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Goodbye To All That
In 1967, Joan Didion wrote an essay called Goodbye to All That, a work of such candid and penetrating prose that it soon became the gold standard for personal essays. Like no other story before it, Didion’s tale of loving and leaving New York captured the mesmerizing allure Manhattan has always had for writers, poets, and wandering spirits.
About the author
Joan Didion
94 books13.6k followersJoan Didion was an American writer and journalist. She is considered one of the pioneers of New Journalism along with Gay Talese, Hunter S. Thompson, and Tom Wolfe.
Didion's career began in the 1950s after she won an essay contest sponsored by Vogue magazine. Over the course of her career, Didion wrote essays for many magazines, including The Saturday Evening Post, Life, Esquire, The New York Review of Books and The New Yorker. Her writing during the 1960s through the late 1970s engaged audiences in the realities of the counterculture of the 1960s, the Hollywood lifestyle, and the history and culture of California. Didion's political writing in the 1980s and 1990s often concentrated on the subtext of political rhetoric and the United States's foreign policy in Latin America. In 1991, she wrote the earliest mainstream media article to suggest the Central Park Five had been wrongfully convicted. In 2005, Didion won the National Book Award for Nonfiction and was a finalist for both the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize for The Year of Magical Thinking, a memoir of the year following the death of her husband, writer John Gregory Dunne. She later adapted the book into a play that premiered on Broadway in 2007. In 2013, she was awarded the National Humanities Medal by president Barack Obama. Didion was profiled in the Netflix documentary The Center Will Not Hold, directed by her nephew Griffin Dunne, in 2017.
Didion's career began in the 1950s after she won an essay contest sponsored by Vogue magazine. Over the course of her career, Didion wrote essays for many magazines, including The Saturday Evening Post, Life, Esquire, The New York Review of Books and The New Yorker. Her writing during the 1960s through the late 1970s engaged audiences in the realities of the counterculture of the 1960s, the Hollywood lifestyle, and the history and culture of California. Didion's political writing in the 1980s and 1990s often concentrated on the subtext of political rhetoric and the United States's foreign policy in Latin America. In 1991, she wrote the earliest mainstream media article to suggest the Central Park Five had been wrongfully convicted. In 2005, Didion won the National Book Award for Nonfiction and was a finalist for both the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize for The Year of Magical Thinking, a memoir of the year following the death of her husband, writer John Gregory Dunne. She later adapted the book into a play that premiered on Broadway in 2007. In 2013, she was awarded the National Humanities Medal by president Barack Obama. Didion was profiled in the Netflix documentary The Center Will Not Hold, directed by her nephew Griffin Dunne, in 2017.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 88 reviews
December 13, 2019
I had a lump in my throat when I was reading this. I think I still have it.
I was 23 when I first moved to Bombay. You see, if you know Bombay, you'd also know the houses are tiny, too many people crammed into a 2 bhk, with three people sharing the living room. There is no living room. But there was something about Bombay. My friends from college, when they visited, said they didn't like it: "ah, how tiring" but I told them this and I am putting it down here: Bombay is an experience, most similar to any city you move to when you're in your early twenties. Our apartment did not leak when it rained but when you stepped out in the streets, rickshaw-walas wouldn't stop and you'd be drenched and half an hour late to your 10 am meeting. Only you were never alone in doing so, and everybody smiled on their way.
Now that we have established how much I love (LUURVVVEEE) Bombay, I want to tell you I moved out last year. It was a very bitter experience. You will understand why this essay brought back so many memories for me. New York was Joan Didion's Bombay. The writing is spectacular but I would be biased in saying this so if you had ever lived away from home, alone, barely trying to comprehend your life, and still left the place (and memories) in only a few years time, you would enjoy it as much as I did. (I doubt if enjoy is the right word but I really hope you get to read this. It only took few minutes for me and am a slow reader.)
I could make promises to myself and to other people and there would be all the time in the world to keep them. I could stay up all night and make mistakes and none of it would count.
I was in love with the city, the way you love the first person who ever touches you and never love anyone quite that way again.
Someone who lives always with a plane schedule in the drawer lives on a slightly different calendar.
I began to cherish the loneliness of it, the sense at any given time no one need know where I was or what I was doing.
I was 23 when I first moved to Bombay. You see, if you know Bombay, you'd also know the houses are tiny, too many people crammed into a 2 bhk, with three people sharing the living room. There is no living room. But there was something about Bombay. My friends from college, when they visited, said they didn't like it: "ah, how tiring" but I told them this and I am putting it down here: Bombay is an experience, most similar to any city you move to when you're in your early twenties. Our apartment did not leak when it rained but when you stepped out in the streets, rickshaw-walas wouldn't stop and you'd be drenched and half an hour late to your 10 am meeting. Only you were never alone in doing so, and everybody smiled on their way.
Now that we have established how much I love (LUURVVVEEE) Bombay, I want to tell you I moved out last year. It was a very bitter experience. You will understand why this essay brought back so many memories for me. New York was Joan Didion's Bombay. The writing is spectacular but I would be biased in saying this so if you had ever lived away from home, alone, barely trying to comprehend your life, and still left the place (and memories) in only a few years time, you would enjoy it as much as I did. (I doubt if enjoy is the right word but I really hope you get to read this. It only took few minutes for me and am a slow reader.)
I could make promises to myself and to other people and there would be all the time in the world to keep them. I could stay up all night and make mistakes and none of it would count.
I was in love with the city, the way you love the first person who ever touches you and never love anyone quite that way again.
Someone who lives always with a plane schedule in the drawer lives on a slightly different calendar.
I began to cherish the loneliness of it, the sense at any given time no one need know where I was or what I was doing.
January 28, 2015
No one can love, romance and serenade New York and loss as much as Joan Didion can.
May 23, 2021
A deliciously written love affair and estrangement with a city. I lovee how Joan Didion puts it.
April 27, 2022
How did this woman get in my head?
How has she lived my life, felt my feelings, even made my mistakes and begrudged my past frick ups?
And then written them so much better than I could dream of doing; and with such lucidity
.
"It is distinctly possible to stay too long at the fair."
Once one realizes that, it's never too early to exit.
How has she lived my life, felt my feelings, even made my mistakes and begrudged my past frick ups?
And then written them so much better than I could dream of doing; and with such lucidity
.
"It is distinctly possible to stay too long at the fair."
Once one realizes that, it's never too early to exit.
February 5, 2022
That was the year, my twenty-eighth, when I was discovering that not all the promises would be kept, that some things are in fact irrevocable and that it had counted after all, every evasion and every procrastination, every mistake, every word, all of it.
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February 7, 2022perhaps one day i will write about a place with such angst that my impassioned words may be understood, or simply mistaken for a confession of love.
January 24, 2024
I rolled my eyes a good few times while reading this ngl
December 12, 2023
She wrote this about Bloomington, Indiana actually
September 23, 2021
"...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,"
January 23, 2022
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 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 in 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 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 years 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 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 spelt 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. I remember walking across Sixty-second Street one twilight that first spring, or the second spring, they were all alike for a while. I was late to meet someone but I stopped at Lexington Avenue and bought a peach and stood on the corner eating it and knew that I had come out out of the West and reached the mirage. I could taste the peach and feel the soft air blowing from a subway grating on my legs and I could smell lilac and garbage and expensive perfume and I knew that it would cost something sooner or later—because I did not belong there, did not come from there—but when you are twenty-two or twenty-three, you figure that later you will have a high emotional balance, and be able to pay whatever it costs. I still believed in possibilities then, still had the sense, so peculiar to New York, that something extraordinary would happen any minute, any day, any month. I was making only $65 or $70 then a week then (“Put yourself in Hattie Carnegie’s hands,” I was advised without the slightest trace of irony by an editor of the magazine for which I worked), so little money that some weeks I had to charge food at Bloomingdale’s gourmet shop in order to eat, a fact which went unmentioned in the letters I wrote to California. I never told my father that I needed money because then he would have sent it, and I would never know if I could do it by myself. At that time making a living seemed a game to me, with arbitrary but quite inflexible rules. And except on a certain kind of winter evening—six-thirty in the Seventies, say, already dark and bitter with a wind off the river, when I would be walking very fast toward a bus and would look in the bright windows of brownstones and see cooks working in clean kitchens and and imagine women lighting candles on the floor above and beautiful children being bathed on the floor above that—except on nights like those, I never felt poor; I had the feeling that if I needed money I could always get it. I could write a syndicated column for teenagers under the name “Debbi Lynn” or I could smuggle gold into India or I could become a $100 call girl, and none of would matter.
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. I could go to a party and meet someone who called himself Mr. Emotional Appeal and ran The Emotional Appeal Institute or Tina Onassis Blandford or a Florida cracker who was then a regular on what the called “the Big C,” the Southampton-El Morocco circuit (“I’m well connected on the Big C, honey,” he would tell me over collard greens on his vast borrowed terrace), or the widow of the celery king of the Harlem market or a piano salesman from Bonne Terre, Missouri, or someone who had already made and list two fortunes in Midland, Texas. I could make promises to myself and to other people and there would be all the time in the world to keep them. I could stay up all night and make mistakes, and none of them would count.
You see I was in a curious position in New York: it never occurred to me that I was living a real life there. In my imagination I was always there for just another few months, just until Christmas or Easter or the first warm day in May. For that reason I was most comfortable with the company of Southerners. They seemed to be in New York as I was, on some indefinitely extended leave from wherever they belonged, disciplined to consider the future, temporary exiles who always knew when the flights left for New Orleans or Memphis or Richmond or, in my case, California. Someone who lives with a plane schedule in the drawer lives on a slightly different calendar. Christmas, for example, was a difficult season. Other people could take it in stride, going to Stowe or going abroad or going for the day to their mothers’ places in Connecticut; those of us who believed that we lived somewhere else would spend it making and canceling airline reservations, waiting for weatherbound flights as if for the last plane out of Lisbon in 1940, and finally comforting one another, those of us who were left, with oranges and mementos and smoked-oyster stuffings of childhood, gathering close, colonials in a far country.
Which is precisely what we were. I am not sure that it is possible for anyone brought up in the East to appreciate entirely what New York, the idea of New York, means to those of us who came out of the West and the South. To an Eastern child, particularly a child who has always has an uncle on Wall Street and who has spent several hundred Saturdays first at F.A.O. Schwarz and being fitted for shoes at Best’s and then waiting under the Biltmore clock and dancing to Lester Lanin, New York is just a city, albeit the city, a plausible place for people to live, But to those of us who came from places where no one had heard of Lester Lanin and Grand Central Station was a Saturday radio program, where Wall Street and Fifth Avenue and Madison Avenue were not places at all but abstractions (“Money,” and “High Fashion,” and “The Hucksters”), New York was no mere city. It was instead an infinitely romantic notion, the mysterious nexus of all love and money and power, the shining and perishable dream itself. To think of “living” there was to reduce the miraculous to the mundane; one does not “live” at Xanadu.
In fact it was difficult in the extreme for me to understand those young women for whom New York was not simply an ephemeral Estoril but a real place, girls who bought toasters and installed new cabinets in their apartments and committed themselves to some reasonable furniture. I never bought any furniture in New York. For a year or so I lived in other people’s apartments; after that I lived in the Nineties in an apartment furnished entirely with things taken from storage by a friend whose wife had moved away. And when I left the apartment in the Nineties (that was when I was leaving everything, when it was all breaking up) I left everything in it, even my winter clothes and the map of Sacramento County I had hung on the bedroom wall to remind me who I was, and I moved into a monastic four-room floor-through on Seventy-fifth Street. “Monastic” is perhaps misleading here, implying some chic severity; until after I was married and my husband moved some furniture in, there was nothing at all in those four rooms except a cheap double mattress and box springs, ordered by telephone the day I decided to move, and two French garden chairs lent me by a friend who imported them. (It strikes me now that the people I knew in New York all had curious and self-defeating sidelines. They imported garden chairs which did not sell very well at Hammacher Schlemmer or they tried to market hair staighteners in Harlem or they ghosted exposés of Murder Incorporated for Sunday supplements. I think that perhaps none of us was very serious, engagé only about our most private lives.)
All I ever did to that apartment was hang fifty yards of yellow theatrical silk across the bedroom windows, because I had some idea that the gold light would make me feel better, but I did not bother to weight the curtains correctly and all that summer the long panels of transparent golden silk would blow out the windows and get tangled and drenched in afternoon thunderstorms. 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 ever procrastination, every word, all of it.
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. For a lot of the time I was in New York I used a perfume called Fleurs de Rocaille, and then L’Air du Temps, and now the slightest trace of either can short-circuit my connections for the rest of the day. Nor can I smell Henri Bendel jasmine soap without falling back into the past, or the particular mixture of spices used for boiling crabs. There were barrels of crab boil in a Czech place in the Eighties where I once shopped. Smells, of course, are notorious memory stimuli, but there are other things which affect me the same way. Blue-and-white striped sheets. Vermouth cassis. Some faded nightgowns which were new in 1959 or 1960, and some chiffon scarves I bought about the same time.
I suppose that a lot of us who have been very young in New York have the same scenes in our home screens. I remember sitting in a lot of apartments with a slight headache about five o’clock in the morning. 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, 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. The White Rose bars opened very early in the morning; I recall waiting in one of them to watch an astronaut go into space, waiting so long that at the moment it actually happened I had my eyes not on the television screen but on a cockroach on the tile floor. I liked the bleak branches above Washington Square at dawn, and the monochromatic flatness of Second Avenue, the fire escapes and the grilled storefronts peculiar and empty in their perspective.
It is relatively hard to fight at six-thirty or seven in the morning, without any sleep, which was perhaps one reason why we stayed up all night, and it seemed to me a pleasant time of day. The windows were shuttered in that apartment in the Nineties and I could sleep for a few hours and then go to work. I could work the on two or three hours’ sleep and a container of coffee from Chock Full O’ Nuts. I liked going to work, liked the soothing and satisfactory rhythm of getting out a magazine, liked the orderly progression of four-color closings and two-color closings and black-and-white closings and then The Product, no abstraction but something which looked effortlessly glossy and could be picked up on a newsstand and weighed in the hand. I liked all the minutiae of proofs and layouts, liked working late on the nights the magazines went to press, sitting and reading Variety and waiting for the copy desk to call. From my office, I could look across town to the weather signal on the Mutual of New York Building and the lights that alternately spelled TIME and LIFE above Rockeffeler Plaza; that pleased me obscurely, and so did walking uptown in the mauve eight o’clocks of early summer evenings and looking at things, Lowestoft tureens in Fifty-seventh Street windows, people in evening clothes trying to get taxis, the trees just coming into full leaf, the lambent air, all the sweet promises of money and summer.
Some years passed, but 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. I liked walking, from the East River over to the Hudson and back on brisk days, down around the Village on warm days. A friend would leave me the key to her apartment in the West Village when she was out of town, and sometimes I would just move down there, because by that time the telephone was beginning to bother me (the canker, you see, was already in the rose) and not many people had that number. I remember one day when someone who did have the West Village number came to pick me up for lunch there, and we both had hangovers, and I cut my finger opening him a beer and burst into tears, and we walked to a Spanish restaurant and drank bloody Marys and gazpacho until we felt better. I was not then guilt-ridden about spending afternoons that way, because I still had all the afternoons in the world.
And even that late in the game I still liked going to parties, all parties, bad parties, Saturday-afternoon parties given by recently married couples who lived in Stuyvesant Town, West Side parties given by unpublished or failed writers who served cheap red wine and talked about going to Guatalajara, Village parties where all the guests worked for advertising agencies and voted for Reform Democrats, press parties at Sardi’s, the worst kind of parties. You will have perceived by now that I was not one to profit by the experience of others, that it was a very long time indeed before I stopped believing in new faces and began to understand the lesson in that story, which was that it is distinctly possible to stay too long at the Fair.
I could not tell you when I began to understand that. All I know is that it was very bad when I was twenty-eight. Everything that was said to me I seemed to have heard before, and I could no longer listen. I could no longer sit in little bars near Grand Central and listen to someone complaining of his wife’s inability to cope with the help while he missed another train to Connecticut. I no longer had any interest in hearing about the advances other people had received from their publishers, about plays which were having second-act trouble in Philadelphia, or about people I would like very much if only I would come out and meet them. I had already met them, always. There were certain parts of the city which I had to avoid. I could not bear upper Madison Avenue on weekday mornings (this was a particularly inconvenient aversion, since I then lived just fifty or sixty feet east of Madison), because I would see women walking Yorkshire terriers and shopping at G
December 12, 2020
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.
August 21, 2023
“ One of the mixed blessings of being twenty and twenty-one and even twenty-three is the conviction that nothing like this, all evidence in the contrary notwithstanding, has ever happened to anyone before”
Crying
Crying
September 6, 2022
Joan did an amazing job catching my attention through this book. She made me realize that sometimes we super value things that shouldn’t be above family, mental health and piece. She took me to New York through her writing.
December 24, 2021
Essee nuorena New Yorkissa yksin asumisesta. En uskonu et törmäisin teokseen joka osais kuvailla niin hyvin mun ajatuksia ja tunteita ajalta kun oon muuttanu omilleni, muuttanu uudelleen ja tietäny et se kaikki on ollu vaan välivaihetta.
June 3, 2020
Absolutely Delightful
January 7, 2022
enormously specific, might have to move to new york when i'm older if only to see what didion's talking about
December 18, 2022
captured both the beauty and the bleakness
"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 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"
August 8, 2023
This hit me very hard. If you want good writing, just go to the OG, not those “inspired” by her. Thanks Didion.
April 7, 2024
Short and lovely :) she knows
October 25, 2023
Read this in Spetember & forgot to put it on goodreads 😭 I'm a Joan Didion stan now ngl
October 24, 2014
I chanced upon a post about Joan Didion's Goodbye To All That by Joan Didionon DailyLit and it got me curious enough to get my hands on a copy of Didion’s classic essay.
In Goodbye to all that, Joan dives into the narrative with hilarious observations, witty remarks and also painful truths. The point she is trying to make is this — the throbbing sense of disillusionment and resignation that came along with her eight-year stay in New York. But the best part is the purple prose doesn’t stay in New York. It travels far and wide, making itself relevant in any life-altering city, so that reader can easily put herself into Didion’s shoes and understand her pangs.
She asks the question "…was anyone so young?" and herself supplies the response: "I am here to tell you that someone was." This is the kind of rhetoric commentary that one can expect in the essay.
She talks of personal calamities that unfold in herself with literary perfection. Sample this:
I hurt the people I cared about, and insulted those I did not. I cut myself off from the one person who was closer to me than any other. I cried until I was not even aware when I was crying and when I was not, cried in elevators and in taxis and in Chinese laundries, and when I went to the doctor he said only that I seemed to be depressed, and should see a “specialist.” He wrote down a psychiatrist’s name and address for me, but I did not go.
Or the way she brings two or more points of view together with no inhibitions. From talking about how she was “in love with the city”, she segues the narrative to when she remembered "walking across Sixty-second Street … I stopped at Lexington Avenue and bought a peach and stood on the corner eating it and knew that I had come out of the West and reached the mirage" her writing is so seamless her passing fascination with New York is relevant throughout.
The essay was part of the 1967 collection of essays Slouching towards Bethlehem, which is next on my reading list, the same volume that gave us the insightful essay On keeping a notebook.
If you have fallen madly in love with a city, and then fallen out of it to the point of being disillusioned this is a compulsory read.
In Goodbye to all that, Joan dives into the narrative with hilarious observations, witty remarks and also painful truths. The point she is trying to make is this — the throbbing sense of disillusionment and resignation that came along with her eight-year stay in New York. But the best part is the purple prose doesn’t stay in New York. It travels far and wide, making itself relevant in any life-altering city, so that reader can easily put herself into Didion’s shoes and understand her pangs.
She asks the question "…was anyone so young?" and herself supplies the response: "I am here to tell you that someone was." This is the kind of rhetoric commentary that one can expect in the essay.
She talks of personal calamities that unfold in herself with literary perfection. Sample this:
I hurt the people I cared about, and insulted those I did not. I cut myself off from the one person who was closer to me than any other. I cried until I was not even aware when I was crying and when I was not, cried in elevators and in taxis and in Chinese laundries, and when I went to the doctor he said only that I seemed to be depressed, and should see a “specialist.” He wrote down a psychiatrist’s name and address for me, but I did not go.
Or the way she brings two or more points of view together with no inhibitions. From talking about how she was “in love with the city”, she segues the narrative to when she remembered "walking across Sixty-second Street … I stopped at Lexington Avenue and bought a peach and stood on the corner eating it and knew that I had come out of the West and reached the mirage" her writing is so seamless her passing fascination with New York is relevant throughout.
The essay was part of the 1967 collection of essays Slouching towards Bethlehem, which is next on my reading list, the same volume that gave us the insightful essay On keeping a notebook.
If you have fallen madly in love with a city, and then fallen out of it to the point of being disillusioned this is a compulsory read.
March 7, 2017
“Goodbye to all that” (1968), contained in the first collection of nonfiction writing “Slouching Toward Bethlehem”, is an essay written by the American author Joan Didion, best known for exploring the individual and social fragmentation in her literary novels and literary Journalism. Part autobiographical, part novel with an accurate feelings description, this essay is about a young girl’s inner journey and her adult changing perspective when considering the value of beauty. The author writes about her contemporary world - her experience of living in New York City in the 60s, the period of the Beat Generation and the Counterculture. The city of all possibilities was very different from the Western United States, where she grew up and where she has returned after her almost obligatory boot-camp training in New York City.
Though not as difficult to interpret, Miss Didion has a special style of writing and make you feel as you have lived the same feelings as she has lived. It will leave readers with a great deal to think about. She describes how our plans can change so fast, how things can change form, how a very good thing to do turns out to be badly timed and how smells can reawaken our memory and make us jump back in past lived situations.
This is what this essay is about: an introspective journey in the inner selves. It seems like a banal and conventional topic, but it isn’t, as it is not easy to find the right words to describe feelings. We perceive her rough soul throughout the text and only a tormented character led by an experienced writing can give us the sensation of living what she describes. It is arduous to depict what you feel in your soul because you have to dig, dig and dig, and experience pain and joy once and again.
Didion lived in first person what means to be a foreigner in another city, as in her life she moved so often and that made her feel like a perpetual outsider. But the moral of the story is that all this wander and experiences we do can help us to understand what we want. After all, we always return to our roots, to our home. Home is what we feel like home and it depends from one person to another. In fact, the designation of Home is not the same of that of House. The word Home carries with it concepts like private, coziness and family. It is not easy to leave home, but in order to judge and understand what real life is about you need to know other places, minds and languages.
Though not as difficult to interpret, Miss Didion has a special style of writing and make you feel as you have lived the same feelings as she has lived. It will leave readers with a great deal to think about. She describes how our plans can change so fast, how things can change form, how a very good thing to do turns out to be badly timed and how smells can reawaken our memory and make us jump back in past lived situations.
This is what this essay is about: an introspective journey in the inner selves. It seems like a banal and conventional topic, but it isn’t, as it is not easy to find the right words to describe feelings. We perceive her rough soul throughout the text and only a tormented character led by an experienced writing can give us the sensation of living what she describes. It is arduous to depict what you feel in your soul because you have to dig, dig and dig, and experience pain and joy once and again.
Didion lived in first person what means to be a foreigner in another city, as in her life she moved so often and that made her feel like a perpetual outsider. But the moral of the story is that all this wander and experiences we do can help us to understand what we want. After all, we always return to our roots, to our home. Home is what we feel like home and it depends from one person to another. In fact, the designation of Home is not the same of that of House. The word Home carries with it concepts like private, coziness and family. It is not easy to leave home, but in order to judge and understand what real life is about you need to know other places, minds and languages.
October 2, 2021
Goodbye To All That is a short essay written by writer Joan Didion. The text of the essay is an exploration of her loneliness and isolation in New York City. She meanders through life in a pessimistic view of the world. She uses descriptive language in order to portray a sad life in the city, going through the motions, feeling helpless. She describes the buildings, the landscapes, the harsh reality of the disgustingly banal cityscape.
She talks about love and her friends. She’s desperately trying to hold onto the last shreds of hope that she has in a cycle of pessimism. She holds onto the familiar in an unfamiliar world. The beautiful smell of lilac flowers contrasts with the repulsiveness of garbage and overly scented perfumes. The air is blowing on the subways. She has a cyclical life, wandering through, making barely enough money to scrape by.
Joan lives a depressive life of poverty, a sense of dread and anxiety permeating the text. Hopelessness pervades, but she keeps trying to remain hopeful in a cruel world. The weather is described in great detail throughout the essay, only adding to the atmosphere of the essay. She describes the ways she could get out, but all of them are even worse than what she already has. She keeps trying, but it’s so hard for her.
There is an immense sense of sincerity pervasive throughout the work. She is so emotionally honest and her determination to remain hopeful is admirable. The holidays, the snow, the summer, all described in great, excruciatingly articulate detail. The theme of anxiety throughout the essay is very touching.
It’s such a loveable piece of writing.
Overall, the text is one of extreme emotional honesty and it’s hard not to fall in love with the sincerity of it all. The writing is incredibly powerful. City life is explored in great detail. It’s so detailed and well-written. It is a text that will most likely stick with me for a while.
She talks about love and her friends. She’s desperately trying to hold onto the last shreds of hope that she has in a cycle of pessimism. She holds onto the familiar in an unfamiliar world. The beautiful smell of lilac flowers contrasts with the repulsiveness of garbage and overly scented perfumes. The air is blowing on the subways. She has a cyclical life, wandering through, making barely enough money to scrape by.
Joan lives a depressive life of poverty, a sense of dread and anxiety permeating the text. Hopelessness pervades, but she keeps trying to remain hopeful in a cruel world. The weather is described in great detail throughout the essay, only adding to the atmosphere of the essay. She describes the ways she could get out, but all of them are even worse than what she already has. She keeps trying, but it’s so hard for her.
There is an immense sense of sincerity pervasive throughout the work. She is so emotionally honest and her determination to remain hopeful is admirable. The holidays, the snow, the summer, all described in great, excruciatingly articulate detail. The theme of anxiety throughout the essay is very touching.
It’s such a loveable piece of writing.
Overall, the text is one of extreme emotional honesty and it’s hard not to fall in love with the sincerity of it all. The writing is incredibly powerful. City life is explored in great detail. It’s so detailed and well-written. It is a text that will most likely stick with me for a while.
October 12, 2015
Short short story about growing old and growing over New York; just a few pages, but amazing ones! The pain and joy of years going by and changing you without your notice, the freedom and inconsistency and immediacy of youth, it's all there and it's exactly as I know it but could never ever explain. Lovely!
May 8, 2017
Interesting essay about Didion and her experiences in New York City.
November 16, 2017
This was the slap-in-the-face text for me. I recommend it to people at the age of 23-27.
March 16, 2015
IT WAS OPTIONED FOR FILM I MIGHT BE CRYING RIGHT NOW
September 4, 2022
A light drizzling afternoon, the bright sunshine of early September through the thin, light rain, and listening to Lester Lanin since everyone in New York knows who he is? Lying down to read Joan Didion's short, thrilling, and sympathetic diary called Goodbye to All. Really sympathize with her since her move may be similar to mine in her 20s, 21s, 23s, and 28s, while mine is in my 19s, 20s, and 21s. And yep, I didn't locate my common ground in Tokyo longer, so I left Tokyo & say goodbye to all too. I see Tokyo is somewhat different from New York, that I wonder if it's just Tokyo and Tokyoers are a bit quieter, a bit more aloof, plus Tokyo seems smaller than New York? Not sure, but I understand enough that if I was alone in Tokyo, I'm not rich, or I'm not flexible, or maybe back in those days I had no purpose, you know you would be overwhelmed by the bright lights of the surrounding buildings, drove me insane, made me become someone else sad, and so on, like falling into a bottomless hole and it just continues. And somehow, you're now daydreaming of visiting New York to explore someday soon, to learn more—but not enough to really understand—that busy, never-sleeping city? to compare Tokyo's and New York's differences?
- Sooner or later no matter what she or he is doing, but one of the mixed blessings of being twenty and twenty one and even twenty-three the conviction that nothing like this, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, has ever happened to anyone before..
- It is often said that NY is a city for only the very rich and the very poor. It is less often said that NY is also, at least for those of us who came there from somewhere else, a city for only the very young.
- Had it rained in the night? We never knew.
- I liked the soothing and satisfactory rhythm of getting out a magazine, liked the orderly progression of four-color closings and two-color closings and black-and-white closings and then The Product, no abstraction but something which looked effortlessly glossy and could be picked up on the news-stand and weighed in the hand.
- I hurt the people I cared about, and insulted those I did not. I cut myself off from the one person who was closer to me than any other. I cried until I was not even aware when I was crying and when I was not, cried in elavators and in taxis and in Chinese laundries, and when I went to the doctor he said only that I seemed to be depressed, and should see a "specialist".
bookreviews bookreview review YA short youngadult adventure nonfiction biography essay
A few of my favorite, very sympathetic parts from the book:
- Sooner or later no matter what she or he is doing, but one of the mixed blessings of being twenty and twenty one and even twenty-three the conviction that nothing like this, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, has ever happened to anyone before..
- It is often said that NY is a city for only the very rich and the very poor. It is less often said that NY is also, at least for those of us who came there from somewhere else, a city for only the very young.
- Had it rained in the night? We never knew.
- I liked the soothing and satisfactory rhythm of getting out a magazine, liked the orderly progression of four-color closings and two-color closings and black-and-white closings and then The Product, no abstraction but something which looked effortlessly glossy and could be picked up on the news-stand and weighed in the hand.
- I hurt the people I cared about, and insulted those I did not. I cut myself off from the one person who was closer to me than any other. I cried until I was not even aware when I was crying and when I was not, cried in elavators and in taxis and in Chinese laundries, and when I went to the doctor he said only that I seemed to be depressed, and should see a "specialist".
bookreviews bookreview review YA short youngadult adventure nonfiction biography essay
June 18, 2019
In the third-to-last chapter of "Hemingway's Boat" Paul Hendrickson mentions this essay as the "famous leaving New York story" (or something close enough to that). Within the scope of his book it was a throwaway line but since I'm planning my own good-bye it excited me. And it's pretty good. It's Hemingway-esque in its simple language and fear of the comma, and when Didion explains that Easterners will never understand what New York means to people growing up in the West or the South I immediately filed that tidbit away as the wedge to convince Tian and Nico to read it, too. Some of the punch was lost on me since I've done the New York thing for a year now and am sick of it, but Didion's own disillusionment is still exciting. This is one I'll need to re-read closer to my departure, and maybe again and again after that.
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