Joan Didion Essay New York
The Long Goodbye
"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 adept, at the age of 29. "Information technology 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 only 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-and then-immature writer chirapsia a hasty retreat from the city, only transforming the surrender into a literary triumph via a "Goodbye to All That, Redux" essay.
The literature may be thin when information technology comes to "See ya, Chicago" or "Later, Los Angeles" odes, but ever since Ms. Didion ready the standard 46 years agone, the "Bye New York" essay has become a de rigueur career motion 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 "Bye" essay has found renewed life, as a new generation of writers works out its love-hate relationship with the city in public mode. Recently, stance-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 similar Gawker and The Cutting; 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 brand information technology hither, you can make it anywhere, the song goes," Mr. Sullivan wrote in a Sun Times of London column last week, explaining his decision to flee New York afterward merely a year and render to Washington. "Simply why would anyone want to make it here? The human beings are stacked on top of one some other in vast towers that create dark, narrow caverns in between. Gridlocked traffic competes with every conceivable dissonance and every imaginable variation on the theme of human rage and impatience."
New York, I can't quit you. Or perhaps I can.
On first glance, gimmicky entries to the genre tend to follow the same arc every bit 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 nosotros all fall for, to our peril, when we are young.
"No homo 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 mag blog The Cut, New York is not just a guy, it'southward 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 loma, A-number-one."
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The New York-you-broke-my-heart essay has go such a trope for young female writers that Jezebel recently asked, "Is Dumping New York City a 'Daughter Affair?' "
(Apparently non. Mr. Sullivan also invoked the romantic-beloved theme in a recent blog mail service, describing New York as his "mistress," though he felt "married to Washington," his once and time to come home. And in a 2010 exit essay on The New York Times blog Urban center Room, Christopher Solomon, who came from the Pacific Northwest, wrote: "Oh, I pursued you. We went to the opera, to plays, to gritty piddling restaurants in Queens. You — the city — were always my appointment. But y'all never belonged to me. Eventually you, likewise, moved on, taking your buzzing neon hope of fame to the next newcomer.")
By framing the human relationship as a love matter, information technology makes the inevitable breakup with the literary capital seem less similar a career failure than a coming to the senses afterward a youthful infatuation.
"In my early twenties, I felt that my life could be ane large experiment, and in my mid-twenties I am coming to terms with the fact that no, my life is really my life," wrote Chloe Caldwell in her album entry, "Leaving My Groovy Lifestyle."
In putting it then, Ms. Caldwell echoed Ms. Didion'southward clarification 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 'beget' to live in New York right now, about how much 'space' nosotros need. All I hateful 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 alibi. The reality was, in the relatively cheap New York of the 1960s, even a Faddy junior staff fellow member like her — making $seventy a week — could secure a centrally located Manhattan apartment with a view of, she thought, the Brooklyn Bridge ("Information technology turned out the bridge was the Triborough," she dryly amended) and pay for taxis to parties where she might see "new faces." Certain, the early days were tough — "some weeks I had to charge food at Bloomingdale'south gourmet store in club to eat," she wrote. Only in general, she could afford to hang effectually long enough to determine when she had stayed "besides long at the Fair." In sum, she could beget to fall out of love with the urban center slowly.
Not so for the would-be Didions of today. In their New York, the squeamish apartments with the bridge views tend to go to the underwriters of bond bug, not to the writers of essays for literary anthologies. The unaffordability of New York on a writer'southward upkeep 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 capeesh "the camaraderie congenital while feeling a stranger's breath on your neck on a packed rush-hr train," every bit if that were a skillful thing. Even so, the stark economic realities forced him out of the urban center as the banzai gamble years of his mid-20s drew to a shut.
"New York makes it easy to forget that many Americans would probably find paying $950 for a x-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."
Epitome
(His description called to mind another widely linked article from The Onion in 2010: "8.four Million New Yorkers Of a sudden 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 non just crowding out writers; information technology is crowding out ideas, according to Mr. Sullivan. "If you call back you lot'll find intellectual stimulation, you're thinking of another era," he wrote. "The conversations are invariably about money or belongings or schools. I've never been more bored past casual chat."
No less a New Yorker than David Byrne — Mr. Talking Heads, Mr. Downtown — threatened to bolt the urban center 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 take museums, but they don't have civilization," he wrote. "Ugh. If New York goes there — more than than it already has — I'm leaving."
No wonder that Sari Botton, who edited the anthology, titled her ain 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 place loft on Artery B tripled, to $vi,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 than 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, volume advances shrinking and magazines shuttering, New York may no longer exist a necessary destination for the young writer, she acknowledged. It may not even be a feasible 1.
"If you are a young author," she added, "yous'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 brand a living in whatever job you're going to get. It'south but not conducive to a creative life."
In a more than innocent era, it seems, writers chose the moment in life that they were ready to serve the urban center its "Honey John" letter. These days, New York is likely to dump them start.
Maybe the next anthology will exist titled simply "Adept Riddance."
Joan Didion Essay New York,
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/24/fashion/From-Joan-Didion-to-Andrew-Sullivan-some-writers-leave-behind-letters-when-they-leave-new-york-city.html
Posted by: matneyfror1958.blogspot.com
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