Goodbye to All That

So sad-- just realized yesterday that Joan Didion is doing a reading of her new book at the Folger Shakespeare Library, but that it's sold out. I called to see if I could show up for some standing room love, but no dice. I'm hoping that someone will answer my Craigslist ad for a ticket, but something tells me that the bulk of the PEN/Faulkner Society crowd doesn't use CL.

I'm an underliner-- when I'm reading, there are always passages or sentence I want to mark to note... for their beauty, or their truth. When I'm reading Didion, I want to underline everything.

Freshman year in college, in my Women and Memoir class, we read Goodbye to All That, an essay she wrote in her early 30's about living in New York as a young woman. Choice bits below in an homage to Didion, and to being young:

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. I remember walking across Sixty-second Street one twilight that first spring, or the second spring, they were all alike for awhile. I was late to meet someone, but I stopped at Lexington Avenue and bough a peach and stood on the corner eating it and knew that I had come out of the West and reached the mirage.

and

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...

You will have perceived by now that I was not one to profit by the experience of others, that it was a very long time indeed before I stopped believing in new faces and began to understand the lesson in that story, which was that it is distinctly possible to stay too long at the Fair.