It all started with one sentence I read this morning from “Letter from the Editor” on Vogue, October 2017.
“…strength of character is everything, and age irrelevant.”
Anna Wintour, Vogue’s Editor in Chief, opens the letter talking about Hillary Clinton’s “gracious and eloquent concession speech” after November 9, 2016, and her recent memoir, What Happened, published on September 12, 2017. Then the letter goes on about other women with strong character, including Joan Didion.
It’s hard not to know about Hillary Clinton, whether or not living in New York. But I don’t know who Joan Didion is, except for what’s stated in the letter that at 82, the acclaimed writer, journalist, and former Vogue employee still has a sharp and sensitive gaze, “attuned to the local particulars and the broader implications.”
Convinced that Joan Didion was a name never coming across me before, I naturally turned to her Wikipedia page. She is a prolific writer moved to LA after living in NYC for some years…wait, why does this sound so familiar?
A few years ago I bought Goodbye to All That: Writers on Loving and Leaving New York, from Strand Bookstore at the corner of Broadway and 12th Street as I was walking downtown to the Village on a warm spring day. It’s an easy-read book of 28 writers’ personal stories coming to New York, trying to stay in New York, and eventually choosing to leave New York. The book sat on the nightstand next to my bed for a while. Every night I found myself amused by a few pages before going to bed.
For some reason, I started looking for the book in my recently rearranged apartment. Luckily, it’s not too hard to retrieve it from my bookshelf. Sure enough, I found Joan Didion there. In fact, the entire book is inspired by Didion’s 1967 essay, Goodbye to All That. On the front page of the book, there is a quote from her essay,
“All I mean is that I was very young in New York, and that at some point the golden rhythm was broken, and I am not that young anymore.”
I easily downloaded a pdf version of the short nine-page essay and read through it for the first time, sitting in front my new giant desk in Astoria, New York, my cat Xiaomi quietly accompanying this morning reading.
It’s Columbus Day. A rain early in the morning brought a real sense of autumn after two-week unusual warm temperature. Pumpkins and leaves are turning colorful, the air cooling down accompanied by a touch of the heavy fall sentiment. I had just obtained a new desk and was thrilled to be able to sit upright and concentrate on reading and writing. Xiaomi apparently loves the desk too – she made herself very comfortable in a chair next to mine, just sleeping and purring the entire time, with occasional patrols among my notebooks, computers, iPad & iPhone, teacups, pens and books on the desk. With David Bowie’s Five Years (1969 – 1973) in the background, working on THE LOG about Joan Didion seemed to be the best version of my New York story. Like Didion and all the 28 writers, I tend to look back at my years in NY from time to time, and often question (more often these days than before) whether I should stay or leave.
I found a few more quotes from Didion’s essay that speak to my heart this particular morning:
“ …I enter a revolving door at twenty and come out a good deal older, and on a different street.”
“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 here from somewhere else, a city for only the very young.”
"…I was in love with the city the way you love the first person who ever touches you and never loves anyone quite that way again."
“ You see I was in a curious situation in New York: it never occurred to me that I was living a real life there.”
“…New York was no mere city. It was instead an infinitely romantic notion, the mysterious nexus of all love and money and power, the shining and perishable dream itself.”
Didion makes it very clear that New York is for young people. It perhaps is the best city for many to spend their youth, me included, though I came here already halfway through my twenties (and I didn’t really start living in the city until my 30s). Everyone has the time when you have nothing but youth and dreams. New York is all about that. Whether the dream is about freedom, money, power, love, or fame, it’s all about being young and wondering in the Big Apple feeling all you dream are within the touch.
Didion moved away from New York after married in late 1960s. Speaking of “strength of character”, I also learned that Anna Wintour refers to Didion very specifically. Didion lost her husband to an unexpected massive heart failure at their dinner table one night after living together inseparably for over 40 years. Shortly after she lost her adopted daughter too. With her role of being a wife and mother ceased to exist, Didion struggled to regain her sense of identity, all reflected in her book, The Year of Magical Thinking, an example of “fictional journalism” she is widely known and acclaimed for.
In a picture published in the New York Times in 1971, Didion reminds me of 三毛，the Taiwanese writer most famous for her witty essays about youth and travel, her heavenly happy marriage (as depicted in her books) ended tragically with her Portuguese husband died in a work-related accident, and her suicide in the bathroom of her own home. They both have long dark hair, piercing eyes, and intelligent look with melancholy, except that at 82, with white hair and wrinkles all over her face, Didion still carries her sharp and sensitive gaze. And now she has many years to pierce back too, if she wants.
In 2005, Wiki says, Didion moved back to NY and has been living here since.
Somehow it’s a comfort for me to know.
Astoria，New York
