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The Long Goodbye

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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 clich: the not-quite-soyoung writer beating a hasty retreat from the city, but transforming the surrender into a literary triumph via a Goodbye to All That, Redux essay.

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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

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The Long Goodbye - NYTimes.com

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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 cant quit you. Or maybe I can.

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Joan Didion wrote Goodbye to All That, about leaving New York, in 1967, setting the stage for a succession of writers, like Andrew Sullivan.

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On first glance, contemporary entries to the genre tend to follow the same arc as Ms. Didions essay. Basically, it is a classic femme (or homme) fatale story, with New York as siren, New York as loversubstitute, 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 Im 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, its that guy. Ive always been partial to the friendly guy who doesnt 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 hes 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

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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 midtwenties 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. Didions 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 Bloomingdales 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 writers budget is a theme running through several contemporary variations on the theme.
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A version of this article appears in print on November 24, 2013, on page ST1 of the New York edition with the headline: The Long Goodbye.
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ama

los angeles

grew up in queens, went to a suny school in new paltz and i left manhattan for los angeles when i was 26. i am now 52 and while i get to "go home" a couple of times a year - the rhythmic hustle of the subways, the split second connections made with strangers and the complicated scents that are a mix of clean air, garbage stench and human perfumes, are the gentle pulls that remind me i'll always be a new yorker. however, today i live in topanga canyon, a 10 minute drive down the mountain and another 10 minute ride with the ocean on my passenger side, and i'm in santa monica where my work is. i fall asleep to the sirens of coyotes and wake up to the oddly pleasant alarm clock of roosters crowing. there's weather up here, nice people who care about each other and a view from my backyard that could pass for a tuscan valley. yes you can go home again, but i always am glad to return to topanga!
Nov. 24, 2013 at 3:29 p.m.
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Carolyn R.

NYC

It always has - and will be - one of the greatest loves and passions that shaped my life. No matter where I have traveled - I have one home. A vignette happening on every street corner; incredible learning and growth seeping in to every pore, and stimulation that makes the world's greatest operas look timid. I realize my city won't always be faithful, or do what I need it to do (cheaper
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