

Goodbye to all that - helwr
http://www.mtholyoke.edu/~zkurmus/html/didion.html

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mturmon
She's a beautiful writer with a very distinct voice. Observant, noticing the
telling details.

Her essay compilations "Slouching towards Bethlehem" and "The White Album" are
essential reading if you're interested in California in the late 1960s and
into the 1970s -- she lived in LA at the time, and is definitely an outsider
to the hippie/boomer explosion, some of the side-effects of which are in the
essays. (The essay above was about her move from Manhattan to LA; she grew up
in Sacramento.)

Another influential essay of hers is "The Deferential Spirit" from 1996
(teaser at [http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1996/sep/19/the-
def...](http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1996/sep/19/the-deferential-
spirit/?page=1)) which demolishes the technique and works of Bob Woodward.

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jogle
I really connected to this piece a lot: I'm in my 20s, in NYC for the first
time, grew up in the South, and am completely infatuated with this place for
some unable-to-be-explained reason.

    
    
      I suppose that a lot of us who have been very young in New
      York have the same scenes in our home screens. I remember 
      sitting in a lot of apartments with a slight headache about 
      five o’clock in the morning. I had a friend who could not 
      sleep...
    

It's so easy to fall in love with this city but so hard to describe the reason
why. She did a great job.

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MaysonL
See also: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good-Bye_to_All_That>

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sid6376
This was so beautiful that i almost cried. But what it certainly did was
enhance the charm for NYC. I am a 24 year old Indian with little hope of
making it to NY in my 20's but when i get there eventually, i will try to
remember this piece.

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shib71
Fascinating read, but would benefit from the attention of an editor.

~~~
michael_dorfman
This was printed in Saturday Evening Post(in 1967), so it did have the
attention of the their editors.

On the other hand, Didion said that she submitted pieces there because the pay
was good, and the editors "would let you do whatever you wanted".

