What does a twenty-one year old woman growing up in Moorhead, Minnesota, a town best known for an often-flooding north flowing river, have in common with a twenty-year-old woman who lived a movie-like lifestyle in New York?
Not much.
“…was anyone ever so young? I am here to tell you that someone was.”
Joan Didion, in her 1967 essay “Goodbye to All That,” describes what it was like to live as a young woman in New York City. An outsider herself, Didion’s essay hinges on the idea that New York is a place for the “very young.” At twenty, Didion’s time in the city slips by with “the deceptive ease of a film dissolve” until she is twenty-eight and “not that young anymore.”
The first time I read Joan Didion’s essay I did not understand it, and so in turn, I did not understand myself. My time was spent studying “Goodbye to All That” for sentence structure and pacing, and I was intimidated. One year, and dozens of read throughs later, I have a stronger appreciation for Didion. In fact, I love Didion. But I continue to struggle to relate to her work. Didion’s life was the type of life I dreamed of for myself. Yes there was suffering and pain, but also a level of adventure and bravery that I’ve always desired but am not strong enough to achieve.
How could I relate to her?
Throughout the essay, Didion reflects on her naive behavior and the wide-eyed impression she had of New York. She labels herself “optimistic,” “bright,” and filled with a “sense of wonder.” At the same time, Didion states her love for the city would “cost something sooner or later.” As Didion approached twenty-eight, the places that filled her with a sense of wonder, such as Times Square in the afternoon, or the New York Public Library, had to be avoided at all costs.
It is not that Didion fell out of love with New York. She outgrew it.
I lean towards organization and practicality. I’m the type of person who urges caution, constantly confirms and reconfirms events, and turns down offers for last minute plans with friends. Spontaneous decisions are not in my wheelhouse. Reading “Goodbye to All That”, I found myself more worried about Didion’s careless behavior as a young woman in a large city than anything else. Living in other people’s apartments for a year and charging food to Bloomingdale’s because she didn’t have enough money to eat sparked my concern rather than made me question why she no longer lived in New York.
Of course, the more I read her work, the more similarities I feel between the two of us. We both share a sense of ambition, and there is the desire to be a writer, not to mention the belief the world holds opportunities and extraordinary chances around every corner, though that appears to be a young person’s belief. I do not have the love for New York Didion had, but there is more of myself in her than I first thought.
However.
There is another part of me that does not want to relate to her message in “Goodbye to All That.”
My struggle with Didion comes from being young. Not her. Me. The fact is I am at “the beginnings of things” and others are at the ends. But twenty-one doesn’t feel very young, not while you are in it. Didion describes when she was young in New York through a magical lens; I can’t help but think in her eyes, to be young is to shine. There is a freedom, a glow, that comes from experiencing everything for the first time, before age turns it into repetition. Though that may be the exact form of naivety Didion is talking about. If it is, then there may be one more thing Didion and I have in common.
When Didion leaves New York at twenty-eight, she creates a line in the ground, a clear marker for the end of youth. But if your twenties are young and your thirties are not, where does that leave the rest? Are you young in your teens, when the idea of a first kiss makes your hands shake and the self-labeled identity you’ve created acts as a shield from judgment? Is it a different subset of experience and naivety that does not count? What about your childhood?
Now at twenty-one, sitting in my childhood bedroom, a cat purring in my lap and three years of college and a brief stint in England under my belt, I’m in a rather unique position. By most societal standards I am fully grown. There are no more grand milestones to meet, and the glow of youth will begin to dim. But by Didion’s standards, I have never been more young. This development limbo has left me doubting my own experiences. I often downplay the emotions and impact they have on me because I am not yet old enough to understand them.
So far, I’ve gone through life believing school, college and then my time abroad would allow me to find myself. I imagined, with a shocking level of naivety, that my first experiences as an adult would provide clarity, and show exactly what my life was meant to be. It never happened. Didion writes about New York with a sense of nostalgia for the city, one touched with failed promises, hurt people, and a sense of “breaking up,” but also a deeper understanding of herself and a love she would never have again.
Am I unable to feel those emotions as well? Can I not feel the same certain uncertainty that made Didion’s life in New York so special? Must I wait till I’ve grown past young, crossed the invisible threshold of youth into twenty-nine, thirty, forty, or seventy before I am allowed to claim the reminiscent feeling Didion had for the Idlewood temporary terminal and the apartment in the Nineties.
In “Goodbye to All That” Didion labels a person’s twenties as young, but this mischaracterizes what a person does feel at twenty, or twenty-one in my case.
“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.”
To be twenty-one is to experience too much too quickly. The early stages of life catapult a person through moments rapidly, and ever increasing burdens are placed on slowly growing shoulders.
In “Goodbye to All That” readers watch Didion grow up. Not in the sense of watching a toddler take their first steps or a teenager getting their driver’s license, but in a breakdown of the veil New York held over her. We witness her year of couch surfing, move with her to her apartment in the Nineties, upend ourselves again for a “monastic four-room floor-through” on Seventy-fifth street. We shed the Sacramento-smart dresses alongside her, watch the yellow silk curtains get doused in the rain, and meet everyone there is to meet. Didion gains experience in New York. She thrives in the blurred spring and summer evenings when the city holds timeless promises, until one day she is twenty-eight and she’s gained too much and the “golden rhythm was broken.” Experience becomes Didion’s undoing, a lack of experience is becoming mine.
Didion takes on the role of a double narrator in her essay. On one hand, she describes what life in New York was like and embraces what it means to be young. On the other hand, Didion includes a layer of reflection to the essay by explaining New York after three years of separation. Didion narrates Didion’s earlier life. This is not unusual in memoir and such a technique creates an intentional disconnect between the two forms of Didion. We see New York as Didion did, through the eyes of a twenty year old who was “there for just another few months,” and easily falls in love with the city. However, the younger Didion would not be able to tell us why she does not live in New York anymore, that is a job only the grown Didion can do. One allows her to impart the wisdom she’s gained over the years. One allows her to participate in the experience.
“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.”
At twenty-one, I am young enough that my experiences are still new. My first year of college, first party, and first time I left the country to name a few. I’m used to the feeling of uncertainty and trepidation surrounding moments I have never experienced before because they keep happening. Perhaps I was like Didion. The invisible line she created in New York when the mirage was broken and she was twenty-eight existed for me too, but it was earlier, and I understood it less. Somewhere between ten, thirteen, eighteen, or twenty-one, I passed a different cut off. One that caused me to look back and realize I had left my youth behind without ever appreciating it had gone.
I want the double narrative Didion achieves in “Goodbye to All That.” I’m homesick for an earlier period in my life because I reached twenty-one too quickly. I hadn’t stayed “ too long at the fair,” as Didion would put it, I’d left it too early.
At the beginning of “Goodbye to All That” Didion asks, “…was anyone ever so young?” I am here to tell you that someone was.
Lauren Melton is an undergraduate student at Concordia College in Moorhead, Minnesota and is the editor-in-chief for the school literary journal.
Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies 