Joan Didion Goodbye To All That Analysis

In Joan Didion’s “Goodbye to All That”, she reminisces on her experiences as a young woman living in New York and the experiences that led her to move away at age twenty eight. As Didion grew older, the novelty of a city she once loved dearly wore off. By reflecting on her own youth in New York, Didion warns that the promise of a new city and its experiences can lead to one’s downfall, shattering all illusions of a young writer trying to make their own. This essay is Didion’s personal reflective piece that displays her nostalgia for an optimistic time of her youth in New York. This essay is about how Didion both fell in and out of love with New York and describes why she left her pseudo home of eight years. She begins by talking about her origins, claiming that New York is a temporary fixture, and how she quickly falls in love with it. Didion experiences her early twenties in a surreal state of mind. She has one foot in and out of the doorway, believing she did not truly live there. She has an epiphany at 28 realizing the broken promises and loss of innocence in her life. The lesson she learns is that she has stayed "too long at the fair"(1). Didion feels stuck in a rut, going to the same parties meeting the same people with different faces. Joan notices that anything she does is something she has previously …show more content…
For Didion, Babylon is New York. The author splits her essay into four parts, each a different stage of her relationship with the city. The first is pre-New York, then when she became infatuated with New York, how she began to hate it, and finally, post-New York. These stages of her life occur within the span of about eight years. Didion begins her essay with a thought on how clear and vague beginnings and endings are, respectively. She practices this in the essay with her dubious