Assignment for 10/7 - Didion

When Joan Didion says, on the 6th page of the essay “Goodbye to All That,” that she and her husband moved away from New York three years before she wrote the essay, I was surprised. The distance of three years did not seem to be nearly enough for the way she was writing. There was a clarity about the experience of living in New York that felt as though it could only be seen from a greater distance. But there was also a lack of affection for her younger self, a bitterness, that came through. “That was the year, my twenty-eight, when I was discovering that not all of the promises would be kept, that some things are in fact irrevocable, and that it had counted after all, every evasion and every procrastination, every word, all of it.” (4) She never comes right out and says that she wasted eight years of her life, but there is a great deal of anger in those words.

There are occasional touches of humor, as on the parenthetical aside on the sixth page where she talks about why it was such a problem that she “could not bear Upper Madison Avenue on weekday mornings,” but mostly the story is sad. She keeps referring to all the things she did not know. (The curtains on page 4, how much to tip on page 1, that there would eventually be a cost for all of this, throughout.) She uses the word “should” a lot, as if she wants to go back and shake her former self.

“That is what it was all about about, wasn’t it? Promises?” (4) Who is she talking to? The reader? The city? Herself, of several years ago? It could be one of them, or all of them. “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.” (4) Her sentences are generally long, rushing out over themselves so that it feels as though she is trying to get all of thise out of her, where it can trouble her no longer.

Even the things that she liked about the city are dulled, cast in an unflattering light. “Some years passed, I still did not lose that sense of wonder about New York. 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.” (5) That is a common feeling, but in the context of the rest of the piece it feels as though she is scoffing at herself for being selfish. New York, it seemed, made her selfish. It made her unaware. But now that she has become aware, the process of looking back is made bleak.