I wrote this for an essay class last semester, but didn’t get around to posting it until now. The assignment was to reflect on a strong reaction you’ve had to another author’s writing. Sorry if it’s a little tl;dr.
“Good-bye to All That” by Joan Didion, the mandatory “this city has ruined me” essay that all New York writers inevitably produce, is a piece I’d composed in my head many times before realizing she had already penned it.
Written in 1967, the sentiments woven into this essay still resonate more than 40 years later, though maybe that’s because, as she writes, “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.” Upon reading “Good-bye to All That” for the first time, I realized that many of my own essays had a similar spine, albeit with a contemporary twist: they were peppered with misanthropic indictments of the internet and the personal challenges I’d faced in coming to grips with the city, but somehow I always eventually stumbled upon the same point that Didion makes: to be young and disaffected in New York is perhaps the most unoriginal stance a writer can take, but in spite of that, or perhaps because of it, it’s also one of the most resonant.