Joan Didion Goodbye To All That Summary

In both the short essay, “Goodbye to All That,” and the well-written memoir, The Year of Magical Thinking, Didion emphasizes New York City’s amusingly sentimental and lively nature and describes the activities and different auras she remembers from living there; these same activities and auras also cause Didion remarkable feelings of grief and nostalgia due to the fact that she is reminded her of her inability to appreciate New York, after moving back to a seemingly deathly Los Angeles, and the sudden deaths of her husband and daughter whom happens to go through a coma all within the same time frame. In “Goodbye to All That,” author Joan Didion illuminates New York City’s sentimental and lively nature by talking about spending more time in

New York than she anticipated she would without realizing it, how nothing seemed too far from reach, and by means of expanding on the city’s magnificence and beauty. Didion even describes the activities and different auras she remembers from living in New York, which cause her nostalgia. She mentions traces of specific perfumes she smelled in New York, the mixture of spices for boiling crabs, and the wild parties which took place on Saturday afternoons. Finally, she begins to have feelings of grief due to the unfortunate, unexpected death of her husband and sickness of her daughter in New York.

In the aftermath of said events, Didion goes on to explain the vortex effect and its consequences on her conscious reality, compares grief to societal expectations, and confronts her identical ties to both John and Quintana. These feelings and ideas are all remnants of her experiences in New York City, a location of great, sentimental meaning to Didion.
In the short essay “Goodbye to All That,” author Joan Didion illuminates New York City’s sentimental and lively nature in comparison to California, but mentions aspects of it that shed light upon her eventual grief mentioned in The Year of Magical Thinking. The narrative “Goodbye to All That,” is the story of “arriving in New York young, and leaving for California not so young..” (“In The Syntax: Rewriting Joan Didion's ‘Goodbye to All That’”). In it, she starts off by explaining the fact that she spent more time in New York than she anticipated she would without even realizing it. Didion had always believed at every point during her stay in New York that she would only be staying there “for just another few months, just until Christmas or Easter or the first warm day in May” (3). In fact, she even includes in the text that, “[she] would stay in New York, just six months, and [she] could see the Brooklyn Bridge from the window. As it turned out the bridge was the Triborough, and [she] stayed eight years” (2). Through this, it is quite apparent that she did not see her presence in New York to be permanent in any way, but as merely a short getaway from where she was from, which was California. Although, she does explain her satisfaction in the perceived magnificence and beauty of New York:
“To those of us who came from places where no one had heard of Lester Lanin and Grand Central Station was a Saturday radio program, where Wall Street and Fifth Avenue and Madison Avenue were not places at all but abstractions, New York was no mere city. It was instead an infinitely romantic notion, the 4 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” (3-4).

Furthermore, she goes on to explain how nothing really felt impossible or out of reach in New York. It is almost as if it was a city full of opportunity and unpredictability for her. However, this positive outlook on New York’s unpredictability is ironic due to the fact that it is this very unpredictability that made her husband’s death and daughter’s coma all the more devastating to her life. She expresses her confusion from the shocking events in The Year of Magical Thinking, and exclaims,“How could this have happened when everything was normal” (Didion, 68).
Joan Didion describes the activities and different auras she remembers from living in New York with precise expression.

To Didion,“Imprecise expression was not just sloppy; it was harmful” (Daugherty, 443). This thorough and emotional expression throughout the text leaves the impression that all the memories she makes caused her nostalgia. For example, in the well-written essay “Goodbye to All That,” Didion mainly focuses on place and setting, particularly shedding some light on her experiences and feelings in both New York City and Los Angeles. She exposes the reader to the aspects of New York City that she misses, aspects which made her think twice about living in California afterwards. Specifically, things as small as specific smells, the foods, the random encounters with strange people, and the “young and fresh feeling” of everyday life in New York City, are what made her reminisce on her time there. Traces of different perfumes she smelled in New York brought her all the way back. Didion explains, “For a lot of the time I was in New York I used a perfume called Fleurs de Rocaille, and then L’Air du Temps, and now the slightest trace of either can short-circuit my connections for the rest of the day” (4). Even the mixture of spices which was used for boiling crabs in New York City stuck with her mind. Then, Didion gives a detailed description of the wild parties that took place on Saturday

afternoons:
“And even that late in the game I still liked going to parties, all parties, bad parties, Saturday-afternoon parties given by recently married couples who lived in Stuyvesant Town, West Side parties given by unpublished or failed writers who served cheap red wine and talked about going to Guadalajara, Village parties where all the guests worked for advertising agencies and voted for Reform Democrats, press parties at Sardi’s, the worst kind of parties.” (Didion, 5)

It was all of these sensory memories that contributed to her feelings of nostalgia even after she left New York City. Of course, she constructs New York in a way that makes it seem like when she was in California, she wishes she had been on the East Coast, instead. Didion poetically describes to the reader that she comes to realize the big apple was the place for her to reside and live her life. However, only after years had passed and she had moved away to California did she figure out she missed it so much. As Didion writes in The Year of Magical Thinking, “You had to go with the change” (227)
In discussion on the subtopic of grief and nostalgia, Didion reminisces and reminds herself that New York is a significant and sentimental place for her; the death of her husband and, shortly after, the attack on the health of her only daughter, caused Didion to question her identity and her stance on the process of grieving. These particular experiences in New York caused her to undergo what is known as the “vortex effect.” The reader can take this stage as a time in which Didion is rendered paralyzed from memories caused by a seemingly tedious and boring states of affairs; all within the time that she begins to come to terms with her husband’s death and accept her daughter’s state of severe illness. It is said that she “found her mind turning increasingly to illness, to the end of promise, the dwindling of the days, the inevitability of the fading, the dying of the brightness” (Didion, 58). Didion explains in The Year of Magical Thinking that she was “thinking as small children think, as if her thoughts or wishes had the power to reverse the narrative, change the outcome” (Didion, 35). Even if it was painful for her to deal with, it was in fact a necessary part of the process of eventually getting over these unfortunate events. Furthermore, Joan Didion compares her idea of grief to qualities that are essentially valued in American culture. In American culture, qualities such as strength and independence are valued amongst all. Therefore, her state of grief is basically seen as a sign of weakness and a form of self-pity. “Grief dislocates both space and time” (“‘A Place None of Us Know Until We Reach It’: Mapping Grief and Memory in Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking”). Joan Didion makes this very clear in “Goodbye to All That,” when she says she remembers “with a clarity that makes the nerves in the back of her neck constrict, when New York began for her, but she cannot lay my finger upon the moment it ended” (1). Didion also explores how her connection with her husband and her daughter impacted her self identity. In light of the unfortunate events that they underwent, this self identity is ultimately brought into question. This frustrates her and gives her another thing to grieve besides her husband in the flesh. She not only lost her husband, but part of herself, as well. This can be seen as the start of a major change in her life, or, possible metanoia. This initially begins with “what feels like a missed opportunity..” (“Metanoic Movement: The Transformative Power of Regret”). Overall, Didion reflects on the idea that such a mental state can be linked back to a specific place, in her case, New York. In light of this fact, the reader can make a justified conclusion that her work is place-based, as Didion reflects on the idea that a mental state can be linked back to any particular location in which memories of such high significance are made.
In both the short essay, “Goodbye to All That,” and the well-written memoir, The Year of Magical Thinking, Didion emphasizes New York City’s sentimental and lively nature by describing the activities and different auras she remembers from living there; these same activities and auras also cause Didion remarkable feelings of grief and nostalgia due to the fact that she is reminded her of her inability to appreciate New York, after moving back to a seemingly boring and stable Los Angeles. Of course, the sudden death of her husband and the coma of her daughter happen to take place all within the same time frame. In conclusion, Joan Didion illuminates New York City as a sentimental place in which can be unpredictable in both a positive and negative sense. Going to California afterwards, she only realized the difficulty in overcoming the daunting “vortex effect” in lieu of her husband’s death and her daughter’s illness, due to the high amount of things there that may have been capable of setting this paralysis off. The construction and deconstruction of place in Didion’s works ultimately leads to the discovery of a plethora of deep emotional setbacks that change her her life.