narrative essay goodbye to all that

“Goodbye to All That” by Joan Didion Essay

In “Goodbye to All That,” Joan Didion writes that the “lesson” of her story is that “it is distinctly possible to remain too long at the Fair.” Throughout the story, the author implies that one may have magical places in his or her imagination, but living in a place that he or she imagines as magical or dreamy can turn into a very upsetting experience. The purpose of Didion’s writing was to provide evidence for this idea, and she managed to do it by revealing her understanding of the situation in which she had found herself after eight years spent in New York City, describing her feelings about this understanding, and explaining the consequences of learning this lesson.

First of all, the author came to the understanding that it was possible to remain too long at the fair when she analyzed the life she was living. She realized that, despite the idealistic image of New York she had, the place to which she had dedicated eight years of her life was not so splendid after all. An example of this realization is the fact that, in New York, according to Didion, everyone was trying to meet “new faces,” but everyone failed to do so. When going with her friend to a party where she had been promised to meet new faces, Didion was made fun of my friend, as he laughed and revealed that, at the party, they were going to, “he had already slept with five of the women and owed money to all but two of the men.” Over the years, the magical place Didion had been in love with was becoming more and more boring.

The author’s feelings about this understanding were primarily associated with being depressed. She says that she “cried until [she] was not even aware when [she] was crying and when [she] was not, [she] cried in elevators and in taxis and in Chinese laundries.” Didion was experiencing the emptiness and meaninglessness of her life in New York, the city that kept disappointing her, not because it was a bad place to live but because it was not the place she had been dreaming of living in.

Finally, the main point of the story is that the author got to learn the lesson after all. After she had moved to Los Angeles, her life became significantly more enjoyable, and when she visited New York again, she saw that “everyone was ill and tired.” Upon realizing that illusions are not a good place to live in, Didion left her illusion and created a different life for herself. This shows how living in New York City and perceiving it as a dreamy place ultimately taught her the lesson of appreciating real experiences more than illusionary ones.

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Joan Didion, ‘Goodbye to All That’ and the struggle to see yourself clearly

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Anyone who’s completed the climb out of their early twenties hopefully has the wits to remember when life was as vivid as Kodachrome and the experience to recognize that perhaps all those new colors were duller than they seemed. Perspective, after all, is one of the great pleasures of getting older. But at the date of her death Thursday at the age of 87, Joan Didion’s 1967 essay “Goodbye to All That” remains the permanent sunspot obscuring the center-vision of many maturing writers even contemplating leaving a place like New York and telling other people about it. Only a great artist creates and ruins a genre at the same time. For millennial writers who grew into the body of essays, novels and literary journalism Didion already had waiting for them, it was like sitting down to grainy footage of a party that ended long before they would ever arrive.

Re-reading “Goodbye to All That” today — in the era of online, shortform oversharing — it’s striking to a contemporary reader how those 1967 sentences trail on and curl over themselves, like smoke lifting off a cigarette in a breezeless room. “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 sung and all the stories I had ever read about New York, informed me that it would never quite be the same again,” Didion writes in an opening sentence of the piece. “In fact it never was.” That first sentence has six commas and six and s. It then lands with the kind of five-word Didionism that marked her career’s dehumidified approach to writing and evaluating her own experiences.

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A certain degree of ruthlessness with yourself conveys honesty, and it’s true that some naivete comes with being young. But not everybody might be so hard on themselves when it comes time to take stock of getting older. “Was anyone ever so young?” Didion wonders, recalling how she was afraid to call a hotel front desk to turn down the air conditioning when she was frigid, feverish and alone. “I am here to tell you that someone was. All I could do during those three days was talk long-distance to the boy I already knew I would never marry in the spring.” A husband shows up, along with some furniture, after Didion film-dissolves through a couple pages of life in minimally furnished apartments and all-night parties with strange piano salesmen and various failed writers and self-promoters of her acquaintance.

The essay is so classically a New York story, a journal entry about an outlander’s temporary harmonic alignment with a place that most Americans only recognize from their televisions. But the most universal appeal of “Goodbye to All That” is less about New York than its depiction of youth itself, the only city we’ve all lived in. “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 light, 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.” Think about the last time you really admired the violence of how a stoplight red looks against wet pavement on an empty street. After a while, you realize that’s just how the world looks when you’re alone.

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Looking back, Didion seems frustrated that she couldn’t see herself clearly, couldn’t more sharply perceive at the time that being wowed has a natural expiration date that was rapidly approaching. “You see I was in a curious position in New York: it never occurred to me that I was living a real life there,” she writes. “In my imagination I was always there for just another few months, just until Christmas or Easter or the first warm day in May.” She stayed eight years.

Eventually she got tired. Many do. Finally, Didion left for Los Angeles, where the essay wraps up so suddenly that the white space arrives with the stopping power you’d meet in an electric fence. “The golden rhythm was broken,” she shrugs. After her essay appeared in the Saturday Evening Post and her book “Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” Didion went on to have a distinguished career, which included a lot of formidable books, including 2005’s classic “The Year of Magical Thinking,” a painful memoir about grieving the sudden death of her husband, John Gregory Dunne. “It was in fact the ordinary nature of everything preceding the event that prevented me from truly believing it had happened, absorbing it, incorporating it, getting past it,” she writes of his death. Almost 40 years later, there she was, still struggling to perceive herself clearly, while offering herself to readers to be seen.

It takes time to see clearly after a departure. She knew that.

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Matt Pearce was a reporter for the Los Angeles Times from 2012 to 2024. He previously covered the covering internet culture and podcasting, the 2020 presidential election and spent six years on The Times’ national desk, where he wrote stories about violence, disasters, social movements and civil liberties. Pearce was one of the first national reporters to arrive in Ferguson, Mo., during the uprising in 2014, and he chased Hurricane Harvey across Texas as the storm ravaged the Lone Star State in 2017. A University of Missouri graduate, he hails from a small town outside Kansas City, Mo.

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Goodbye To All That Essay Summary By Joan Didion

Table of Contents

“Goodbye to All That” is a celebrated essay written by Joan Didion , published in her 1968 collection of essays titled “Slouching Towards Bethlehem.” The essay serves as a memoir and reflection on Didion’s experience of living in New York City during the 1950s and 1960s and her eventual departure from the city.

Goodbye To All That Essay Summary By Joan Didion- In the essay, Didion begins by recounting her arrival in New York at the age of twenty, describing her wide-eyed fascination with the city’s allure and the excitement she felt at being part of its vibrant cultural scene. 

She delves into her experiences as a young woman navigating the city’s social circles, discussing her relationships and encounters with various influential figures in the literary and artistic world.

Goodbye To All That Essay Summary By Joan Didion- However, as the essay progresses, Didion’s tone becomes increasingly disillusioned. She describes the challenges and hardships of living in New York, including the high cost of living, the intense competition, and the feeling of constantly being on the outskirts of success. 

Goodbye To All That Essay Summary By Joan Didion- She reflects on the transitory nature of relationships and the loss of innocence and idealism that often accompanies the pursuit of personal and professional fulfillment in the city.

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Goodbye To All That Essay Summary By Joan Didion- Didion also explores the idea of impermanence and change, discussing how New York’s ever-shifting landscape mirrors the internal changes she undergoes as a person. She realizes that her initial infatuation with the city has waned, and she no longer feels a sense of belonging or connection to it. 

The essay reaches its climax as Didion makes the decision to leave New York behind and move to California, symbolizing her farewell to the city and the lifestyle it represents.

Goodbye To All That Essay Summary By Joan Didion- “Goodbye to All That” is not just a personal account of Didion’s experience in New York but also a reflection on the broader themes of disillusionment, identity, and the passage of time.

Goodbye To All That Essay Summary By Joan Didion- It has resonated with many readers who have experienced similar feelings of ambivalence and the need for change in their own lives. The essay is regarded as one of Didion’s most influential works and has become a classic in the genre of personal essays.

About Joan Didion

Goodbye To All That Essay Summary By Joan Didion- Joan Didion is a highly influential American writer known for her distinctive style and insightful observations of American culture and society. She was born on December 5, 1934, in Sacramento, California. Didion’s writing career spans several decades, and her works have had a profound impact on literature, journalism, and the field of creative nonfiction.

Goodbye To All That Essay Summary By Joan Didion- Didion attended the University of California, Berkeley, where she studied English and won an essay contest sponsored by Vogue magazine, which launched her career as a writer. 

She worked as an editor for Vogue in New York City and later transitioned to writing essays and articles for various publications, including The New York Review of Books and The Saturday Evening Post.

Goodbye To All That Essay Summary By Joan Didion- One of the hallmarks of Didion’s writing is her distinctive style characterized by spare and incisive prose. Her works often explore themes of identity, memory, loss, and the complexities of American society. She has a keen eye for cultural trends and has been hailed for her ability to capture the spirit of different eras, particularly in her essays that provide insightful commentary on the political and social climate of the time.

Some of Joan Didion’s most notable works include “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” (1968), “The White Album” (1979), and “Play It as It Lays” (1970). In addition to her essays and novels, she has also written screenplays, including the adaptation of her own novel “Play It as It Lays” for the film released in 1972.

Goodbye To All That Essay Summary By Joan Didion- Throughout her career, Joan Didion has received numerous awards and accolades for her writing, including the National Book Award for Nonfiction for “The Year of Magical Thinking” (2005), which is a memoir about the year following the death of her husband. 

Her works continue to be celebrated for their insightful exploration of the human experience and their lasting impact on the literary landscape.

Joan Didion’s essay “Goodbye to All That” is a poignant and introspective reflection on her time living in New York City during the 1950s and 1960s. Through her personal experiences and observations, Didion captures the initial excitement and allure of the city, followed by a growing disillusionment and the eventual decision to leave.

Goodbye To All That Essay Summary By Joan Didion- The essay explores themes of disillusionment, the transient nature of relationships, the pursuit of personal and professional fulfillment, and the passage of time. Didion’s departure from New York symbolizes not just a physical farewell to the city but also a symbolic shedding of her old self and a quest for a new beginning.

Goodbye To All That Essay Summary By Joan Didion- “Goodbye to All That” has resonated with readers for its relatability and its exploration of universal themes of change, identity, and the complexities of urban life. It remains a significant work in the realm of personal essays and stands as a testament to Didion’s skill as a writer in capturing the essence of a time and place while delving into the depths of her own psyche.

Q: Who is Joan Didion? 

A: Joan Didion is an American writer known for her works in various genres, including essays, novels, and screenplays. She was born on December 5, 1934, in Sacramento, California. Didion is renowned for her distinctive writing style characterized by concise and incisive prose, as well as her keen observations of American culture and society.

Q: What is “Slouching Towards Bethlehem”? 

A: “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” is a collection of essays written by Joan Didion, published in 1968. The book’s title is taken from the W.B. Yeats poem “The Second Coming,” and it reflects the themes of societal unrest and cultural decline explored in the essays. The collection covers a range of topics, including Didion’s experiences in California, her reflections on the 1960s counterculture, and her observations of American society at the time.

Q: What is the significance of “Goodbye to All That”? 

A: “Goodbye to All That” is one of the most notable essays in Joan Didion’s collection “Slouching Towards Bethlehem.” It stands out for its introspective portrayal of Didion’s experience living in New York City and her decision to leave the city behind. 

The essay has resonated with many readers due to its exploration of disillusionment, the pursuit of personal fulfillment, and the themes of change and identity. It has become a classic in the genre of personal essays and is often referenced as a powerful reflection on the complexities of urban life.

Q: What are some other notable works by Joan Didion? 

A: Joan Didion has written numerous notable works throughout her career. Some of her other well-known books include “The White Album” (1979), a collection of essays reflecting on the 1960s and ’70s, “Play It as It Lays” (1970), a novel that explores themes of existentialism and disillusionment in Hollywood, and “The Year of Magical Thinking” (2005), a memoir recounting the year following the death of her husband. Didion’s works have received critical acclaim and have had a significant impact on literature and the field of nonfiction writing.

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Goodbye to All That: Writers on Loving and Leaving New York

By maria popova.

The magnificent Cheryl “Sugar” Strayed — one of the finest hearts, minds, and keyboards of our time, whose Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar is an existential must and was among the best psychology and philosophy books of 2012 — had a rude awakening to NYC. On the warm September afternoon of her twenty-fourth birthday, she saw a man get stabbed in the West Village. He didn’t die, but the shock of it — and the shock of the general bystander-indifference as a waiter assuringly said to her, “I wouldn’t worry about it,” while pouring her another cup of coffee on the sunny sidelines — planted the seed of slow-growing, poisonous worry about the greater It of it. Strayed writes:

I couldn’t keep myself from thinking everything in New York was superior to every other place I’d ever been, which hadn’t been all that many places. I was stunned by New York. Its grand parks and museums. Its cozy cobbled streets and dazzlingly bright thoroughfares. Its alternately efficient and appalling subway system. Its endlessly gorgeous women clad in slim pants and killer shoes and interesting coats. And yet something happened on my way to falling head over heels in love with the place. Maybe it was the man getting stabbed that no one worried about. Or maybe it was bigger than that. The abruptness, the gruffness, the avoid-eye-contact indifference of the crowded subways and streets felt as foreign to me as Japan or Cameroon, as alien to me as Mars. Even the couple who owned the bodega below our apartment greeted my husband and me each day as if we were complete strangers, which is to say they didn’t greet us at all, no matter how many times we came in to buy toilet paper or soup, cat food or pasta. They merely took our money and returned our change with gestures so automatic and faces so expressionless they might as well have been robots. … This tiny thing … grew to feel like the greatest New York City crime of all, to be denied the universal silent acknowledgment of familiarity, the faintest smile, the hint of a nod.

That realization was the beginning of the end. On a cold February afternoon, Strayed and her husband began packing their New York lives into a double-parked pickup truck. They were done after dark, long after they had anticipated — for living in New York is the art of transmuting a shoebox into a bottomless pit of stuff, only to have it unravel into a black hole of time-space that swallows you whole each time you move shoeboxes — and all that remained was that odd morning-after emptiness of feeling, which Strayed captures with her characteristic blunt elegance:

I’d entered the city the way one enters any grand love affair: with no exit plan. I went willing to live there forever, to become one of the women clad in slim pants and killer shoes and interesting coats. I was ready for the city to sweep me into its arms, but instead it held me at a cool distance. And so I left New York the way one leaves a love affair too: because, much as I loved it, I wasn’t truly in love. I had no compelling reason to stay.

Dani Shapiro , author of the freshly released and wonderful Still Writing: The Pleasures and Perils of a Creative Life — had a rather different experience:

The city, was what people from New Jersey called it. The city, as if there were no other. If you were a suburban Jewish girl in the late 1970s, aching to burst out of the tepid swamp of your adolescence (synagogue! field hockey! cigarettes!), the magnetic pull of the city from across the water was irresistible. Between you and the city were the smokestacks of Newark, the stench of oil refineries, the soaring Budweiser eagle, its lit-up wings flapping high above the manufacturing plant. That eagle — if you were a certain kind of girl, you wanted to leap on its neon back and be carried away. On weekend trips into the city, you’d watch from the backseat of your parents’ car for the line in the Lincoln Tunnel that divided New Jersey from New York, because you felt dead on one side, and alive on the other.

She moved to the alive side at nineteen, to live with a boyfriend she soon married, only to find herself divorced at twenty. (“How many people can claim that?,” Shapiro asks clearly rhetorically — and, clearly, she’d be surprised.) Now, thirty years later, she has a Dear Me moment as she looks back:

I wish I could reach back through time and shake some sense into that lost little girl. I wish I could tell her to wait, to hold on. That becoming a grown-up is not something that happens overnight, or on paper. That rings and certificates and apartments and meals have nothing to do with it. That everything we do matters. Wait , I want to say — but she is impatient, racing ahead of me.

And though she became a writer — a Writer in the City — Shapiro found herself strangely, subtly, yet palpably unfitted for the kind of life the city required:

I could lecture on metaphor; I could teach graduate students; I could locate and deconstruct the animal imagery in Madame Bovary . But I could not squash a water bug by myself. The practicalities of life eluded me. The city — which I knew with the intimacy of a lover — made it very possible to continue like this, carried along on a stream of light, motion, energy, noise. The city was a bracing wind that never stopped blowing, and I was a lone leaf slapped up against the side of a building, a hydrant, a tree.

Writing now from her small study in scenic Connecticut, two hours north of the city, she reflects on her choice to leave after — and despite — having attained her teenage dream:

My city broke its promise to me, and I to it. I fell out of love, and then I fell back in — with my small town, its winding country roads, and the ladies at the post office who know my name. I did my best to become the airbrushed girl on its billboards, but even airbrushed girls grow up. We soften over time, or maybe harden. One way or another, life will have its way with us.

Roxane Gay , author of the beautiful Ayiti , recalls her first impressions of New York as a child in Queens — its city-street grit, its Broadway glitter, its daily human tragedies and triumphs unfolding on every corner. Above all, however, the city sang its siren song of unlimited diversity and unconditional acceptance to her — a young black girl with an artistic bend — as she became obsessed with attending college there:

If I went to school in New York, surely all my problems would be solved. I would learn how to be chic and glamorous. I would learn how to walk fast and wear all black without looking like I was attending a funeral. In adolescence, I was becoming a different kind of stranger in a strange land. I was a theater geek and troubled and angry and hell-bent on forgetting the worst parts of myself. In New York, I told myself, I would no longer be the only freak in the room because the city was full of freaks.

But despite being admitted into NYU — her most dreamsome fulfillment of idyllic fantasy — her parents had their doubts about the city’s dangers and distractions, so they sent her to a prestigious school a few hours away. And yet Gay continued to fuel the fantasy of New York’s make-or-break magic wand of success — a fantasy especially entertained by aspiring writers:

New York City is the center of the writing world, or so we’re told. New York is where all the action happens because the city is where the most important publishers and agents and writers are. New York is where the fancy book parties happen and where the literati rub elbows and everyone knows (or pretends to know) everything about everyone else’s writing career. At some point, New York stopped being the city of my dreams because it stopped being merely an idea I longed to be a part of. New York was very real and very complicated. New York had become an intimidating giant of a place, but still I worried. If I wasn’t there as a writer, was I a writer anywhere?

And yet she did became a writer — a great one — even though she left the fairy Gotham godmother for a tiny Midwestern town, where she now teaches, writes, and revels in the unconditional unfanciness and comforting underwhelmingness of it all. After a recent visit to the city to meet with her agent — for though a Real Writer may live anywhere, a Real Writer’s agent invariably lives in New York — she reflects:

New York was a strange land, and I was still a stranger and would always be one. Overall, that visit was fun. The city was good to me and I looked forward to returning and soon. But. There was nothing for me to say goodbye to in New York because I never truly said hello. I became a writer without all the glamorous or anti-glamorous trappings of New York life I thought I needed.

Goodbye to All That: Writers on Loving and Leaving New York is an exquisite read in its entirety and a wonderful addition to these 10 favorite nonfiction reads on NYC . For an antidote, complement it with some cartographic love letters to the city from those who decided to stay and the mixed experiences of those who came and went.

— Published October 9, 2013 — https://www.themarginalian.org/2013/10/09/goodbye-to-all-that-book/ —

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“Goodbye to All That” by Joan Didion

From the Essays of E.B. White , particularly “Here Is New York” and “Good-bye to Forty-eighth Street,” and a little bit from “On a Florida Key,” I got swept over to this essay, because I wanted to figure out how they did place so particularly. That is, the particularity of a place, but the fact too that it’s so personal, that even the one Florida Key in the one year when White was there is not the same for anyone else as it was for him. I annotated this essay for the place-details Didion uses, and her zooming in and out.

“Goodbye to All That” is about a time in Didion’s life when she had a relationship with a place. She moved to New York City in the mid-1950s, and away again in the mid-1960s; she writes here of New York “beginning” and “ending” for her. The story of the essay is of the way the specialness of the place ended for her, what she could see from one end of the experience that she couldn’t see from the other. It is a fine blend of particular details and of generalities, or philosophical statements, such as: “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.” Or, that New York is “a city for only the very young.” There is a definite “Paris is a moveable feast” tone: elegiac, loving of a particular experience indelibly aligned with time and place.

In just over ten pages, Didion memorializes the New York City she loved upon arrival. It is a lovely study of this place, peppered with anecdotes and scenes–parties, snips of dialog–as well as those generalized philosophies; and it retains a feeling of pulled-back nostalgia and reflection. Didion’s choice of details creates that place that is so particular and personal. “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… and the warm air smelled of mildew…” The hotel room in the second paragraph super-cooled to thirty-five degrees, and the young Didion’s fear to call for help “because I did not know how much to tip whoever might come–was anyone ever so young?” (A lovely aside, addressing the reader there, and again maintaining a reflective distance in time.) The bridge viewed from the window. These details continue to make the place of this essay a specific place–the Triborough bridge, all the street names and addresses named as “the Nineties” and “the Eighties”–but they also give it sensory specificity: “I could smell lilac and garbage and expensive perfume.”

I can’t wait to read more Didion. Up next is The White Album .

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Filed under: book reviews | Tagged: creative nonfiction , essays , memoir , nonfiction , sense of place , WVWC MFA reading list |

3 Responses

[…] “Goodbye to All That”, Joan Didion – nonfiction […]

Finally reading this essay after perusing your 2017 best-of list. It’s definitely skilled as you say; and evocative of place, intimately personal. But also so much more; certainly a significant cultural time (with perspective now growing with age) intertwined with timeless youthful naiveté; and the ageless romance of conceived places. It made me think of London or Den Haag, at a particular time.

I also noted clever references, likely the tip of an iceberg I’m missing; e.g. a 60’s Streisand song ‘I Stayed Too Long at the Fair’ or Shakespeare’s ‘canker in the rose’ Sonnet.

I will likely be seeking out the whole essay collection…

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Summer Books 2007: Excerpts

Excerpt: 'goodbye to all that'.

Joan Didion

Hear Mia Dillon Read a Passage.

Mia Dillon's reading of "Goodbye to All That" is included in Selected Shorts: Travel Tales , an audio compilation of short stories.

More Recommendations:

See book critic Alan Cheuse's reading picks for the season.

Selected Shorts: Travel Tales

List Price: $28.00

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 heard sung and all the stories 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 on all 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 bad 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 three days 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 to 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 slept 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.

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34 Goodbye to All That by Joan Didion

Goodbye to All That

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 heard sung and all the stories 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 on all 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 bad 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 three days 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 to 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 slept 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.

Consider this:

• Joan Didion has called this her love letter to New York.  What details in the story show you the author’s love for the city?
• How did the experience of living in the city impact the author?
• Have you ever been in love with a city, town, or other place?  How did the experience of being in that place impact you?

This excerpt  of “Goodbye to All That” is from Didion’s work  Slouching Toward Bethlehem and made available to the public by NPR and is made available in this course under the educational purposes guidelines of fair use.

Goodbye to All That by Joan Didion Copyright © by Ryna May is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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Read 12 Masterful Essays by Joan Didion for Free Online, Spanning Her Career From 1965 to 2013

in Literature , Writing | January 14th, 2014 3 Comments

Image by David Shankbone, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

In a clas­sic essay of Joan Didion’s, “Good­bye to All That,” the nov­el­ist and writer breaks into her narrative—not for the first or last time—to prod her read­er. She rhetor­i­cal­ly asks and answers: “…was any­one ever so young? I am here to tell you that some­one was.” The wry lit­tle moment is per­fect­ly indica­tive of Didion’s unspar­ing­ly iron­ic crit­i­cal voice. Did­ion is a con­sum­mate crit­ic, from Greek kritēs , “a judge.” But she is always fore­most a judge of her­self. An account of Didion’s eight years in New York City, where she wrote her first nov­el while work­ing for Vogue , “Good­bye to All That” fre­quent­ly shifts point of view as Did­ion exam­ines the truth of each state­ment, her prose mov­ing seam­less­ly from delib­er­a­tion to com­men­tary, anno­ta­tion, aside, and apho­rism, like the below:

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.

Any­one who has ever loved and left New York—or any life-alter­ing city—will know the pangs of res­ig­na­tion Did­ion cap­tures. These eco­nom­ic times and every oth­er pro­duce many such sto­ries. But Did­ion made some­thing entire­ly new of famil­iar sen­ti­ments. Although her essay has inspired a sub-genre , and a col­lec­tion of breakup let­ters to New York with the same title, the unsen­ti­men­tal pre­ci­sion and com­pact­ness of Didion’s prose is all her own.

The essay appears in 1967’s Slouch­ing Towards Beth­le­hem , a rep­re­sen­ta­tive text of the lit­er­ary non­fic­tion of the six­ties along­side the work of John McPhee, Ter­ry South­ern, Tom Wolfe, and Hunter S. Thomp­son. In Didion’s case, the empha­sis must be decid­ed­ly on the lit­er­ary —her essays are as skill­ful­ly and imag­i­na­tive­ly writ­ten as her fic­tion and in close con­ver­sa­tion with their autho­r­i­al fore­bears. “Good­bye to All That” takes its title from an ear­li­er mem­oir, poet and crit­ic Robert Graves’ 1929 account of leav­ing his home­town in Eng­land to fight in World War I. Didion’s appro­pri­a­tion of the title shows in part an iron­ic under­cut­ting of the mem­oir as a seri­ous piece of writ­ing.

And yet she is per­haps best known for her work in the genre. Pub­lished almost fifty years after Slouch­ing Towards Beth­le­hem , her 2005 mem­oir The Year of Mag­i­cal Think­ing is, in poet Robert Pinsky’s words , a “traveler’s faith­ful account” of the stun­ning­ly sud­den and crush­ing per­son­al calami­ties that claimed the lives of her hus­band and daugh­ter sep­a­rate­ly. “Though the mate­r­i­al is lit­er­al­ly ter­ri­ble,” Pin­sky writes, “the writ­ing is exhil­a­rat­ing and what unfolds resem­bles an adven­ture nar­ra­tive: a forced expe­di­tion into those ‘cliffs of fall’ iden­ti­fied by Hop­kins.” He refers to lines by the gift­ed Jesuit poet Ger­ard Man­ley Hop­kins that Did­ion quotes in the book: “O the mind, mind has moun­tains; cliffs of fall / Fright­ful, sheer, no-man-fath­omed. Hold them cheap / May who ne’er hung there.”

The near­ly unim­peach­ably author­i­ta­tive ethos of Didion’s voice con­vinces us that she can fear­less­ly tra­verse a wild inner land­scape most of us triv­i­al­ize, “hold cheap,” or can­not fath­om. And yet, in a 1978 Paris Review inter­view , Didion—with that tech­ni­cal sleight of hand that is her casu­al mastery—called her­self “a kind of appren­tice plumber of fic­tion, a Cluny Brown at the writer’s trade.” Here she invokes a kind of arche­type of lit­er­ary mod­esty (John Locke, for exam­ple, called him­self an “under­labour­er” of knowl­edge) while also fig­ur­ing her­self as the win­some hero­ine of a 1946 Ernst Lubitsch com­e­dy about a social climber plumber’s niece played by Jen­nifer Jones, a char­ac­ter who learns to thumb her nose at pow­er and priv­i­lege.

A twist of fate—interviewer Lin­da Kuehl’s death—meant that Did­ion wrote her own intro­duc­tion to the Paris Review inter­view, a very unusu­al occur­rence that allows her to assume the role of her own inter­preter, offer­ing iron­ic prefa­to­ry remarks on her self-under­stand­ing. After the intro­duc­tion, it’s dif­fi­cult not to read the inter­view as a self-inter­ro­ga­tion. Asked about her char­ac­ter­i­za­tion of writ­ing as a “hos­tile act” against read­ers, Did­ion says, “Obvi­ous­ly I lis­ten to a read­er, but the only read­er I hear is me. I am always writ­ing to myself. So very pos­si­bly I’m com­mit­ting an aggres­sive and hos­tile act toward myself.”

It’s a curi­ous state­ment. Didion’s cut­ting wit and fear­less vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty take in seem­ing­ly all—the expans­es of her inner world and polit­i­cal scan­dals and geopo­lit­i­cal intrigues of the out­er, which she has dis­sect­ed for the bet­ter part of half a cen­tu­ry. Below, we have assem­bled a selec­tion of Didion’s best essays online. We begin with one from Vogue :

“On Self Respect” (1961)

Didion’s 1979 essay col­lec­tion The White Album brought togeth­er some of her most tren­chant and search­ing essays about her immer­sion in the coun­ter­cul­ture, and the ide­o­log­i­cal fault lines of the late six­ties and sev­en­ties. The title essay begins with a gem­like sen­tence that became the title of a col­lec­tion of her first sev­en vol­umes of non­fic­tion : “We tell our­selves sto­ries in order to live.” Read two essays from that col­lec­tion below:

“ The Women’s Move­ment ” (1972)

“ Holy Water ” (1977)

Did­ion has main­tained a vig­or­ous pres­ence at the New York Review of Books since the late sev­en­ties, writ­ing pri­mar­i­ly on pol­i­tics. Below are a few of her best known pieces for them:

“ Insid­er Base­ball ” (1988)

“ Eye on the Prize ” (1992)

“ The Teach­ings of Speak­er Gin­grich ” (1995)

“ Fixed Opin­ions, or the Hinge of His­to­ry ” (2003)

“ Pol­i­tics in the New Nor­mal Amer­i­ca ” (2004)

“ The Case of There­sa Schi­a­vo ” (2005)

“ The Def­er­en­tial Spir­it ” (2013)

“ Cal­i­for­nia Notes ” (2016)

Did­ion con­tin­ues to write with as much style and sen­si­tiv­i­ty as she did in her first col­lec­tion, her voice refined by a life­time of expe­ri­ence in self-exam­i­na­tion and pierc­ing crit­i­cal appraisal. She got her start at Vogue in the late fifties, and in 2011, she pub­lished an auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal essay there that returns to the theme of “yearn­ing for a glam­orous, grown up life” that she explored in “Good­bye to All That.” In “ Sable and Dark Glass­es ,” Didion’s gaze is stead­ier, her focus this time not on the naïve young woman tem­pered and hard­ened by New York, but on her­self as a child “deter­mined to bypass child­hood” and emerge as a poised, self-con­fi­dent 24-year old sophisticate—the per­fect New York­er she nev­er became.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Joan Did­ion Reads From New Mem­oir, Blue Nights, in Short Film Direct­ed by Grif­fin Dunne

30 Free Essays & Sto­ries by David Fos­ter Wal­lace on the Web

10 Free Sto­ries by George Saun­ders, Author of Tenth of Decem­ber , “The Best Book You’ll Read This Year”

Read 18 Short Sto­ries From Nobel Prize-Win­ning Writer Alice Munro Free Online

Josh Jones  is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at  @jdmagness

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Comments (3) |

Related posts:

Comments (3), 3 comments so far.

“In a clas­sic essay of Joan Didion’s, “Good­bye to All That,” the nov­el­ist and writer breaks into her narrative—not for the first or last time,..”

Dead link to the essay

It should be “Slouch­ing Towards Beth­le­hem,” with the “s” on Towards.

Most of the Joan Did­ion Essay links have pay­walls.

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Goodbye to All That

85 pages • 2 hours read

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.

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Summary and Study Guide

English poet and classicist Robert Graves wrote his autobiography, Good-Bye to All That , in 1929, at the age of 34. Graves undertook the writing of his autobiography with the hope of crafting a best-selling book that would support his career as a writer. Good-Bye to All That details Graves’s life from his upper-middle-class childhood in England to his service as a military officer in World War I, and on to his first few years as a veteran. This memoir provides a candid account of military service tinged by Graves’s poetic sensibilities, and also serves as Graves’s account of his coming-of-age and leaving of his home country.

Graves begins his autobiography with his first childhood memories and a genealogical history of his parents' families. His father, Alfred Graves, comes from a line of loquacious Irish preachers and his mother, Amalie von Ranke, comes from a reserved German family of physicians and clergymen. Graves is the middle child of ten, born late in his parents' lives, and spends most of his childhood cared for by a nurse in a large house in Wimbledon, outside of London. As a boy, Graves’s mother instills in him a strong sense of Protestant values and Graves’s father, a poet, exposes Graves to classical and canonical literature.

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Graves spends his high school years at a private preparatory school in Surrey called Charterhouse. There, Graves feels oppressed and upset by the school's strict adherence to traditions. With tensions between England and Germany rising, Graves becomes self-conscious of his German middle name, von Ranke, which he drops. At school, Graves writes poetry, takes up boxing, and begins a romantic relationship with a younger boy, whom he calls “Dick.” Graves also begins to question his once unshakable faith in the Church of England and practicing "implicit obedience to orders" (58).

England enters World War I just after Graves finishes Charterhouse and he enlists just "a day or two later" (67), hoping to avoid going to college at Oxford. Graves undergoes Officers' Training School and, at just 19, becomes a second-lieutenant with the prestigious Royal Welch Fusiliers. After graduating, Graves spends a few months commanding soldiers at a detention camp for Germans in England. He then joins the fighting in France, where he spends the next year in the trenches, dealing with gas attacks, heavy shelling, and heavy casualties. Due to these experiences, Graves begins to suffer from neurasthenia, or post-traumatic stress disorder.

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After suffering a severe wound in battle, his colonel erroneously reports Graves’s death to his mother. However, Graves survives his wounds and, after a period of recovery, rejoins the Royal Welch in France. Bronchitis sends Graves back to England, and after resuming a post as an officers' trainer, Graves realizes he "should not have been back on duty" (265). Graves, having married a childhood friend, Nancy Nicholson , receives his "demobilization" (283), with a few tricks involved to do so. After this, Graves, Nancy, and their infant children move to Oxford, where Graves begins his degree in English Literature.

Between 1919 and 1925, Graves and Nancy have four children. Nancy, a painter, and Graves, now committed to making a living from his writing alone, struggle to make ends meet. They try to start a shop outside Oxford but it fails. When Nancy's doctor recommends a winter in Egypt for her health, Graves finds himself offered a position teaching at the "newly-founded Royal Egyptian University, Cairo" (323). Graves accepts the position and the memoir ends with his academic year spent teaching English literature to "the sons of rich merchants and landowners" (326) and cavorting with British aristocrats and Egyptian royalty. In the memoir's Epilogue, Graves explains that he and Nancy separated in 1929 and later divorced. Three of their four children served in World War II and Graves himself volunteered for "infantry service" (345) but could only get "a sedentary appointment" (345). After spending WWII in South Devon, England as an "Air Raid Warden" (345), Graves returns to Majorca, Spain where he spends the rest of his life writing. 

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Home › Literature › Analysis of Joan Didion’s Novels

Analysis of Joan Didion’s Novels

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on May 30, 2018 • ( 0 )

Almost all of Joan Didion’s (1934-) works are concerned with similar themes, and there is an interesting complementary relationship between her essays and her novels. Her essays generally seem intended to force the reader to strip away illusions about contemporary life and accept realities, even if they are bleak. The novels are generally explorations of characters crippled by illusions. To some extent, in each novel, the heroine is disabused of her illusions. The fragile hope that each novel holds out, however, is not offered in terms of this disillusionment but in terms of new illusions and almost meaningless gestures. Each novel ends with the heroine learning to care for others—for a husband, for a lover, for children, for friends—and yet this caring is generally based on illusion and seems doomed to failure. Didion’s final implication, then, seems to be that people need to strip away all illusions, except those that help them to care for others. Such illusions—even though they are doomed to lead to failure—are sacred. These sacred illusions might be fictional, as stories are fictional, but, as Didion has said, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live . . . or at least we do for a while.”

Lily, after she admits to herself that she probably will not be offered the lead role in Gone with the Wind , accepts a traditional, passive woman’s role. After passively “accepting” Everett twenty-seven times, she agrees to marry him: “It seemed as inescapable as the ripening of the pears, as fated as the exile from Eden.” However, she finds the role of river matron less than satisfactory, and she continues to accept men—first Joe Templeton and later Ryder Channing—for little more reason than that they desire her. Through it all, Lily fails to come to terms with who she is and what she really wants.

The traditional dream of ranch and family no longer works for Everett, either. Ironically, he seems happy only when he runs away from the ranch, his wife, and his sister, to join the army during World War II. When his father dies, however, he feels bound by duty to return to the ranch, to try to make it work, and to take care of his wife and sister. It does not work; his wife is unfaithful, his sister is destroyed by the “lack of honor” in the world, and his son obviously intends to abandon the homestead.

Martha, Everett’s sister, is perhaps the most utterly destroyed character in the novel. She cannot act out her incestuous feelings for her brother, and the man she does accept for a lover, Ryder Channing, is no gentleman. After he marries another woman and their affair ends, he almost brutally “seduces” her again. Martha is forced to admit that she is not a “lady”—their affair had not been a great romantic passion, but what advice columnist Ann Landers might describe as “chemistry.” Stripped of her illusions, she cannot live. Her brother cannot protect her—a fact that will make him, a romantic gallant, feel even more guilty—and she kills herself.

All of the romantic illusions of the traditional world come crashing down when Everett kills Ryder Channing and then himself. It could be argued that it is not the traditional world that has failed these characters; it is rather that they have failed it. After all, a good river matron should not have an affair while her husband is serving his country; Everett should have been stronger; and Martha should have had more self-respect than to take up with a man such as Ryder. Such an argument, however, would simply ignore too much of the characters’ background. Lily’s father, Walter Knight, was not so shining as Lily had thought. He does not become governor of California. He is a near alcoholic, and he carries on an adulterous relationship with Rita Blanchard, another “good spinster” who proves no better and no worse than Martha. Walter is no more a rancher than Everett; his Mexican foreman Gomez is the one who keeps the place going. Finally, he can no more protect his Rita than Everett can protect Martha; both he and Rita drown when he accidentally drives into the Sacramento River.

The novel, then, shows the myth of the Sacramento Valley as a second Eden to be a second-generation failure. The book might seem to imply that it is World War II that renders this idyllic world “gone with the wind,” but it is doubtful that Didion believes that things were really better in the old days. Her vision of the settling of the West seems centered on the Donner-Reed party; her great-great-great grandmother had been part of that party originally, but she left it before they were stranded by winter snows and forced to eat their own dead to survive. In her essay “On Morality,” Didion equates morality with not leaving the dead to the coyotes, and she writes of the Donner-Reed party: “We were taught instead that they had somewhere abdicated their responsibilities, somehow breached their primal loyalties or they would not have found themselves helpless in the mountain winter . . . would not have failed.” At the end of Run River , all three major characters have failed to live up to their primal loyalties of wife to husband, husband to wife, brother to sister, sister to sister-in-law. They have been “immoral,” not because of their sexual misconduct but because they have failed to take care of one another.

There is, perhaps, some hope for Lily at the end. She has survived, not by virtue but by luck, and she may have learned. Looking at Everett’s body, she finally—perhaps for the first time—tries to talk to him. She recalls the good times and realizes the importance of their love: “She hoped that . . . he would rise thinking of her, we were each other, we were each other, not that it mattered much in the long run but what else mattered as much .” “Not that it mattered much” is vintage Didion, but the “what else mattered as much” seems heartfelt. The hope that lovers will rise thinking of each other “through all eternity” has the ring of romantic illusion, but at this point, such a hope constitutes the only possible relationship left for Lily and Everett. At the end of the novel, she is left thinking about what she will say to her children. To sustain them, she will probably be compelled to sustain an illusion about the man she has come to love too late: “She did not know what she could tell anyone except that he had been a good man. She was not certain that he had been but it was what she would have wished for him, if they gave her one wish.”

The ease with which Run River can be explained as an explosion of traditional American myths probably suggests why the novel is generally considered Didion’s most modest achievement. So many people have exploded traditional American myths since 1963 that it does not seem necessary to reread Run River to see it done again. In Play It as It Lays , however, Didion does something few writers have done as well as she; she turns the tables and explodes the myths and illusions of the contemporary sensibility.

Play It as It Lays Perhaps no setting could be more appropriate for an illusionhunter than Los Angeles. In Play It as It Lays , Didion places her heroine Maria (pronounced “Mar-eye-ah,” like the west wind in the musical Paint Your Wagon ) squarely in the fast lane of life in Southern California. The novel opens with Maria in a psychiatric ward. She has been placed there, presumably, for her failure to attempt to stop a friend from committing suicide in her presence. As the novel unfolds (like Run River ) backward into the past, however, the reader comes to realize that if Maria has become unhinged, it is probably a result of the cumulative effect of her abortion, her divorce, and the miscellaneous acts of casual sex, drugs, and other perversities one might expect in a novel about Hollywood.

Didion does not condemn the fast lane from a traditional moral perspective; that would have been too easy, and probably not very convincing or interesting. Besides, Didion’s target is not simply the sexual mores of contemporary culture. Rather, she explores the popular “philosophy” or worldview that so many have accepted since the collapse of the traditional morality—a “philosophy” that might be called sloppy existentialism, extreme relativism, or simply nihilism. Maria states the key tenet of this philosophy on the second page of the novel: “NOTHING APPLIES.”

Maria herself was not reared with the traditional American values. Instead of the Puritan work ethic (“God helps those who help themselves”), she was taught the gambler’s code: “My father advised me that life itself was a crap game.” That view was infused with a faith in good luck: “I was raised to believe that what came in on the next roll would always be better than what went on the last.” For a long time, Maria was content to wait for the rolls, to go with the flow, and to “play it as it lays.”

However, Maria’s luck runs out. The bad roll is an unwanted pregnancy. She thinks, but is not sure, that Carter, her husband, is not the father. He demands that she have an abortion and threatens to take away Kate, their brain-damaged daughter, if she refuses. Maria acquiesces, and her mental deterioration begins.

If Maria could completely accept the mores of her set, she would have no problem; for them, neither abortion nor divorce is anything to lose one’s composure over. Maria, however, does cling to one traditional dream; she wants a family. She fantasizes about living a simple life with Kate and some man—in almost identical fantasies, the man is either Ivan or Les, two of her steadier lovers. Abortion—the termination of another possible child—is almost more than Maria can contemplate, yet she undergoes the procedure.

Maria’s reaction to the abortion is not philosophical, moral, or religious; it is emotional, physical, and psychological. She cries; she hemorrhages; she reaches a point where she cannot easily use plumbing because she imagines pipes clogged with chopped-up pieces of flesh.

Didion does not attempt to make an abstract moral issue out of abortion. Maria’s reaction is almost primitive, in the sense of being immediate and unreflecting. In a real sense, however, to return to Didion’s essay “On Morality,” abortion is a denial of the most basic social responsibility, that of mother to child (it is hard here not to recall Didion’s own traumatic miscarriage and her devotion to her adopted daughter). In Play It as It Lays , even more emphatically than in Run River , characters fail to fulfil their primal social responsibilities. Carter, Les (even Les’s wife), Maria’s friends, Helene and BZ, and a number of others all say that they are “seriously worried” about Maria as she slips more and more into self-destructive behavior; they say that they care, but none of them can reach her, none of them can take care of her. Some of their protestations are hard to take seriously; Carter humiliates Maria on a number of occasions, and Helene and BZ use her—while she is drunk and only halfconscious— for obscure and unpleasant sexual purposes.

Most of these characters profess not to be concerned with the sexual conduct of their spouses. When Helene, BZ’s wife, drifts into an affair with Carter, BZ asks Maria if she cares. For a time, Maria tries to insist that she does care, but as the novel draws to a conclusion, BZ forces her more and more to a nihilistic position: “‘Tell me what matters,’ BZ said. ‘Nothing,’ Maria said.” The “nothing” here is Ernest Hemingway’s “nada,” and at the end of the novel, BZ, like Hemingway, kills himself. BZ, however, does not use a gun. He goes out with a bottle of vodka and a grain-and-a-half of Seconal. When Helene and Carter force their way into the room, BZ is dead and Maria is asleep next to him, holding his hand.

On the last page of the novel, Maria, from the psychiatric ward, affirms BZ’s nihilism, if not his suicide: “I know what ‘nothing’ means, and keep on playing. Why, BZ would say. Why not, I say.” That, however, is not all there is to it. Maria has already made it clear that she is playing for Kate. She wants to take Kate away from the hospital; she wants them to have a home by the sea where they can live a simple life. Given Kate’s condition—to say nothing of Maria’s—this future does not sound very likely. Despite her acceptance of nihilism, Maria holds on to one last romantic notion. Perhaps she realizes how illusory her hope is, but, like Lily’s hope that Everett will rise thinking of her, the illusion and the hope are necessary. They keep her in the game and away from the Seconal.

A Book of Common Prayer Run River and Play It as It Lays demonstrate the failures both of traditional American myths and of more current nihilistic lifestyles. Lily Knight McClellan and Maria Wyeth both survive, but both are sustained by hopes that seem largely based on illusion. In Didion’s third novel, A Book of Common Prayer , the reader is told on the first page that the protagonist, Charlotte Douglas, does not survive. The narrator, however, comments that “she died, hopeful.” Whether Charlotte’s hope is also illusory is a central question of the novel.

It is the question that the narrator, Grace Strasser-Mendana, née Tabor, is trying to answer throughout the novel. Grace, originally from the United States, “married into one of the three or four solvent families in Boca Grande,” the small Central American republic in which Charlotte Douglas is finally killed (or murdered; as Grace says, neither word seems to work). The death of Grace’s husband has left her “in putative control of fifty-nine-point-eight percent of the arable land and about the same percentage of the decisionmaking process in La Rep±blica.” From this position of power, Grace observes the political scheming of her family. She also watches Charlotte walk barefooted into the scene and become caught up in it. Grace leaves the country before Charlotte dies, and the novel is her attempt to understand Charlotte. As she says, “Call it my witness to Charlotte Douglas.”

At the very beginning of her witness, Grace comments that Charlotte “dreamed her life,” and much of what Grace says makes Charlotte seem a woman even more given to illusion than was Lily Knight McClellan or Maria Wyeth. Grace insists that Charlotte was the “usual child of comfortable family in the temperate zone.” She had been supplied with all the material benefits and easy optimism of an affluent American. As a child, she was given a carved Austrian angel that listened to her bedside prayers: “In these prayers the child Charlotte routinely asked that ‘it’ turn out all right, ‘it’ being unspecified and all-inclusive, and she had been an adult for some years before the possibility occurred to her that ‘it’ might not.”

Like Maria, Charlotte loses some of the optimism; her luck runs out. The more traditional lifestyle fails her. Her first husband, Warren Bogart (perhaps the name is meant to be halfway between Warren Beatty and Humphrey Bogart), had been “raised to believe not in ‘hard work’ or ‘self reliance’ but in the infinite power of the personal appeal.” He is also sadistic, sexually perverse, and alcoholic. Charlotte is not perfect, either; one Easter, while their child Marin is still a baby, she gets drunk and sleeps with a man she does not even like (she later conveniently forgets the episode). Warren hits her, and she finally walks away from the marriage.

Her second marriage is not unlike Maria’s life in the fast lane, except that the game is no longer motion pictures but radical politics. Her husband is not a director but a radical chic lawyer who flies from one center of revolution to another. Leonard does seem genuinely to care for Charlotte, but there are complications. Marin, Charlotte’s child by Warren, turns revolutionary; she and her friends hijack a jetliner, burn it in the desert, and join the underground.

Charlotte’s main illusion, like Maria’s, is centered around her daughter. She later tells Grace that she and Marin were “inseparable” (a term she also uses to describe her relationship with Warren), and she spins out fantastic accounts of their visit to the Tivoli Gardens. As might be expected, the revolutionary Marin claims to have little use for her bourgeois mother.

All this does seem After a disastrous reunion with Warren and after the birth and almost immediate death of her child by Leonard, Charlotte drifts to Boca Grande, where she meets Grace. At first, Charlotte gives Grace every reason to think that she is dreaming her life; for quite a while, she goes to the airport every day, on the offhand chance that Marin will pass through Central America; she drifts aimlessly into sexual relations with Victor, Grace’s brother-in-law, and then with Gerardo, Grace’s son; she seems not to notice the growing signs of revolution; she refuses the attempts of Gerardo, Leonard, and Grace to persuade her to leave; finally, the revolution begins, and she is arrested and killed. Her body is dumped on the lawn of the American embassy. All this does seem to add up to a life of dreams and illusions, yet throughout the novel, Charlotte proves herself to be capable of very practical behavior. She kills a chicken with her bare hands; she skins an iguana for stew; she performs an emergency tracheotomy with a penknife; and she inoculates people against an epidemic of cholera for thirty-four hours without a break. Although Charlotte often seems not to notice what is going on around her, she corrects people who claim to know what is happening; she reminds a reporter that Marin’s comrade killed himself in Arizona, not Mexico, and she later corrects Gerardo on a technical point: “‘Carmen wasn’t using an M-3.’ Charlotte said. She leaned forward slightly and her face was entirely grave. ‘Antonio was. Carmen was using an M-16.’”

If Charlotte is not as out of touch as she seems, why then does she stay in Boca Grande and risk her life? In her last conversation with Leonard, she says very simply, “I walked away from places all my life and I’m not going to walk away from here.” In another context, one could imagine John Wayne speaking those lines. In this context, however, there is no sense of the heroic. For a moment, Leonard seems to misunderstand this, and he warns her, “You don’t get any real points for staying here, Charlotte.” Charlotte understands perfectly: “‘I can’t seem to tell what you do get the real points for,’ Charlotte said. ‘So I guess I’ll stick around for a while.’” Didion does not glorify Charlotte’s decision to stay; it is not a self-defining existential act. She simply returns to her work at a birth-control clinic (an ironic job for a woman whose passport lists her occupation as madre ). Her work is not particularly meaningful, since Charlotte routinely advises women to use the diaphragm while the clinic stocks only intrauterine devices (IUD’s). In any event, no clients come on Charlotte’s last day of work, the last day of her life. In deciding to stay, Charlotte maintains something of her integrity, what Didion would call “character,” but Didion allows the reader no illusions about the act; it is the integrity of a cardplayer playing out a losing hand.

Charlotte’s integrity can only be appreciated in comparison to the values of the other characters, particularly Grace. Even though Grace has been trying to understand Charlotte throughout the novel, she is as much a victim of delusion as Charlotte is. For some time, Grace has realized the difficulty in understanding things, in trying to get the story straight. She had abandoned her first discipline before the beginning of the novel: “I am an anthropologist who lost faith in her own method, who stopped believing that observable activity defined anthros.” She turned to biochemistry, but that, too, failed: “Give me the molecular structure of the protein that defined Charlotte Douglas.” When Leonard reveals to her that her husband Edgar had been involved with the guerrillas himself, Grace is finally forced to realize that her life, as much as Charlotte’s, has been one of delusion.

Grace’s statement, “We all remember what we need to remember,” is one of the lessons of the novel; all people prefer to believe their own versions of the stories in which they are trapped; all people accept delusions. Grace finally realizes that, “I am more like Charlotte Douglas than I thought I was.” Perhaps Charlotte’s death was something of a meaningless gesture, but beside her coffin, Grace can only make a small meaningless gesture of love; she places a T-shirt painted like an American flag on the casket. By way of comment, she borrows a phrase from Charlotte and Leonard: “There were no real points in that either.”

Neither Grace nor Charlotte—perhaps none of Didion’s characters in any of her novels—scores any real points in the end. They try to take care of one another, but they fail. Grace and Leonard try to take care of Charlotte, but they fail. Charlotte would like to take care of Marin, but she cannot.Warren wants Charlotte to take care of him, but it does not work. As cynical as Warren is, he may have the final judgment in the novel: “It doesn’t matter whether you take care of somebody or somebody takes care of you. . . . It’s all the same in the end. It’s all the same.”Warren dies alone; Charlotte dies alone. Grace will die—as she says—very soon, and she will be alone. It is all the same in the end. At least Charlotte does to some degree shape her own life toward the end. The night she was arrested, she was, Grace imagines, “walking very deliberately.”

In Democracy , one finds evidence of two of Didion’s most prominent characteristics as a writer—her acute sense of place and her fascination with the AmericanWest. Although these twin aspects of her muse have always been evident in her writings about California, she has occasionally cast her glance farther westward to Hawaii. In Slouching Towards Bethlehem , she wrote: “I sat as a child on California beaches and imagined that I saw Hawaii, a certain shimmer in the sunset, a barely perceptible irregularity glimpsed intermittently through squinted eyes.” In a column for New West magazine, written more than a decade later, she revealed that she kept a clock in her bedroom in Los Angeles, set at Honolulu time.

When Didion, however, tried to write a novel about feudal Hawaii (originally titled Pacific Distances ), she produced a book that is only marginally about that subject. In Democracy , Hawaii is less important as a society in transition than as a way station between the Mainland and America’s ultimate western frontier, Southeast Asia. (In Slouching Towards Bethlehem , she speaks of sailors who got drunk in Honolulu because “they were no longer in Des Moines and not yet in Da Nang.”) As Walt Whitman pro- claimed more than a century earlier in his poem “Passage to India” (1871), the roundness of the earth leads not to some apocalyptic West but back east whence we came. America’s manifest destiny, however, has not even produced a mystical passage to India, but rather helicopters lifting off the roof of the American embassy in Saigon during the final days of the only war the United States has ever lost.

In this imagistic, elliptical novel, much is left to conjecture. More than in any of her previous works, Didion has helped fuel this conjecture by an almost compulsive literary allusiveness. Certainly the most significant allusion is to Henry Adams, who in 1880 published a novel titled Democracy . Although in her review of Didion’s novel Mary McCarthy made nothing of the novels having the same name, Thomas R. Edwards saw both Didion and Adams as displaced aristocrats who with “irony and subtlety confront a chaotic new reality that shatters the orderings of simpler, older ways.”

From a purely technical standpoint, the most controversial and problematic aspect of Democracy is its point of view. Departing from the more conventional narrative techniques of her earlier novels, Didion inserts herself into Democracy and claims to have been acquainted personally with her characters. Although this device may appear to make Didion’s tale a postmodernist novel about novel writing, it also places her in the decidedly premodernist company of George Eliot and William Makepeace Thackeray, who both inserted themselves into their fiction.

By revealing her problems in writing this book and by treating her characters as if they were as real as the figures in her journalism, Didion may be trying to collapse the distinction between fiction and nonfiction narrative. If the new journalism brings the techniques of fiction to the writing of fact, this novel brings the illusion of fact to the writing of fiction. Such a device is for Democracy what the title A Book of Common Prayer was for Didion’s earlier novel—a reason for telling the story.

The Last Thing He Wanted In The Last Thing He Wanted , Didion’s technique of writing fiction as though it were fact becomes much more assured. She creates a journalist narrator who claims not only to be the novel’s author but also to have written about one of the story’s characters for The New York Times Magazine , the type of highprofile periodical in which readers would expect to find an article by the real Joan Didion. In contrast to Democracy , however, Didion does not identify herself as the narrator. “For the record,” she writes, “this is me talking. You know me, or you think youdo. The not quite omniscient author.” Readers may be tempted to think that the “me” refers to Didion herself, but the novel’s characters are clearly fictional, and thenarrator belongs to the same created world as the characters. Instead, the “me” seems to refer more to the idea of the narrator as “not quite omniscient author.” Unlike true omniscient authors, who know everything that goes on in their stories, this narrator-author has a limited view. She must piece together the story of Elena McMahon, the novel’s heroine, from transcripts of tape recordings, news articles, diplomatic reports, and interviews with not always truthful sources.

Out of these fragments the narrator-author constructs a story that explains Elena’s mysterious death. After she walks away from her job covering the 1984 presidential campaign for The Washington Post , her seriously ill father, who is an arranger of ambiguous “deals,” asks her to fly to the Caribbean to deliver something for him. The plane does not land exactly where Elena expects it to, and the something turns out to be illegal arms for the Contras, a counterrevolutionary group that opposed the Sandinista government of Nicaragua during the 1980’s. After Elena reads in a U.S. paper that her father has suddenly died, she (along with the reader) realizes  that her life is in extraordinary danger. Ultimately, she is framed for an assassination attempt on Treat Morrison, a U.S. operative with whom Elena has a fleeting romance. The attempt ends with Elena shot dead and Morrison gravely wounded. The novel itself ends two brief chapters later, as the narrator-author tries to reshape the story so that it ends with Elena and Morrison still together, a form the story’s narrator-author finds more pleasing than the “actual” one.

Perhaps Didion’s greatest achievement in this novel is the complexity that she wrings out of its lean, deceptively easy-to-read prose. Although several critics during  the 1990’s noted that her fiction was becoming ever more spare and her nonfiction was growing in length and density, The Last Thing He Wanted merges both characteristics. The novel’s language makes it seem simple on its surface, but keeping track of the story requires the reader to maneuver through murky, difficult-to-follow conspiracies involving rival government factions, just as did the actual 1980’s news coverage of alleged (and illegal) U.S. government support of the Contras. Although not all critics believed that the novel broke new ground for Didion, its reviews were mostly positive—atribute to Didion’s position as one of the most highly regarded writers of her generation.

Major works Long fiction • Run River , 1963; Play It as It Lays , 1970; A Book of Common Prayer , 1977; Democracy , 1984; The Last Thing He Wanted , 1996. Short fiction : The Panic in Needle Park , 1971 (with John Gregory Dunne); Play It as It Lays , 1972 (with Dunne); A Star Is Born , 1976 (with Dunne and Frank Pierson); True Confessions , 1981 (with Dunne); Up Close and Personal , 1996 (with Dunne). Teleplay s: Hills Like White Elephants , 1990 (with John Gregory Dunne); Broken Trust , 1995 (with Dunne). Nonfictio n: Slouching Towards Bethlehem , 1968; The White Album , 1979; Salvador , 1983; Joan Didion: Essays and Conversations , 1984 (Ellen G. Friedman, editor); Miami , 1987; After Henry , 1992 (also known as Sentimental Journeys , 1993); Political Fictions , 2001; Fixed Ideas: America Since 9-11 , 2003; Where I Was From , 2003; Vintage Didion , 2004; The Year of Magical Thinking , 2005; We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live: Collected Nonfiction , 2006.

Source: Notable American Novelists Revised Edition Volume 1 James Agee — Ernest J. Gaines Edited by Carl Rollyson Salem Press, Inc 2008.

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Tags: A Book of Common Prayer , American Literature , Analysis of Joan Didion’s Novels , Democracy , Joan Didion , Literary Criticism , Literary Theory , Play It as It Lays , Political Fictions , Run River , Slouching Towards Bethlehem , The Last Thing He Wanted , The Panic in Needle Park , The White Album

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