Goodbye to All That
Over the years, how many people have read Joan Didion’s pointed, moody, celebrated essays and come to New York in the hope of writing some of their own? The path of those would-be writers is patently stubborn, given the tone Ms. Didion strikes in the essay so many name as their favorite, “Goodbye to All That.” It is a famous elegy for the passing of youth, but also a catalog of Manhattan’s enervating clichés, and, implicitly, a rejection of the New York literary scene she inhabited.
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I arrived in NYC in 1981 along with most of the rest of the herd from the Radcliffe Publishing Procedures Course. Most of us found work. I think I held the record for one of the first to find a job: three weeks. Bad then, everyone was incessantly talking about how bad things were, but, in reflection, they were so bad afterall, not compared to today.
Overall, I feel the same way I did then: If one is very smart and is willing to work very hard, one can find work. For everyone else, not so much.
