"Goodbye To All That "
Joan Didion
The Electronic Typewriter


This piece felt immensely more descriptive than anything I have read so far by Eula Biss. Didion uses strong sensory details-- "I could taste the peach and feel the soft air blowing from a subway grating on my legs and I could smell lilac and garbage and expensive perfume."  The voice is self savvy while still claiming innocence and questioning the world. She asks questions and makes statements on matters thought to be understood but never mentioned-- "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."



The  essay is  written in retrospection so while the reader is following Didion as she grows to understand New York they are aware in a tonal sense where the essay is headed. It is formatted chronologically as she changes and experiences different parts of city life. Though the story isn't one continuous the sections and thought process are told through a rising action formula.
Questions:
Quotes:
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 read about New York, informed me that it would never be quite the same again


What specifically happened at the end? Does she blame NY for her depression?
Why did she initially decide to move to NY

I could write a syndicated column for teenagers under the name “Debbi Lynn” or I could smuggle gold into India or I could become a $100 call girl, and none of would matter.

 It was instead an infinitely romantic notion, the mysterious nexus of all love and money and power, the shining and perishable dream itself. To think of “living” there was to reduce the miraculous to the mundane; one does not “live” at Xanadu.