Goodbye To All That

Joan Didion’s story Goodbye To All That made me really yearn to see with fresh eyes the lights of New York arrive over me, or fall in love with any new place and through it, myself. Obviously this story is ripe for college students, at “the beginning of things”, as Didion would say, though they (we) may feel more in the midst of everything and less at one end or another. Someone once told me that the hour or half hour before you black out becomes the clearest in memory.

Didion follows this pattern, with the events of her arrival crisp and in focus as photographs, down to the make of plane she stepped off of and the temperature of the air conditioner in her hotel room. Next follows the hazy, drunken love story of Didion as a New Yorker. She describes the disintegration of the memories of these years through the metaphor of “the deceptive ease of a film dissolve”. She speaks with the older-and wiser, Vaseline-lensed voice of someone who has gotten over a phase and speaks knowingly to a young person, sure that they too will grow tired of that phase. This tone of voice hovers dangerously close to condescension, or could, if Didion did not speak of her experience so personally and lovingly, without judging her own naiveté.

When Didion wakes up the next morning and realizes that she’s been living in Los Angeles with her husband for three years, she remarks that New York is for the young, and that time is past for her. I guess reactions to this depend on the reader’s own situation (like the fine line where one side yells at Wendy for growing up at the end of Peter Pan). My upbringing in New York conditions me to think that I suspected all along that Didion wouldn’t be able to hold out, that there goes another one who thought they could waltz in and be a New Yorker. But others would understand, and others would believe that they would be different. Again, the way that she keeps from sounding moralizing and all-presuming is by letting us see her at her most personal and most vulnerable. It is her struggle and love we see, her highs and lows, and we can read ourselves into them of we choose, but she leaves that up to us and does not force it upon us.