking , died Thursday, The New York Times reports. She was 87.

Didion died at her home in Manhattan after a battle with Parkinson’s disease, a spokesperson for her publisher, Knopf, confirmed. “Didion was one of the country’s most trenchant writers and astute observers,” the statement read. “Her best-selling works of fiction, commentary, and memoir have received numerous honors and are considered modern classics.”  

Didion was a prolific and multifaceted writer, as well regarded for her novels, memoirs, and screenplays as her essays, cultural criticism, and investigative reporting. Early in her career, she was the go-to chronicler of California at its countercultural peak, and managed to create a new genre of essay — the “I’m Leaving New York City” essay — with her celebrated 1967 piece, “Goodbye to All That.” With her husband, John Gregory Dunne, Didion wrote screenplays for films like The Panic in Needle Park , the 1976 adaptation of A Star Is Born , and an adaptation of her own novel, Play It as It Lays. 

In her extensive political reporting, she covered everything from the civil war in El Salvador to U.S. political campaigns; and as a critic she investigated the way media shaped perceptions of major events (she published one of the earliest challenges to the guilty verdict in the Central Park Five case, which was later overturned). In 2005, Didion won the National Book Award for Nonfiction and was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for The Year of Magical Thinking , her memoir chronicling her life and grief after Dunne’s sudden death in 2003, as well as her daughter Quintana’s eventually fatal illness.  

Didion was born on Dec. 5, 1934 in Sacramento, California. Her family had lived in the state for five generations, descended from settlers who’d abandoned the doomed Donner party and took a safer route — a fitting biographical detail for a writer who would go on to expertly capture the never-ending allure, promise, and underlying chaos of the Golden State.  

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“I grew up in a dangerous landscape,” Didion told The Paris Review in 1978. “I think people are more affected than they know by landscapes and weather. Sacramento was a very extreme place. It was very flat, flatter than most people can imagine, and I still favor flat horizons. The weather in Sacramento was as extreme as the landscape. There were two rivers, and these rivers would flood in the winter and run dry in the summer. Winter was cold rain and tulle fog. Summer was 100 degrees, 105 degrees, 110 degrees. Those extremes affect the way you deal with the world. It so happens that if you’re a writer the extremes show up. They don’t if you sell insurance.”

Didion studied English at the University of California, Berkeley, and in her senior year she won an essay contest sponsored by Vogue . Rather than take the prize trip to Paris, she went to New York to take a job at the magazine instead and quickly moved from a promotional copywriter to an associate features editor. Along with her work for Vogue , Didion contributed to several other magazines and published her first novel, Run, River , in 1963. After her stint in New York — during which she met and married Dunne — Didion returned to California, and started garnering attention for her pieces in Life and The Saturday Evening Post .

Part of the New Journalism movement, Didion’s reporting incorporated literary elements, balancing her meticulous observations about the world with deeply personal anecdotes. Her dispatches on the glitz, idealism, and sordid edges of 1960s California were eventually collected into her acclaimed 1968 collection, Slouching Towards Bethlehem.

In 1970, Didion published her second novel, Play It as It Lays , about a struggling young actress trying to make it in Hollywood while grappling with a host of personal demons. Maybe not-so-coincidentally, the new decade also found Didion and Dunne making their own forays into Hollywood with screenwriting: The Panic in Needle Park — about a group of heroin addicts in New York City — was an early starring turn for Al Pacino, while their adaptation of A Star Is Born , starring Barbra Streisand and Kris Kristofferson, was a box-office smash.

Didion’s reporting and fiction grew increasingly political over the decade as well. Her 1977 novel, A Book of Common Prayer , was set in a Central American country in the midst of a revolutionary upheaval; a few years later, she was reporting from El Salvador on the country’s civil war. Her 1984 novel, Democracy , told the story of a senator and a CIA agent at the end of the Vietnam war, while her work about the Cuban exile community in Miami became her 1987 book, Miami. Though she eventually moved away from more traditional political reporting, politics — and the way they were disseminated and interpreted via mass media   — remained central to the criticism and essays she wrote that later appeared in books like After Henry and Political Fictions .  

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In the new millennium, Didion remained ever fascinated with the history and present of California, which she returned to again 2003’s Where I Was From . In 2017’s South and West , she paired more observations about her childhood in California with pieces based on old notes she took during a trip with Dunne through the Deep South in the Seventies.

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But one of her most acclaimed works was The Year of Magical Thinking , which was adapted into a play in 2007. In 2011, Didion published a companion book, Blue Nights , in which she discussed the death of her daughter, as well as parenting and aging. Both works were immensely personal, and in a 2012 conversation with the author Sloane Crosley at the New York Public Library , Didion reflected on how the memoirs echoed some of the earliest, personal writing she did for Vogue .  

“[A] lot of people read these pieces and for the first time people would come to me for life advice, and I hated it,” she said. “I mean, I had — I quit writing those pieces because I couldn’t take this Miss Lonelyhearts role, and I hadn’t written anything that got that kind of response until Magical Thinking in between all these years; and [with] Magical Thinking suddenly people were speaking to me in airports, and usually they had some really terrible thing that had happened, and I learned simply to — that I didn’t have to take it so personally. You know, I learned that I could talk to them without taking it personally, so I didn’t have to stop writing.”

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Sxsw audience award winner ‘geoff mcfetridge: drawing a life’ & nyff title ‘the practice’ land north american distribution via gravitas ventures, joan didion’s “goodbye to all that” optioned for feature film.

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EXCLUSIVE: Joan Didion ‘s seminal essay Goodbye To All That was just optioned for the big screen by producers Megan Carlson and Brian Sullivan who have set up the project as the first in their new shingle, Carlson Sullivan Pictures LLC. This is yet another Didion work to be optioned as her novel A Book of Common Prayer has also been picked up for a feature treatment by Campbell Scott. Carlson and Sullivan are currently focusing in on female writer/directors to bring the essay to the screen.

The optioning of Goodbye To All That comes at a time when Didion’s work is getting new life. The iconic Didion is the new face of the Celine fashion house and her nephew/director Griffin Dunne’s Kickstarter -funded documentary about Didion, We Tell Ourselves Stories In Order To Live, is in the works with co-director Susanne Rostock. Didion started as a staff writer at Vogue before becoming a prominent writer.

Goodbye To All That is an autobiography about Didion going to New York when she was in her 20s and covers the entire period of her life there until 1964 when she and her newlywed husband John Gregory Dunne moved to Los Angeles and thus, began her very well-known writing career as a journalist, essayist, author and screenwriter (with her husband).

This has been a long time coming for Sullivan. “It’s been a dream of mine for years to bring this essay to the screen,” said Sullivan. “I tried to option it as a student when I was at the San Francisco Art Institute and was turned down. It’s been a part of my being for 40 years, and then the planets aligned and here we are. The moment has come for Goodbye To All That .”

Sullivan and Carlson have had a long friendship. They used to work together at George Lucas’ ILM and then at Anonymous Content before founding their new production company.Those involved in the deal was, of course, ICM Partner’s Boaty Boatwright who is friends with Didion as well as the agency’s Ron Bernstein who reps Didion in film, Eric M. Brooks from Bloom Hergott Diemer Rosenthal LaViolette Feldman Schenkman and Goodman on behalf of the author and Steven C. Beer from Franklin, Weinrib, Rudell, and Vassallo on behalf of the producers.

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