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lucyismyname's review
2.0
This essay collection has zero range. It baffles me that these were written by different authors. Every essay had the exact same arc - move to NY young, drink, take drugs, grow tired of the lifestyle and being broke, and ultimately finding solace in a rural/small town and husband.
I would be fairly devastated if I were one of these authors, reading this book for the first time and realising my experience and feelings were a cookie-cutter copy of those of 20 other authors.
I would be fairly devastated if I were one of these authors, reading this book for the first time and realising my experience and feelings were a cookie-cutter copy of those of 20 other authors.
fbroom's review
4.0
A collection of personal essays about leaving New York City. I’m a big fan of personal essays and I also like to read about New York City. New York is being young, falling in love and having lots of endless possibilities so I always love to read about other people's experiences living in the city.
I liked some essays more than others. Before reading this collection, I only knew/read for Roxane Gay, Emily Gould, Megan Daum and Cheryl Strayed. Some of my favorites essays were Currency by Elisa Albert, My City by Dani Shapiro, Manhattan Always Out of Reach by Ann Hood and View from the Penthouse by Valerie Eagler.
1) You are Here by Hope Edelman
2) Strange Lands by Roxane Gay
3) Home by Melissa Febos
4) Transport, Emily Carter Roiphe
Addiction & Rehab in Minnesota
5) Out of Season by Ruth Curry
Moving to New Zealand
"I couldn’t get a job, so I cooked a lot. I planned elaborate meals that I had to start shopping for around 3 pm, and as I didn’t get out of bed much before noon this created the illusion I was doing something like living."
6)
7) Misfits Fit Here by Marie Myung-OK Lee
"Actually, as with the addict who still dreams of the lingering taste of the forbidden, that upswelling feeling—of happiness, of unobserved observation, of the strangest kind of normalcy—came back with a rush, even staying in the tourist trap that is Times Square. Yes, I had quit New York, but it hadn’t quit me. I still carried around those feelings like a magnet that became reactivated every time I returned. But I had a child now, a teaching job, a house, and a community. New York was for the dreamers, the unattached, mobile types."
8) Manhattan Always Out of Reach by Ann Hood
9) Think of This as a Window by Maggie Estep
10) Russia with Love by Emily Gould
Spending three months in Russia.
11) My City by Dani Shapiro
"Look, I want to say. This life you think you want is a shiny apparition. Those restaurants and clubs, those bars bathed in a light pinker than sunset? Those cafes where photographers from magazines took your picture, and makeup artists dusted your pretty nose? They will be submerged, as in a shipwreck, the seas of time washing over them until something new has taken their place. The joint where you now drink those frozen margaritas will become an organic juice bar. The bistro with the best steak frites is now a T-Mobile store. The bookstore where you will eventually give your first reading sells boxes of hair dye and curling irons. It all changes—even institutions, even concrete towers, even, or perhaps most of all, our very selves—my foolish little sweetheart. That’s how I could leave. Trust me. You’ll thank me someday."
12) Someday, Some Morning, Sometime by Emma Straub
13) View from the Penthouse by Valerie Eagler
Truly devastating life experience
14) Losing New York by Lauren Elkin
Moving to Paris
15) Currency by Elisa Albert
"Classic beige sterile trying-too-hard fifteen plants in an atrium under a skylight of which some third-rate architect was very proud. State-of-the-art-twenty-years-ago multiplex with arcade. Escalators, Muzak, teenagers up to no good. Israelis accost you with samples of Dead Sea shit from a cart. The hideous seasonal store: Halloween crap, Christmas crap, Valentine’s crap, St. Patrick’s Day crap, Easter crap, Fourth of July crap, back-to-school crap, around again."
"It’s not until you’re long gone that you begin to understand: it’s unusual to be “from” a place that comprises a lot of fantasy lives. But from there you are, and what an education you got, man. The culture of name-dropping and status anxiety, the whiff of desperation inherent in any attempt to assert oneself that way: it was in your microwaved baby formula."
"Love letters to New York are invariably designed to make the reader feel like a loser, no? You might feel powerless in New York, but you can always make some poor schmuck who’s never lived there, or, better yet, only recently just moved there, feel even more powerless."
"You fell in love here a bunch, wrote a couple books, gave birth. How could that time not hold you in thrall? “Change is seen as something evil only by those who have lost their youth or sense of humor.” That was Cookie Mueller on the East Village, 1985. The city’s not the same and you’re not the same and you’ll never get that time back because time is a spiral, girl: a spiral. Life is elsewhere now. Live it."
"All accountable, reasonably happy grown-ups are the same, but unhappy immature drama-queen wretches are all unhappy in their own way."
“I mean, Jesus, it’s only a place. It isn’t responsible for who you’ve become; it could have been Tel Aviv or Berlin or San Francisco or London. Could’ve been rural Idaho, Sebastopol, Ireland, Texas. Anyway, how many people are lucky enough to choose where they live in the first place? It’s just you miss the reckless girl who lived here."
16) A war zone for anyone looking for love by Liza Monroy
17) REAL ESTATE by SARI BOTTON
I loved the feeling of being alone but among people.
I had any number of ways to distract myself from that difficulty. There were countless hours of mental gymnastics trying to figure out one intermittently interested guy after another. There were longer and longer runs around the East River Park. There was singing, at the top of my lungs, in my apartment (my upstairs neighbor once popped down to ask, “Can we move the Joni Mitchell hour to a time when I’m not home?”) and at the weekly jazz open mic at Cleopatra’s Needle on the Upper West Side and Rue B in my neighborhood. I took to the task of organizing casual dinners among the group of friends I considered my East Village family as if I were a professional event planner.
18) MAYBE I LOVED YOU by MARCY DERMANSKY
19) LONG TRAINS LEAVING by EMILY ST. JOHN MANDEL
I would wake at midnight or one in the morning, rise in the freezing darkness, and go out to write. A ritual: I dressed in my best clothes, sometimes put on a tie. I gathered my papers and my laptop computer, bundled up as best I could, and stepped out into the breathtaking cold. It felt like embarking on a profound adventure.
A memory of a ballet class when I was a teenager, a teacher glancing at me as I struggled through a difficult adagio, nodding approvingly at how hard I was working in that moment: “That’s the work,” she’d said, and the line stayed with me. This is the work, I thought, writing by the hour in the café. This is the discipline. This is what writing will take. I worked for hours at a time, trying to distill my wild fragments and false starts into a novel, drinking cup after cup of tea. I watched the night progress in stages. The freezing club kids ferried away by a fleet of taxis at 1:30 or 2 AM, the last few stragglers stumbling homeward with greasy pizza slices at 3 and 3:30. By 4 AM the street was quiet, scoured by salt and ice. A line from my first novel: “Outside the café the cold deepened until the streets froze white.” By 4:30, the first movements toward”
20) SO LONG, SUCKERS by REBECCA WOLFF
21) CRASH AND BURN by EVA TENUTOR
22) HEEDLESS, RESILIENT, GULLIBLE, AND STUPID by JANET STEEN
By leaving my hometown, I had, I thought, forsaken them to deal with it on their own. Not that I had ever been able to help, but there was always the illusion that if you were nearby or willing to suffer as well, you were at least providing some sort of company. But instead I had gone off to New York, slightly embarrassed that my ambition had become larger than my parents’ ambition had ever been.
23) THE LION, THE PIG, AND THE WOLF AND OTHER THOUGHTS ABOUT NEW YORK by KAREN E. BENDER
I also liked being surrounded by strangers. I loved the whole concept of rush hour, the businessmen and -women in their suits, the messengers hurtling down the street, the idea that we were all rushing somewhere important.
24) THE LOOSENING by RAYHANÉ SANDERS
25) CAPTIVE by DANA KINSTLER
26) MY MISSPENT YOUTH by MEGHAN DAUM
27) MINNESOTA NICE by CHERYL STRAYED
I liked some essays more than others. Before reading this collection, I only knew/read for Roxane Gay, Emily Gould, Megan Daum and Cheryl Strayed. Some of my favorites essays were Currency by Elisa Albert, My City by Dani Shapiro, Manhattan Always Out of Reach by Ann Hood and View from the Penthouse by Valerie Eagler.
1) You are Here by Hope Edelman
2) Strange Lands by Roxane Gay
3) Home by Melissa Febos
4) Transport, Emily Carter Roiphe
Addiction & Rehab in Minnesota
5) Out of Season by Ruth Curry
Moving to New Zealand
"I couldn’t get a job, so I cooked a lot. I planned elaborate meals that I had to start shopping for around 3 pm, and as I didn’t get out of bed much before noon this created the illusion I was doing something like living."
6)
7) Misfits Fit Here by Marie Myung-OK Lee
"Actually, as with the addict who still dreams of the lingering taste of the forbidden, that upswelling feeling—of happiness, of unobserved observation, of the strangest kind of normalcy—came back with a rush, even staying in the tourist trap that is Times Square. Yes, I had quit New York, but it hadn’t quit me. I still carried around those feelings like a magnet that became reactivated every time I returned. But I had a child now, a teaching job, a house, and a community. New York was for the dreamers, the unattached, mobile types."
8) Manhattan Always Out of Reach by Ann Hood
9) Think of This as a Window by Maggie Estep
10) Russia with Love by Emily Gould
Spending three months in Russia.
11) My City by Dani Shapiro
"Look, I want to say. This life you think you want is a shiny apparition. Those restaurants and clubs, those bars bathed in a light pinker than sunset? Those cafes where photographers from magazines took your picture, and makeup artists dusted your pretty nose? They will be submerged, as in a shipwreck, the seas of time washing over them until something new has taken their place. The joint where you now drink those frozen margaritas will become an organic juice bar. The bistro with the best steak frites is now a T-Mobile store. The bookstore where you will eventually give your first reading sells boxes of hair dye and curling irons. It all changes—even institutions, even concrete towers, even, or perhaps most of all, our very selves—my foolish little sweetheart. That’s how I could leave. Trust me. You’ll thank me someday."
12) Someday, Some Morning, Sometime by Emma Straub
13) View from the Penthouse by Valerie Eagler
Truly devastating life experience
14) Losing New York by Lauren Elkin
Moving to Paris
15) Currency by Elisa Albert
"Classic beige sterile trying-too-hard fifteen plants in an atrium under a skylight of which some third-rate architect was very proud. State-of-the-art-twenty-years-ago multiplex with arcade. Escalators, Muzak, teenagers up to no good. Israelis accost you with samples of Dead Sea shit from a cart. The hideous seasonal store: Halloween crap, Christmas crap, Valentine’s crap, St. Patrick’s Day crap, Easter crap, Fourth of July crap, back-to-school crap, around again."
"It’s not until you’re long gone that you begin to understand: it’s unusual to be “from” a place that comprises a lot of fantasy lives. But from there you are, and what an education you got, man. The culture of name-dropping and status anxiety, the whiff of desperation inherent in any attempt to assert oneself that way: it was in your microwaved baby formula."
"Love letters to New York are invariably designed to make the reader feel like a loser, no? You might feel powerless in New York, but you can always make some poor schmuck who’s never lived there, or, better yet, only recently just moved there, feel even more powerless."
"You fell in love here a bunch, wrote a couple books, gave birth. How could that time not hold you in thrall? “Change is seen as something evil only by those who have lost their youth or sense of humor.” That was Cookie Mueller on the East Village, 1985. The city’s not the same and you’re not the same and you’ll never get that time back because time is a spiral, girl: a spiral. Life is elsewhere now. Live it."
"All accountable, reasonably happy grown-ups are the same, but unhappy immature drama-queen wretches are all unhappy in their own way."
“I mean, Jesus, it’s only a place. It isn’t responsible for who you’ve become; it could have been Tel Aviv or Berlin or San Francisco or London. Could’ve been rural Idaho, Sebastopol, Ireland, Texas. Anyway, how many people are lucky enough to choose where they live in the first place? It’s just you miss the reckless girl who lived here."
16) A war zone for anyone looking for love by Liza Monroy
17) REAL ESTATE by SARI BOTTON
I loved the feeling of being alone but among people.
I had any number of ways to distract myself from that difficulty. There were countless hours of mental gymnastics trying to figure out one intermittently interested guy after another. There were longer and longer runs around the East River Park. There was singing, at the top of my lungs, in my apartment (my upstairs neighbor once popped down to ask, “Can we move the Joni Mitchell hour to a time when I’m not home?”) and at the weekly jazz open mic at Cleopatra’s Needle on the Upper West Side and Rue B in my neighborhood. I took to the task of organizing casual dinners among the group of friends I considered my East Village family as if I were a professional event planner.
18) MAYBE I LOVED YOU by MARCY DERMANSKY
19) LONG TRAINS LEAVING by EMILY ST. JOHN MANDEL
I would wake at midnight or one in the morning, rise in the freezing darkness, and go out to write. A ritual: I dressed in my best clothes, sometimes put on a tie. I gathered my papers and my laptop computer, bundled up as best I could, and stepped out into the breathtaking cold. It felt like embarking on a profound adventure.
A memory of a ballet class when I was a teenager, a teacher glancing at me as I struggled through a difficult adagio, nodding approvingly at how hard I was working in that moment: “That’s the work,” she’d said, and the line stayed with me. This is the work, I thought, writing by the hour in the café. This is the discipline. This is what writing will take. I worked for hours at a time, trying to distill my wild fragments and false starts into a novel, drinking cup after cup of tea. I watched the night progress in stages. The freezing club kids ferried away by a fleet of taxis at 1:30 or 2 AM, the last few stragglers stumbling homeward with greasy pizza slices at 3 and 3:30. By 4 AM the street was quiet, scoured by salt and ice. A line from my first novel: “Outside the café the cold deepened until the streets froze white.” By 4:30, the first movements toward”
20) SO LONG, SUCKERS by REBECCA WOLFF
21) CRASH AND BURN by EVA TENUTOR
22) HEEDLESS, RESILIENT, GULLIBLE, AND STUPID by JANET STEEN
By leaving my hometown, I had, I thought, forsaken them to deal with it on their own. Not that I had ever been able to help, but there was always the illusion that if you were nearby or willing to suffer as well, you were at least providing some sort of company. But instead I had gone off to New York, slightly embarrassed that my ambition had become larger than my parents’ ambition had ever been.
23) THE LION, THE PIG, AND THE WOLF AND OTHER THOUGHTS ABOUT NEW YORK by KAREN E. BENDER
I also liked being surrounded by strangers. I loved the whole concept of rush hour, the businessmen and -women in their suits, the messengers hurtling down the street, the idea that we were all rushing somewhere important.
24) THE LOOSENING by RAYHANÉ SANDERS
25) CAPTIVE by DANA KINSTLER
26) MY MISSPENT YOUTH by MEGHAN DAUM
27) MINNESOTA NICE by CHERYL STRAYED
aniyapapaya10's review
5.0
Definitely a great read for anyone interested about the livelihood of New Yorkers. There’s essays in here that made me laugh, cry, think, reflect, and empathize in ways I don’t think anything else I’ve ever read has. I started it when I was living in New York one summer for an internship and I’m now finishing it as a person living in Jersey who wants to explore more of the big city this year. There’s apparently a sequel of more essays from people who can’t stay away from the city, and I’ll read that eventually as well. I can confidently say I’m a fan of this sort of anthology now.
irishlibrarian's review
5.0
Every essay reminded me of a piece of New York I'd nearly forgotten. For anyone who has ever loved and left New York.
cjfiebert's review
5.0
This book was exactly what I needed to read during my last weeks in New York.
I bought this book several months ago while J and I were discussing future plans and not quite sure what would be the next step. I started reading it after telling my family that I would be leaving NY and moving down to VA to be with him.
"Goodbye to All That" is a collection of essays from men & women talking about leaving New York City. Some of the stories talk about the author's first experience visiting the city, some about their experiences living in New York, and some about the lives that they began to lead after leaving New York. They talked about the highs and lows of life in New York, the realization that there was life outside the city, and why New York will always hold a special place in their heart.
As a girl who lived in New York my entire life and spent years idolizing the city and dreaming of moving there someday, this book helped me feel better about my decision to leave. Of course I'll always love NYC. It truly was my first love in life. But I know that I, like these authors before me, can move on and say good-bye to all that. And be happier and better for it in the end.
I bought this book several months ago while J and I were discussing future plans and not quite sure what would be the next step. I started reading it after telling my family that I would be leaving NY and moving down to VA to be with him.
"Goodbye to All That" is a collection of essays from men & women talking about leaving New York City. Some of the stories talk about the author's first experience visiting the city, some about their experiences living in New York, and some about the lives that they began to lead after leaving New York. They talked about the highs and lows of life in New York, the realization that there was life outside the city, and why New York will always hold a special place in their heart.
As a girl who lived in New York my entire life and spent years idolizing the city and dreaming of moving there someday, this book helped me feel better about my decision to leave. Of course I'll always love NYC. It truly was my first love in life. But I know that I, like these authors before me, can move on and say good-bye to all that. And be happier and better for it in the end.
leighbeevee's review
2.0
I liked the beginning of this, but halfway through it became too repetitive. I know the collection of essays was aptly put together but they were almost too similar. It let me be nostalgic for NYC but ultimately irritated me after a while.