joan didion essay on new york

New York: Sentimental Journeys

January 17, 1991 issue

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We know her story, and some of us, although not all of us, which was to become one of the story’s several equivocal aspects, know her name. She was a twenty-nine-year-old unmarried white woman who worked as an investment banker in the corporate finance department at Salomon Brothers in downtown Manhattan, the energy and natural resources group. She was said by one of the principals in a Texas oil stock offering on which she had collaborated as a member of the Salomon team to have done “top-notch” work. She lived alone in an apartment on East 83rd Street, between York and East End, a sublet cooperative she was thinking about buying. She often worked late and when she got home she would change into jogging clothes and at eight-thirty or nine-thirty in the evening would go running, six or seven miles through Central Park, north on the East Drive, west on the less traveled road connecting the East and West Drives at approximately 102nd Street, and south on the West Drive. The wisdom of this was later questioned by some, by those who were accustomed to thinking of the Park as a place to avoid after dark, and defended by others, the more adroit of whom spoke of the citizen’s absolute right to public access (“That park belongs to us and this time nobody is going to take it from us,” Ronnie Eldridge, at the time a Democratic candidate for the City Council of New York, declared on the op-ed page of The New York Times ), others of whom spoke of “running” as a preemptive right. “Runners have Type A controlled personalities and they don’t like their schedules interrupted,” one runner, a securities trader, told the Times to this point. “When people run is a function of their life style,” another runner said. “I am personally very angry,” a third said, “Because women should have the right to run any time.”

For this woman in this instance these notional rights did not prevail. She was found, with her clothes torn off, not far from the 102nd Street connecting road at one-thirty on the morning of April 20, 1989. She was taken near death to Metropolitan Hospital on East 97th Street. She had lost 75 percent of her blood. Her skull had been crushed, her left eyeball pushed back through its socket, the characteristic surface wrinkles of her brain flattened. Dirt and twigs were found in her vagina, suggesting rape. By May 2, when she first woke from coma, six black and Hispanic teenagers, four of whom had made videotaped statements concerning their roles in the attack and another of whom had described his role in an unsigned verbal statement, had been charged with her assault and rape and she had become, unwilling and unwitting, a sacrificial player in the sentimental narrative that is New York public life.

NIGHTMARE IN CENTRAL PARK, the headlines and display type read. Teen Wolfpack Beats and Rapes Wall Street Exec on Jogging Path. Central Park Horror. Wolf Pack’s Prey. Female Jogger Near Death After Savage Attack by Roving Gang. Rape Rampage. Park Marauders Call It ‘Wilding,’ Street Slang for Going Berserk. Rape Suspect: ‘It Was Fun.’ Rape Suspect’s Jailhouse Boast: ‘She Wasn’t Nothing.’ The teenagers were back in the holding cell, the confessions gory and complete. One shouted “hit the beat” and they all started rapping to “Wild Thing.” The Jogger and the Wolf Pack. An Outrage And A Prayer . And, on the Monday morning after the attack, on the front page of The New York Post , with a photograph of Governor Mario Cuomo and the headline NONE OF US IS SAFE, this italic text: “A visibly shaken Governor Cuomo spoke out yesterday on the vicious Central Park rape: The people are angry and frightened—my mother is, my family is. To me, as a person who’s lived in this city all of his life, this is the ultimate shriek of alarm.’ ”

Later it would be recalled that 3,254 other rapes were reported that year, including one the following week involving the near decapitation of a black woman in Fort Tryon Park and one two weeks later involving a black woman in Brooklyn who was robbed, raped, sodomized, and thrown down the air shaft of a four-story building, but the point was rhetorical, since crimes are universally understood to be news to the extent that they offer, however erroneously, a story, a lesson, a high concept. In the 1986 Central Park death of Jennifer Levin, then eighteen, at the hands of Robert Chambers, then nineteen, the “story,” extrapolated more or less from thin air but left largely uncorrected, had to do not with people living wretchedly and marginally on the underside of where they wanted to be, not with the Dreiserian pursuit of “respectability” that marked the revealed details (Robert Chambers’s mother was a private-duty nurse who worked twelve-hour night shifts to enroll her son in private schools and the Knickerbocker Greys) but with “preppies,” and the familiar “too much too soon.”

Susan Brownmiller, during a year spent monitoring newspaper coverage of rape as part of her research for Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape , found, not surprisingly, that “although New York City police statistics showed that black women were more frequent victims of rape than white women, the favored victim in the tabloid headline…was young, white, middle-class and ‘attractive.’ ” In its quite extensive coverage of rape-murders during the year 1971, according to Ms. Brownmiller, the Daily News published in its four-star final edition only two stories in which the victim was not described in the lead paragraph as “attractive”: one of these stories involved an eight-year-old child, the other was a second-day follow-up on a first-day story which had in fact described the victim as “attractive.” The Times , she found, covered rapes only infrequently that year, but what coverage they did “concerned victims who had some kind of middle-class status, such as ‘nurse,’ ‘dancer’ or ‘teacher,’ and with a favored setting of Central Park.”

As a news story, “Jogger” was understood to turn on the demonstrable “difference” between the victim and her accused assailants, four of whom lived in Schomburg Plaza, a federally subsidized apartment complex at the northeast corner of Fifth Avenue and 110th Street in East Harlem, and the rest of whom lived in the projects and rehabilitated tenements just to the north and west of Schomburg Plaza. Some twenty-five teenagers were brought in for questioning; eight were held. The six who were finally indicted ranged in age from fourteen to sixteen. That none of the six had a previous police record passed, in this context, for achievement; beyond that, one was recalled by his classmates to have taken pride in his expensive basketball shoes, another to have been “a follower.” I’m a smooth type of fellow, cool, calm, and mellow , one of the six, Yusef Salaam, would say in the rap he presented as part of his statement before sentencing.

I’m kind of laid back, but now I’m speaking so that you know/I got used and abused and even was put on the news…. I’m not dissing them all, but the some that I called They tried to dis me like I was an inch small, like a midget, a mouse, something less than a man .

The victim, by contrast, was a leader, part of what the Times would describe as “the wave of young professionals who took over New York in the 1980’s,” one of those who were “handsome and pretty and educated and white,” who, according to the Times , not only “believed they owned the world” but “had reason to.” She was from a Pittsburgh suburb, Upper St. Clair, the daughter of a retired Westinghouse senior manager. She had been Phi Beta Kappa at Wellesley, a graduate of the Yale School of Management, a Congressional intern, nominated for a Rhodes Scholarship, remembered by the chairman of her department at Wellesley as “probably one of the top four or five students of the decade.” She was reported to be a vegetarian, and “fun-loving,” although only “when time permitted,” and also to have had (these were the Times ’s details) “concerns about the ethics of the American business world.”

In other words she was wrenched, even as she hung between death and life and later between insentience and sentience, into New York’s ideal sister, daughter, Bachrach bride: a young woman of conventional middle-class privilege and promise whose situation was such that many people tended to overlook the fact that the state’s case against the accused was not invulnerable. The state could implicate most of the defendants in the assault and rape in their own videotaped words, but had none of the incontrovertible forensic evidence—no matching semen, no matching fingernail scrapings, no matching blood—commonly produced in this kind of case. Despite the fact that jurors in the second trial would eventually mention physical evidence as having been crucial in their bringing guilty verdicts against one defendant, Kevin Richardson, there was not actually much physical evidence at hand. Fragments of hair “similar [to] and consistent” with that of the victim were found on Kevin Richardson’s clothing and underwear, but the state’s own criminologist had testified that hair samples were necessarily inconclusive since, unlike fingerprints, they could not be traced to a single person. Dirt samples found on the defendants’ clothing were, again, similar to dirt found in the part of the park where the attack took place, but the state’s criminologist allowed that the samples were also similar to dirt found in other uncultivated areas of the park. To suggest, however, that this minimal physical evidence could open the case to an aggressive defense—to, say, the kind of defense that such celebrated New York criminal lawyers as Jack Litman and Barry Slotnick typically present—would come to be construed, during the weeks and months to come, as a further attack on the victim.

She would be Lady Courage to The New York Post , she would be A Profile in Courage to The Daily News and New York Newsday . She would become for Anna Quindlen in The New York Times the figure of “New York rising above the dirt, the New Yorker who has known the best, and the worst, and has stayed on, living somewhere in the middle.” She would become for David Dinkins, the first black mayor of New York, the emblem of his apparently fragile hopes for the city itself: “I hope the city will be able to learn a lesson from this event and be inspired by the young woman who was assaulted in the case,” he said. “Despite tremendous odds, she is rebuilding her life. What a human life can do, a human society can do as well.” She was even then for John Gutfreund, the chairman and chief executive officer of Salomon Brothers, the personification of “what makes this city so vibrant and so great,” now “struck down by a side of our city that is as awful and terrifying as the creative side is wonderful.” It was precisely in this conflation of victim and city, this confusion of personal woe with public distress, that the crime’s “story” would be found, its lesson, its encouraging promise of narrative resolution.

One reason the victim in this case could be so readily abstracted, and her situation so readily made to stand for that of the city itself, was that she remained, as a victim of rape, unnamed in most press reports. Although the American and English press convention of not naming victims of rape (adult rape victims are named in French papers) derives from the understandable wish to protect the victim, the rationalization of this-special protection rests on a number of doubtful, even magical, assumptions. The convention assumes, by providing a protection for victims of rape not afforded victims of other assaults, that rape involves a violation absent from other kinds of assault. The convention assumes that this violation is of a nature best kept secret, that the rape victim feels, and would feel still more strongly were she identified, a shame and self-loathing unique to this form of assault; in other words that she has been in an unspecified way party to her own assault, that a special contract exists between this one kind of victim and her assailant.

The convention assumes, finally, that the victim would be, were this special contract revealed, the natural object of prurient interest; that the act of male penetration involves such potent mysteries that the woman so penetrated (as opposed, say, to having her face crushed with a brick or her brain penetrated with a length of pipe) is permanently marked, “different,” even—especially if there is a perceived racial or social “difference” between victim and assailant, as in nineteenth-century stories featuring white women taken by Indians—“ruined.”

These quite specifically masculine assumptions (women do not want to be raped, nor do they want to have their brains smashed, but very few mystify the difference between the two) tend in general to be self-fulfilling, guiding the victim to define her assault as her protectors do. “Ultimately we’re doing women a disservice by separating rape from other violent crimes,” Deni Elliott, the director of Dartmouth’s Ethics Institute, suggested in a discussion of this custom in Time . “We are participating in the stigma of rape by treating victims of this crime differently,” Geneva Overholser, the editor of the Des Moines Register , said about her decision to publish in February 1990 a five-part piece about a rape victim who agreed to be named. “When we as a society refuse to talk openly about rape, I think we weaken our ability to deal with it.” Susan Estrich, a professor of criminal law at Harvard Law School and the manager of Michael Dukakis’s 1988 presidential campaign, discussed, in Real Rape , the conflicting emotions that followed her own 1974 rape:

At first, being raped is something you simply don’t talk about. Then it occurs to you that people whose houses are broken into or who are mugged in Central Park talk about it all the time…. If it isn’t my fault, why am I supposed to be ashamed? If I’m not ashamed, if it wasn’t “personal,” why look askance when I mention it?

There were, in the 1989 Central Park attack, specific circumstances that reinforced the conviction that the victim should not be named. She had clearly been, according to the doctors who examined her at Metropolitan Hospital and to the statements made by the suspects (she herself remembered neither the attack nor anything that happened during the next six weeks), raped by one or more assailants. She had also been beaten so brutally that, fifteen months later, she could not focus her eyes or walk unaided. She had lost all sense of smell. She could not read without experiencing double vision. She was believed at the time to have permanently lost function in some areas of her brain.

Given these circumstances, the fact that neither the victim’s family nor, later, the victim herself wanted her name known struck an immediate chord of sympathy, seemed a belated way to protect her as she had not been protected in Central Park. Yet there was in this case a special emotional undertow that derived in part from the deep and allusive associations and taboos attaching, in American black history, to the idea of the rape of white women. Rape remained, in the collective memory of many blacks, the very core of their victimization. Black men were accused of raping white women, even as black women were, Malcolm X wrote in The Autobiography of Malcolm X , “raped by the slavemaster white man until there had begun to emerge a home-made, handmade, brainwashed race that was no longer even of its true color, that no longer even knew its true family names.” The very frequency of sexual contact between white men and black women increased the potency of the taboo on any such contact between black men and white women. The abolition of slavery, W.J. Cash wrote in The Mind of the South ,

in destroying the rigid fixity of the black at the bottom of the scale, in throwing open to him at least the legal opportunity to advance, had inevitably opened up to the mind of every Southerner a vista at the end of which stood the overthrow of this taboo. If it was given to the black to advance at all, who could say (once more the logic of the doctrine of his inherent inferiority would not hold) that he would not one day advance the whole way and lay claim to complete equality, including, specifically, the ever crucial right of marriage? What Southerners felt, therefore, was that any assertion of any kind on the part of the Negro constituted in a perfectly real manner an attack on the Southern woman. What they saw, more or less consciously, in the conditions of Reconstruction was a passage toward a condition for her as degrading, in their view, as rape itself. And a condition, moreover, which, logic or no logic, they infallibly thought of as being as absolutely forced upon her as rape, and hence a condition for which the term “rape” stood as truly as for the de facto deed.

Nor was the idea of rape the only potentially treacherous undercurrent in this case. There has historically been, for American blacks, an entire complex of loaded references around the question of “naming”: slave names, masters’ names, African names, call me by my rightful name, nobody knows my name; stories, in which the specific gravity of naming locked directly into that of rape, of black men whipped for addressing white women by their given names.

That, in this case, just such an interlocking of references could work to fuel resentments and inchoate hatreds seemed clear, and it seemed equally clear that some of what ultimately occurred—the repeated references to lynchings, the identification of the defendants with the Scottsboro boys, the insistently provocative repetition of the victim’s name, the weird and self-defeating insistence that no rape had taken place and little harm been done the victim—derived momentum from this historical freight. “Years ago, if a white woman said a Black man looked at her lustfully, he could be hung higher than a magnolia tree in bloom, while a white mob watched joyfully sipping tea and eating cookies,” Yusef Salaam’s mother reminded readers of The Amsterdam News . “The first thing you do in the United States of America when a white woman is raped is round up a bunch of black youths, and I think that’s what happened here,” the Reverend Calvin O. Butts III of the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem told The New York Times . “You going to arrest me now ’cause I said the jogger’s name?” Gary Byrd asked rhetorically on his WLIB show.

I mean, she’s obviously a public figure, and a very mysterious one, I might add. Well, it’s a funny place we live in called America, and should we be surprised that they’re up to their usual tricks? It was a trick that got us here in the first place.

This reflected one of the problems with not naming this victim: she was in fact named all the time. Everyone in the courthouse, everyone who worked for a paper or a television station or who followed the case for whatever professional reason, knew her name. She was referred to by name in all court records and in all court proceedings. She was named, in the days immediately following the attack, on local television stations. She was also routinely named—and this was part of the difficulty, part of what led to a damaging self-righteousness among those who did not name her and to an equally damaging embattlement among those who did, in Manhattan’s black-owned newspapers, The Amsterdam News and The City Sun , and she was named as well on WLIB, the Manhattan radio station owned by a black partnership which included Percy Sutton and, until 1985 when he transferred his stock to his son, Mayor Dinkins.

That the victim in this case was identified on Centre Street and north of 96th Street but not in between made for a certain cognitive dissonance, especially since the names of even the juvenile suspects had been released by the police and the press before any suspect had even been arraigned, let alone indicted. “The police normally withhold the names of minors who are accused of crimes,” the Times explained (actually the police normally withhold the names of accused “juveniles,” or minors under age sixteen, but not of minors sixteen or seventeen), “but officials said they made public the names of the youths charged in the attack on the woman because of the seriousness of the incident.” There seemed a debatable point here, the question of whether “the seriousness of the incident” might not have in fact seemed a compelling reason to avoid any appearance of a rush to judgment by preserving the anonymity of a juvenile suspect; one of the names released by the police and published in the Times was of a fourteen-year-old who was ultimately not indicted.

There were, early on, certain aspects of this case that seemed not well-handled by the police and prosecutors, and others that seemed not well-handled by the press. It would seem to have been tactically unwise, since New York state law requires that a parent or guardian be present when children under sixteen are questioned, for police to continue the interrogation of Yusef Salaam, then fifteen, on the grounds that his Transit Authority bus pass said he was sixteen, while his mother was kept waiting outside. It would seem to have been unwise for Linda Fairstein, the assistant district attorney in charge of Manhattan sex crimes, to ignore, at the precinct house, the mother’s assertion that the son was fifteen, and later to suggest, in open court, that the boy’s age had been unclear to her because the mother had used the word “minor.”

It would also seem to have been unwise for Linda Fairstein to tell David Nocenti, the assistant US attorney who was paired with Yusef Salaam in a “Big Brother” program and who had come to the precinct house at the mother’s request, that he had “no legal standing” there and that she would file a complaint with his supervisors. It would seem in this volatile a case imprudent of the police to follow their normal procedure by presenting Raymond Santana’s initial statement in their own words, cop phrases that would predictably seem to some in the courtroom, as the expression of a fourteen-year-old held overnight and into the next afternoon for interrogation, unconvincing:

On April 19, 1989, at approximately 20:30 hours, I was at the Taft Projects in the vicinity of 113th St. and Madison Avenue. I was there with numerous friends…. At approximately 21:00 hours, we all (myself and approximately 15 others) walked south on Madison Avenue to E. 110th Street, then walked westbound to Fifth Avenue. At Fifth Avenue and 110th Street, we met up with an additional group of approximately 15 other males, who also entered Central Park with us at that location with the intent to rob cyclists and joggers….

In a case in which most of the defendants had made videotaped statements admitting at least some role in the assault and rape, this less than meticulous attitude toward the gathering and dissemination of information seemed peculiar and self-defeating, the kind of pressured or unthinking standard procedure that could not only exacerbate the fears and angers and suspicions of conspiracy shared by many blacks but conceivably open what seemed, on the basis of the confessions, a conclusive case to the kind of doubt that would eventually keep juries out, in the trial of the first three defendants, ten days, and, in the trial of the next two defendants, twelve days. One of the reasons the jury in the first trial could not agree, Manhattan Lawyer reported in its October 1990 issue, was that one juror, Ronald Gold, remained “deeply troubled by the discrepancies between the story [Antron] McCray tells on his videotaped statement and the prosecution scenario”:

Why did McCray place the rape at the reservoir, Gold demanded, when all evidence indicated it happened at the 102 Street crossdrive? Why did McCray say the jogger was raped where she fell, when the prosecution said she’d been dragged 300 feet into the woods first? Why did McCray talk about having to hold her arms down, if she was found bound and gagged? The debate raged for the last two days, with jurors dropping in and out of Gold’s acquittal [for McCray] camp…. After the jurors watched McCray’s video for the fifth time, Miranda [Rafael Miranda, another juror] knew it well enough to cite the time-code numbers imprinted at the bottom of the videotape as he rebuffed Gold’s arguments with specific statements from McCray’s own lips. [McCray, on the videotape, after admitting that he had held the victim by her left arm as her clothes were pulled off, volunteered that he had “got on top” of her, and said that he had rubbed against her without an erection “so everybody would…just know I did it.”] The pressure on Gold was mounting. Three jurors agree that it was evident Gold, worn down perhaps by his own displays of temper as much as anything else, capitulated out of exhaustion. While a bitter Gold told other jurors he felt terrible about ultimately giving in, Brueland [Harold Brueland, another juror who had for a time favored acquittal for McCray] believes it was all part of the process. “I’d like to tell Ronnie some day that nervous exhaustion is an element built into the court system. They know that,” Brueland says of court officials. “They know we’re only going to be able to take it for so long. It’s just a matter of, you know, who’s got the guts to stick with it.”

So fixed were the emotions provoked by this case that the idea that there could have been, for even one juror, even a moment’s doubt in the state’s case, let alone the kind of doubt that could be sustained over ten days or twelve, seemed, to many in the city, bewildering, almost unthinkable: the attack on the jogger had by then passed into narrative, and the narrative was about confrontation, about what Governor Cuomo had called “the ultimate shriek of alarm,” about what was wrong with the city and about its solution. What was wrong with the city had been identified, and its names were Raymond Santana, Yusef Salaam, Antron McCray, Kharey Wise, Kevin Richardson, and Steve Lopez. “They never could have thought of it as they raged through Central Park, tormenting and ruining people,” Bob Herbert wrote in the News after the verdicts came in on the first three defendants.

There was no way it could have crossed their vicious minds. Running with the pack, they would have scoffed at the very idea. They would have laughed. And yet it happened. In the end, Yusef Salaam, Antron McCray and Raymond Santana were nailed by a woman. Elizabeth Lederer stood in the courtroom and watched Saturday night as the three were hauled off to jail…. At times during the trial, she looked about half the height of the long and lanky Salaam, who sneered at her from the witness stand. Salaam was apparently too dumb to realize that Lederer—this petite, soft-spoken, curly-haired prosecutor—was the jogger’s avenger…. You could tell that her thoughts were elsewhere, that she was thinking about the jogger. You could tell that she was thinking: I did it. I did it for you.

Do this in remembrance of me : the solution, then, or so such pervasive fantasies suggested, was to partake of the symbolic body and blood of The Jogger, whose idealization was by this point complete, and was rendered, significantly, in details stressing her “difference,” or superior class. The Jogger was someone who wore, according to Newsday , “a light gold chain around her slender neck” as well as, according to the News , a “modest” gold ring and “a thin sheen” of lipstick. The Jogger was someone who would not, according to the Post , “even dignify her alleged attackers with a glance.” The Jogger was someone who spoke, according to the News , in accents “suited to boardrooms,” accents that might therefore seem “foreign to many native New Yorkers.” In her first appearance on the witness stand she had been subjected, the Times noted, “to questions that most people do not have to answer publicly during their lifetimes,” principally about her use of a diaphragm on the Sunday preceding the attack, and had answered these questions, according to an editorial in the News , with an “indomitable dignity” that had taught the city a lesson “about courage and class.”

This emphasis on perceived refinements of character and of manner and of taste tended to distort and to flatten, and ultimately to suggest not the actual victim of an actual crime but a fictional character of a slightly earlier period, the well-brought-up maiden who briefly graces the city with her presence and receives in turn a taste of “real life.” The defendants, by contrast, were seen as incapable of appreciating these marginal distinctions, ignorant of both the norms and accoutrements of middle-class life. “Did you have jogging clothes on?” Elizabeth Lederer asked Yusef Salaam, by way of trying to discredit his statement that he had gone into the park that night only to “walk around.” Did he have “jogging clothes,” did he have “sports equipment,” did he have “a bicycle.” A pernicious nostalgia had come to permeate the case, a longing for the New York that had seemed for a while to be about “sports equipment,” about getting and spending rather than about having and not having: the reason that this victim must not be named was so that she could go unrecognized, it was astonishingly said, by Jerry Nachman, the editor of the New York Post , and then by others who seemed to find in this a particular resonance, to Bloomingdale’s.

Some New York stories involving young middle-class white women do not make it to the editorial pages, or even necessarily to the front pages. In April 1990, a young middle-class white woman named Laurie Sue Rosenthal, raised in an Orthodox Jewish household and at age twenty-nine still living with her parents in Jamaica, Queens, happened to die, according to the coroner’s report from the accidental toxicity of Darvocet in combination with alcohol, in an apartment at 36 East 68th Street in Manhattan. The apartment belonged to the man she had been, according to her parents, seeing for about a year, a minor assistant city commissioner named Peter Franconeri. Peter Franconeri, who was at the time in charge of elevator and boiler inspections for the Buildings Department and married to someone else, wrapped Laurie Sue Rosenthal’s body in a blanket; placed it, along with her handbag and ID, outside the building with the trash; and went to his office at 60 Hudson Street. At some point an anonymous call was made to 911. Franconeri was identified only after her parents gave the police his beeper number, which they found in her address book. According to Newsday , which covered the story more extensively than the News , the Post , or the Times ,

Initial police reports indicated that there were no visible wounds on Rosenthal’s body. But Rosenthal’s mother, Ceil, said yesterday that the family was told the autopsy revealed two “unexplained bruises” on her daughter’s body. Larry and Ceil Rosenthal said those findings seemed to support their suspicions that their daughter was upset because they received a call from their daughter at 3 AM Thursday “saying that he had beaten her up.” The family reported the conversation to police. “I told her to get into a cab and get home,” Larry Rosenthal said yesterday. “The next I heard was two detectives telling me terrible things.” “The ME [medical examiner] said the bruises did not constitute a beating but they were going to examine them further,” Ceil Rosenthal said.

“There were some minor bruises,” a spokeswoman for the office of the chief medical examiner told Newsday a few days later, but the bruises “did not in any way contribute to her death.” This is worth rerunning: a young woman calls her parents at three in the morning, “distraught.” She says that she has been beaten up. A few hours later, on East 68th Street between Madison and Park Avenues, a few steps from Porthault and Pratesi and Armani and Saint Laurent and the Westbury Hotel, at a time of day in this part of New York 10021 when Jim Buck’s dog trainers are assembling their morning packs and Henry Kravis’s Bentley is idling outside his Park Avenue apartment and the construction crews are clocking in over near the Frick at the multi-million-dollar houses under reconstruction for Bill Cosby and for the owner of The Limited, this young middle-class white woman’s body, showing bruises, gets put out with the trash.

“Everybody got upside down because of who he was,” an unidentified police officer later told Jim Dwyer of Newsday , referring to the man who put the young woman out with the trash. “If it had happened to anyone else, nothing would have come of it. A summons would have been issued and that would have been the end of it.” In fact nothing did come of the death of Laurie Sue Rosenthal, which might have seemed a natural tabloid story but failed, on several levels, to catch the local imagination. For one thing she could not be trimmed into the role of the preferred tabloid victim, who is conventionally presented as fate’s random choice (Laurie Sue Rosenthal had, for whatever reason, taken the Darvocet instead of a taxi home, her parents reported treatment for a previous Valium dependency, she could be presumed to have known over the course of a year that Franconeri was married and yet continued to see him); for another, she seemed not to have attended an expensive school or to have been employed in a glamour industry (no Ivy Grad, no Wall Street Exec), which made it hard to cast her as part of “what makes this city so vibrant and so great.”

In August 1990, Peter Franconeri pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor, the unlawful removal of a body, and was sentenced by Criminal Court Judge Peter Benitez to seventy-five hours of community service. This was neither surprising nor much of a story (only twenty-three lines even in Newsday , on page twenty-nine of the city edition), and the case’s resolution was for many people a kind of relief. The district attorney’s office had asked for “some incarceration,” the amount usually described as a touch, but no one wanted, it was said, to crucify the guy: Peter Franconeri was somebody who knew a lot of people, understood how to live in the city, who had for example not only the apartment on East 68th Street between Madison and Park but a house in Southampton and who also understood that putting a body outside with the trash was nothing to get upside down about, if it was handled right. Such understandings may in fact have been the city’s true “ultimate shriek of alarm,” but it was not a shriek the city wanted to recognize.

Perhaps the most arresting collateral news to surface, during the first few days after the attack on the Central Park jogger, was that a significant number of New Yorkers apparently believed the city sufficiently well-ordered to incorporate Central Park into their evening fitness schedules. “Prudence” was defined, even after the attack, as “staying south of 90th Street,” or having “an awareness that you need to think about planning your routes,” or, in the case of one woman interviewed by the Times , deciding to quit her daytime job (she was a lawyer) because she was “tired of being stuck out there, running later and later at night.” “I don’t think there’s a runner who couldn’t describe the silky, gliding feeling you get running at night,” an editor of Runner’s World told the Times . “You see less of what’s around you and you become centered on your running.”

The notion that Central Park at night might be a good place to “see less of what’s around you” was recent. There were two reasons why Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, when they devised their winning entry in the 1858 competition for a Central Park design, decided to sink the transverse roads below grade level. One reason, the most often cited, was aesthetic, a recognition on the part of the designers that the four crossings specified by the terms of the competition, at 65th, 79th, 85th, and 97th Streets, would intersect the sweep of the landscape, be “at variance with those agreeable sentiments which we should wish the park to inspire.” The other reason, which appears to have been equally compelling, had to do with security. The problem with grade-level crossings, Olmsted and Vaux wrote in their “Greensward” plan, would be this:

The transverse roads will…have to be kept open, while the park proper will be useless for any good purpose after dusk; for experience has shown that even in London, with its admirable police arrangements, the public cannot be assured safe transit through large open spaces of ground after nightfall. These public thoroughfares will then require to be well lighted at the sides, and, to restrain marauders pursued by the police from escaping into the obscurity of the park, strong fences or walls, six or eight feet high, will be necessary.

The park, in other words, was seen from its conception as intrinsically dangerous after dark, a place of “obscurity,” “useless for any good purpose,” a refuge only for “marauders.” The parks of Europe closed at nightfall, Olmsted noted in his 1882 pamphlet The Spoils of the Park: With a Few Leaves from the Deep-laden Note-books of “A Wholly Unpractical Man,” “but one surface road is kept open across Hyde Park, and the superintendent of the Metropolitan Police told me that a man’s chances of being garrotted or robbed were, because of the facilities for concealment to be found in the Park, greater in passing at night along this road than anywhere else in London.”

In the high pitch of the initial “jogger” coverage, suggesting as it did a city overtaken by animals, this pragmatic approach to urban living gave way to a more ideal construct, one in which New York either had once been or should be “safe,” and now, as in Governor Cuomo’s “none of us is safe,” was not. It was time, accordingly, to “take it back,” time to “say no”; time, as David Dinkins would put it during his campaign for the mayoralty in the summer of 1989, to “draw the line.” What the line was to be drawn against was “crime,” an abstract, a free-floating specter that could be dispelled by certain acts of personal affirmation, by the kind of moral rearmament which later figured in Mayor Dinkins’s plan to revitalize the city by initiating weekly “Tuesday Night Out Against Crime” rallies.

By going into the park at night, Tom Wicker wrote in the Times , the victim in this case had “affirmed the primacy of freedom over fear.” A week after the assault, Susan Chace suggested on the op-ed page of the Times that readers walk into the park at night and join hands. “A woman can’t run in the park at an offbeat time,” she wrote. “Accept it, you say. I can’t. It shouldn’t be like this in New York City, in 1989, in spring.” Ronnie Eldridge also suggested that readers walk into the park at night, but to light candles. “Who are we that we allow ourselves to be chased out of the most magnificent part of our city?” she asked, and also: “If we give up the park, what are we supposed to do: Fall back to Columbus Avenue and plant grass?” This was interesting, suggesting as it did that the city’s not inconsiderable problems could be solved by the willingness of its citizens to hold or draw some line, to “say no”; in other words that a reliance on certain magical gestures could affect the city’s fate.

The insistent sentimentalization of experience, which is to say the encouragement of such reliance, is not new in New York. A preference for broad strokes, for the distortion and flattening of character, and for the reduction of events to narrative, has been for well over a hundred years the heart of the way the city presents itself: Lady Liberty, huddled masses, ticker-tape parades, heroes, gutters, bright lights, broken hearts, eight million stories in the naked city; eight million stories and all the same story, each devised to obscure not only the city’s actual tensions of race and class but also, more significantly, the civic and commercial arrangements that rendered those tensions irreconcilable.

Central Park itself was such a “story,” an artificial pastoral in the nineteenth-century English romantic tradition, conceived, during a decade when the population of Manhattan would increase by 58 percent, as a civic project that would allow the letting of contracts and the employment of voters on a scale rarely before undertaken in New York. Ten million cartloads of dirt would need to be shifted during the twenty years of its construction. Four to five million trees and plants would need to be planted, half a million cubic yards of topsoil imported, 114 miles of ceramic pipe laid.

Nor need the completion of the park mean the end of the possibilities: in 1870, once William Marcy Tweed had revised the city charter and invented his Department of Public Parks, new roads could be built whenever jobs were needed. Trees could be dug up, and replanted. Crews could be set loose to prune, to clear, to hack at will. Frederick Law Olmsted, when he objected, could be overridden, and finally eased out. “A ‘delegation’ from a great political organization called on me by appointment,” Olmsted wrote in The Spoils of the Park , recalling the conditions under which he had worked:

After introductions and handshakings, a circle was formed, and a gentleman stepped before me, and said, “We know how much pressed you must be…but at your convenience our association would like to have you determine what share of your patronage we can expect, and make suitable arrangements for our using it. We will take the liberty to suggest, sir, that there could be no more convenient way than that you should send us our due quota of tickets, if you please, sir, in this form, leaving us to fill in the name .” Here a pack of printed tickets was produced, from which I took one at random. It was a blank appointment and bore the signature of Mr. Tweed…. As superintendent of the Park, I once received in six days more than seven thousand letters of advice as to appointments, nearly all from men in office…. I have heard a candidate for a magisterial office in the city addressing from my doorsteps a crowd of such advice-bearers, telling them that I was bound to give them employment, and suggesting plainly, that, if I was slow about it, a rope round my neck might serve to lessen my reluctance to take good counsel. I have had a dozen men force their way into my house before I had risen from bed on a Sunday morning, and some break into my drawing-room in their eagerness to deliver letters of advice.

Central Park, then, for its underwriters if not for Olmsted, was about contracts and concrete and kickbacks, about pork, but the sentimentalization that worked to obscure the pork, the “story,” had to do with certain dramatic contrasts, or extremes, that were believed to characterize life in this as in no other city. These “contrasts,” which have since become the very spine of the New York narrative, appeared early on: Philip Hone, the mayor of New York in 1826 and 1827, spoke in 1843 of a city “overwhelmed with population, and where the two extremes of costly luxury in living, expensive establishments and improvident wastes are presented in daily and hourly contrast with squalid mixing and hapless destruction.” Given this narrative, Central Park could be and ultimately would be seen the way Olmsted himself saw it, as an essay in democracy, a social experiment meant to socialize a new immigrant population and to ameliorate the perilous separation of rich and poor. It was the duty and the interest of the city’s privileged class, Olmsted had suggested some years before he designed Central Park, to “get up parks, gardens, music, dancing schools, reunions which will be so attractive as to force into contact the good and the bad, the gentleman and the rowdy.”

The notion that the interests of the “gentleman” and the “rowdy” might be at odds did not intrude: then as now, the preferred narrative worked to veil actual conflict, to cloud the extent to which the condition of being rich was predicated upon the continued neediness of a working class; to confirm the responsible stewardship of “the gentleman” and to forestall the possibility of a self-conscious, or politicized, proletariat. Social and economic phenomena, in this narrative, were personalized. Politics were exclusively electoral. Problems were best addressed by the emergence and election of “leaders,” who could in turn inspire the individual citizen to “participate,” or “make a difference.” “Will you help?” Mayor Dinkins asked New Yorkers, in a September address from St. Patrick’s Cathedral intended as a response to the “New York crime wave” stories then leading the news. “Do you care? Are you ready to become part of the solution?”

“Stay,” Governor Cuomo urged the same New Yorkers. “Believe. Participate. Don’t give up.” Manhattan Borough President Ruth Messinger, at the dedication of a school flagpole, mentioned the importance of “getting involved” and “participating,” or “pitching in to put the shine back on The Big Apple.” In a discussion of the popular “New York” stories written between 1902 and 1910 by William Sidney Porter, or “O. Henry,” William R. Taylor of the State University of New York at Stony Brook spoke of the way in which these stories, with their “focus on individuals’ plights,” their “absence of social or political implications” and “ideological neutrality,” provided “a miraculous form of social glue”:

These sentimental accounts of relations between classes in the city have a specific historical meaning: empathy without political compassion. They reduce the scale of human suffering to what atomized individuals endure as their plucky, sad lives were recounted week after week for almost a decade…. Their sentimental reading of oppression, class differences, human suffering, and affection helped create a new language for interpreting the city’s complex society, a language that began to replace the threadbare moralism that New Yorkers inherited from nineteenth-century readings of the city. This language localized suffering in particular moments and confined it to particular occasions; it smoothed over differences because it could be read almost the same way from either end of the social scale. *

Stories in which terrible crimes are inflicted on innocent victims, offering as they do a similarly sentimental reading of class differences and human suffering, a reading that promises both resolution and retribution, have long performed as the city’s endorphins, a built-in source of natural morphine working to blur the edges of real and to a great extent insoluble problems. What is singular about New York, and remains virtually incomprehensible to people who live in less rigidly organized parts of the country, is the minimal level of comfort and opportunity its citizens have come to accept. The romantic capitalist pursuit of privacy and security and individual freedom, so taken for granted nationally, plays, locally, not much role. A city where virtually every impulse has been to stifle rather than to encourage normal competition, New York works, when it does work, not on a market economy but on little deals, payoffs, accommodations, baksheesh, arrangements that circumvent the direct exchange of goods and services and prevent what would be, in a competitive economy, the normal ascendance of the superior product.

There were in the five boroughs in 1990 only 581 supermarkets (a supermarket, as defined by the trade magazine Progressive Grocer , is a market that does an annual volume of two million dollars), or, assuming a population of eight million, one supermarket for every 13,769 citizens. Groceries, costing more than they should because of this absence of competition and also because of the proliferation of payoffs required to ensure this absence of competition (produce, we have come to understand, belongs to the Gambinos, and fish to the Lucheses and the Genoveses, and a piece of the construction of the market to each of the above, but keeping the door open belongs finally to the inspector here, the inspector there), are carried home or delivered, as if in Jakarta, by pushcart.

It has historically taken, in New York as if in Mexico City, ten years to process and specify and bid and contract and construct a new school; twenty or thirty years to build or, in the cases of Bruckner Boulevard and the West Side Highway, to not quite build a highway. A recent public scandal revealed that a batch of city-ordered Pap smears had gone unread for more than a year (in the developed world the Pap smear, a test for cervical cancer, is commonly read within a few days); what did not become a public scandal, what is still accepted as the way things are, is that even Pap smears ordered by Park Avenue gynecologists can go unread for several weeks.

Such resemblances to cities of the third world are in no way casual, or based on the “color” of a polyglot population: these are all cities arranged primarily not to improve the lives of their citizens but to be labor-intensive, to accommodate, ideally at the subsistence level, since it is at the subsistence level that the work force is most apt to be captive and loyalty assured, a third-world population. In some ways New York’s very attractiveness, its promises of opportunity and improved wages, its commitments as a city in the developed world, were what seemed destined to render it ultimately unworkable. Where the vitality of such cities in the less developed world had depended on their ability to guarantee low-cost labor and an absence of regulation, New York had historically depended instead on the constant welling up of new businesses, of new employers to replace those phased out, like the New York garment manufacturers who found it cheaper to make their clothes in Hong Kong or Kuala Lumpur or Taipei, by rising local costs.

It had been the old pattern of New York, supported by an expanding national economy, to lose one kind of business and gain another. It was the more recent error of New York to misconstrue this history of turnover as an indestructible resource, there to be taxed at will, there to be regulated whenever a dollar could be seen in doing so, there for the taking. By 1977, New York had lost some 600,000 jobs, most of them in manufacturing and in the kinds of small businesses that could no longer maintain their narrow profit margins inside the city. During the “recovery” years, from 1977 until 1988, most of these jobs were indeed replaced, but in a potentially perilous way: of the 500,000 new jobs created, most were in the area most vulnerable to a downturn, that of financial and business services, and many of the rest in an area not only equally vulnerable to bad times but dispiriting to the city even in good, that of tourist and restaurant services.

The demonstration that many kinds of businesses were finding New York expendable had failed to prompt real efforts to make the city more competitive. Taxes grew still more punitive, regulation more byzantine. Forty-nine thousand new jobs were created in New York’s city agencies between 1983 and 1990, even as the services provided by those agencies were widely perceived to decline. Attempts at “reform” typically tended to create more jobs: in 1988, in response to the length of time it was taking to build or repair a school, a new agency, the School Construction Authority, was formed. A New York City school, it was said, would now take only five years to build. The head of the School Construction Authority was to receive $145,000 a year and each of the three vice-presidents $110,000 a year. An executive gym, with Nautilus equipment, was contemplated for the top floor of the agency’s new headquarters at the International Design Center in Long Island City. Two years into this reform, the backlog on repairs to existing schools stood at 33,000 outstanding requests. “To relieve the charity of friends of the support of a half-blind and half-witted man by employing him at the public expense as an inspector of cement may not be practical with reference to the permanent firmness of a wall,” Olmsted noted after his Central Park experience, “while it is perfectly so with reference to the triumph of sound doctrine at an election.”

In fact the highest per capita taxes of any city in the United States (and, as anyone running a small business knows, the widest variety of taxes) provide, in New York, unless the citizen is prepared to cut a side deal here and there, only the continuing multiplication of regulations designed to benefit the contractors and agencies and unions with whom the regulators have cut their own deals. A kitchen appliance accepted throughout the rest of the United States as a basic postwar amenity, the in-sink garbage disposal unit, is for example illegal in New York. Disposals, a city employee advised me, not only encourage rats and “bacteria,” presumably in a way that bags of garbage sitting on the sidewalk do not (“because it is,” I was told when I asked how this could be), but also encourage people “to put their babies down them.”

On the one hand this illustrates how a familiar urban principle, that of patronage (the more garbage there is to be collected, the more garbage collectors can be employed), can be reduced, in the bureaucratic wilderness that is any third world city, to voodoo; on the other it reflects this particular city’s underlying criminal ethic, its acceptance of graft and grift as the bedrock of every transaction. “Garbage costs are outrageous,” an executive of Supermarkets General, which owns Pathmark, recently told City Limits about why the chains preferred to locate in the suburbs. “Every time you need to hire a contractor, it’s a problem.” The problem, however, is one from which not only the contractor but everyone with whom the contractor does business—a chain of direct or indirect patronage extending deep into the fabric of the city—stands to derive one or another benefit, which was one reason the death of the young middle-class white woman in the East 68th Street apartment of the assistant commissioner in charge of boiler and elevator inspections flickered so feebly on the local attention span.

It was only within the transforming narrative of “contrasts” that both the essential criminality of the city and its related absence of civility could become points of pride, evidence of “energy”: if you could make it here you could make it anywhere, hello sucker, get smart. Those who did not get the deal, who bought retail, who did not know what it took to get their electrical work signed off, were dismissed as provincials, bridge-and-tunnels, out-of-towners who did not have what it took not to get taken. “Every tourist’s nightmare became a reality for a Maryland couple over the weekend when the husband was beaten and robbed on Fifth Avenue in front of Trump Tower,” began a story in The New York Post this summer. “Where do you think we’re from, Iowa?” the prosecutor who took Robert Chambers’s statement said on videotape by way of indicating that he doubted Chambers’s version of Jennifer Levin’s death. “They go after poor people like you from out of town, they prey on the tourists,” a clerk explained last spring in the West 46th Street computer store where my husband and I had taken refuge to escape three muggers. My husband said that we lived in New York. “That’s why they didn’t get you,” the clerk said, effortlessly incorporating this change in the data. “That’s how you could move fast.”

The narrative comforts us, in other words, with the assurance that the world is knowable, even flat, and New York its center, its motor, its dangerous but vital “energy.” “FAMILY IN FATAL MUGGING LOVED NEW YORK” was the Times headline on a story following the September murder, in the Seventh Avenue IND station, of a twenty-two-year-old tourist from Utah. The young man, his parents, his brother, and his sister-in-law had attended the US Open and were reportedly on their way to dinner at a Moroccan restaurant downtown. “New York, to them, was the greatest place in the world,” a family friend from Utah was quoted as having said. Since the narrative requires that the rest of the country provide a dramatic contrast to New York, the family’s hometown in Utah was characterized by the Times as a place where “life revolves around the orderly rhythms of Brigham Young University” and “there is only about one murder a year.” The town was in fact Provo, where Gary Gilmore shot the motel manager, both in life and in The Executioner’s Song . “She loved New York, she just loved it,” a friend of the assaulted jogger told the Times after the attack. “I think she liked the fast pace, the competitiveness.”

New York, the Times concluded, “invigorated” the jogger, “matched her energy level.” At a time when the city lay virtually inert, when forty thousand jobs had been wiped out in the financial markets and former traders were selling shirts at Bergdorf Goodman for Men, when the rate of mortgage delinquencies had doubled, when fifty or sixty million square feet of office space remained unrented (sixty million square feet of unrented office space is the equivalent of fifteen darkened World Trade Towers) and even prime commercial blocks on Madison Avenue in the Seventies were boarded up, empty; at a time when the money had dropped out of all the markets and the Europeans who had lent the city their élan and their capital during the Eighties had moved on, vanished to more cheerful venues, this notion of the city’s “energy” was sedative, as was the commandeering of “crime” as the city’s central problem.

The extent to which the October 1987 crash of the New York financial markets damaged the illusions of infinite recovery and growth on which the city had operated during the 1980s had been at first hard to apprehend. “Ours is a time of New York ascendant,” the New York City Commission on the Year 2000, created during the mayoralty of Ed Koch to reflect the best thinking of the city’s various business and institutional establishments, had declared in its 1987 report. “The city’s economy is stronger than it has been in decades, and is driven both by its own resilience and by the national economy; New York is more than ever the international capital of finance, and the gateway to the American economy….”

And then, its citizens had come gradually to understand, it was not. This perception that something was “wrong” in New York had been insidious, a slow onset illness at first noticeable only in periods of temporary remission. Losses that might have seemed someone else’s problem (or even comeuppance) as the markets were in their initial 1987 free fall, and that might have seemed more remote still as the markets regained the appearance of strength, had come imperceptibly but inexorably to alter the tone of daily life. By April 1990, people who lived in and around New York were expressing, in interviews with the Times , considerable anguish and fear that they did so: “I feel very resentful that I’ve lost a lot of flexibility in my life,” one said. “I often wonder, ‘Am I crazy for coming here?’ ” “People feel a sense of impending doom about what may happen to them,” a clinical psychologist said. People were “frustrated,” “feeling absolutely desolate,” “trapped,” “angry,” “terrified,” and “on the verge of panic.”

It was a panic that seemed in many ways specific to New York, and inexplicable outside it. Even now, when the troubles of New York are a common theme, Americans from less depressed venues have difficulty comprehending the nature of those troubles, and tend to attribute them, as New Yorkers themselves have come to do, to “crime.” ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK was the headline on the front page of the New York Post on September 10, 1990. RAMPAGING CRIME WAVE HAS 59 PERCENT OF RESIDENTS TERRIFIED. MOST WOULD GET OUT OF THE CITY, SAYS TIME/CNN POLL. This poll appeared in the edition of Time dated September 17, 1990, which carried the cover legend THE ROTTING OF THE BIG APPLE. “Reason: a surge of drugs and violent crime that government officials seem utterly unable to combat,” the story inside explained. Columnists referred, locally, to “this sewer of a city.” The Times ran a plaintive piece about the snatching of Elizabeth Rohatyn’s Hermes handbag outside Arcadia, a restaurant on East 62nd Street that had for a while seemed the very heart of the New York everyone now missed, the New York where getting and spending could take place without undue reference to having and not having, the duty-free New York; that this had occurred to the wife of Felix Rohatyn, who was widely perceived to have saved the city from its fiscal crisis in the mid-Seventies, seemed to many a clarion irony.

This question of crime was tricky. There were in fact eight American cities with higher homicide rates, and twelve with higher overall crime rates. Crime had long been taken for granted in the less affluent parts of the city, and had become in the mid-Seventies, as both unemployment and the costs of maintaining property rose and what had once been functioning neighborhoods were abandoned and burned and left to whoever claimed them, endemic. “In some poor neighborhoods, crime became almost a way of life,” Jim Sleeper, an editor at Newsday and the author of The Closest of Strangers: Liberalism and the Politics of Race in New York , noted in his discussion of the social disintegration that occurred during this period:

…a subculture of violence with complex bonds of utility and affection within families and the larger, “law-abiding” community. Struggling merchants might “fence” stolen goods, for example, thus providing quick cover and additional incentive for burglaries and robberies; the drug economy became more vigorous, reshaping criminal life-styles and tormenting the loyalties of families and friends. A walk down even a reasonably busy street in a poor, minority neighborhood at high noon could become an unnerving journey into a landscape eerie and grim.

What seemed markedly different a decade later, what made crime a “story,” was that the more privileged, and especially the more privileged white, citizens of New York had begun to feel unnerved at high noon in even their own neighborhoods. Although New York City Police Department statistics suggested that white New Yorkers were not actually in increased mortal danger (the increase in homicides between 1977 and 1989, from 1,557 to 1,903, was entirely in what the NYPD classified as Hispanic, Asian, and black victims; the number of white murder victims had steadily declined, from 361 in 1977 to 227 in 1984 and 190 in 1989), the apprehension of such danger, exacerbated by street snatches and muggings and the quite useful sense that the youth in the hooded sweatshirt with his hands jammed in his pockets might well be a predator, had become general. These more privileged New Yorkers now felt unnerved not only on the street, where the necessity for evasive strategies had become an exhausting constant, but even in the most insulated and protected apartment buildings. As the residents of such buildings, the owners of twelve-and sixteen- and twenty-four-room apartments, watched the potted ficus trees disappear from outside their doors and the graffiti appear on their limestone walls and the smashed safety glass from car windows get swept off their sidewalks, it had become increasingly easy to imagine the outcome of a confrontation between, say, the relief night doorman and six dropouts from Julia Richman High School on East 67th Street.

And yet those New Yorkers who had spoken to the Times in April of 1990 about their loss of flexibility, about their panic, their desolation, their anger, and their sense of impending doom, had not been talking about drugs, or crime, or any of the city’s more publicized and to some extent inflated ills. These were people who did not for the most part have twelve- and sixteen-room apartments and doormen and the luxury of projected fears. These people were talking instead about an immediate fear, about money, about the vertiginous plunge in the value of their houses and apartments and condominiums, about the possibility or probability of foreclosure and loss; about, implicitly, their fear of being left, like so many they saw every day, below the line, out in the cold, on the street.

This was a climate in which many of the questions that had seized the city’s attention in 1987 and 1988, for example that of whether Mortimer Zuckerman should be “allowed” to build two fifty-nine-story office towers on the site of what is now the Coliseum, seemed in retrospect wistful, the baroque concerns of better times. “There’s no way anyone would make a sane judgment to go into the ground now,” a vice-president at Cushman and Wakefield told The New York Observer about the delay in the Coliseum project, which had in fact lost its projected major tenant, Salomon Brothers, shortly after Black Monday, 1987. “It would be suicide. You’re better off sitting in a tub of water and opening your wrists.” Such fears were, for a number of reasons, less easy to incorporate into the narrative than the fear of crime.

The imposition of a sentimental, or false, narrative on the disparate and often random experience that constitutes the life of a city or a country means, necessarily, that much of what happens in that city or country will be rendered merely illustrative, a series of set pieces, or performance opportunities. Mayor Dinkins could, in such a symbolic substitute for civic life, “break the boycott” (the Flatbush boycott organized to mobilize resentment of Korean merchants in black neighborhoods) by purchasing a few dollars worth of produce from a Korean grocer on Church Avenue. Governor Cuomo could “declare war on crime” by calling for five thousand additional police; Mayor Dinkins could “up the ante” by calling for sixty-five hundred. “White slut comes into the park looking for the African man,” a black woman could say, her voice loud but still conversational, in the corridor outside the courtroom where, during the summer of 1990, the first three defendants in the Central Park attack, Antron McCray, Yusef Salaam, and Raymond Santana, were tried on charges of attempted murder, assault, sodomy, and rape. “Boyfriend beats shit out of her, they blame it on our boys,” the woman could continue, and then, referring to a young man with whom the victim had at one time split the cost of an apartment: “How about the roommate, anybody test his semen? No. He’s white. They don’t do it to each other.”

Glances could then flicker among those reporters and producers and courtroom sketch artists and photographers and cameramen and techs and summer interns who assembled daily at 111 Centre Street. Cellular phones could be picked up, a show of indifference. Small talk could be exchanged with the marshals, a show of solidarity. The woman could then raise her voice: “White folk, all of them are devils, even those that haven’t been born yet, they are devils . Little demons . I don’t understand these devils, I guess they think this is their court .” The reporters could gaze beyond her, faces blank, no eye contact, a more correct form of hostility and also more lethal. The woman could hold her ground but avert her eyes, letting her gaze fall on another black, in this instance a black Daily News columnist, Bob Herbert. “You,” she could say. “You are a disgrace . Go ahead. Line up there. Line up with the white folk. Look at them, lining up for their first-class seats while my people are downstairs behind barricades …kept behind barricades like cattle …not even allowed in the room to see their sons lynched…is that an African I see in that line? Or is that a negro . Oh, oh, sorry, shush, white folk didn’t know, he was passing ….”

In a city in which grave and disrupting problems had become general—problems of not having, problems of not making it, problems that demonstrably existed, among the mad and the ill and the under-equipped and the overwhelmed, with decreasing reference to color—the case of the Central Park jogger provided more than just a safe, or structured, setting in which various and sometimes only marginally related rages could be vented. “This trial,” the Daily News announced on its editorial page one morning in July 1990, midway through the trial of the first three defendants, “is about more than the rape and brutalization of a single woman. It is about the rape and the brutalization of a city. The jogger is a symbol of all that’s wrong here. And all that’s right, because she is nothing less than an inspiration.”

The News did not define the ways in which “the rape and brutalization of the city” manifested itself, nor was definition necessary: this was a city in which the threat or the fear of brutalization had become so immediate that citizens were urged to take up their own defense, to form citizen patrols or militia, as in Beirut. This was a city in which between twenty and thirty neighborhoods had already given over their protection, which was to say the right to determine who belonged in the neighborhood and who did not and what should be done about it, to the Guardian Angels. This was a city in which a Brooklyn vigilante group, which called itself “Crack Busters” and was said to be trying to rid its Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of drugs, would before September was out “settle an argument” by dousing with gasoline and setting on fire an abandoned van and the three homeless citizens inside. This was a city in which the Times would soon perceive, in the failing economy, “a bright side for the city at large,” the bright side being that while there was believed to have been an increase in the number of middle-income and upper-income families who wanted to leave the city, “the slumping market is keeping many of those families in New York.”

In this city rapidly vanishing into the chasm between its actual life and its preferred narratives, what people said when they talked about the case of the Central Park jogger came to seem a kind of poetry, a way of expressing, without directly stating, different but equally volatile and similarly occult visions of the same disaster. One vision, shared by those who had seized upon the attack on the jogger as an exact representation of what was wrong with the city, was of a city systematically ruined, violated, raped by its underclass. The opposing vision, shared by those who had seized upon the arrest of the defendants as an exact representation of their own victimization, was of a city in which the powerless had been systematically ruined, violated, raped by the powerful. For so long as this case held the city’s febrile attention, then, it offered a narrative for the city’s distress, a frame in which the actual social and economic forces wrenching the city could be personalized and ultimately obscured.

Or rather it offered two narratives, mutually exclusive. Among a number of blacks, particularly those whose experience with or distrust of the criminal justice system was such that they tended to discount the fact that five of six defendants had to varying degrees admitted taking part in the attack, and to focus instead on the absence of any supporting forensic evidence incontrovertibly linking this victim to these defendants, the case could be read as a confirmation not only of their victimization but of the white conspiracy they saw at the heart of that victimization. For The Amsterdam News , which did not veer automatically to the radical analysis (a typical recent issue lauded the FBI for its minority recruiting and the Harlem National Guard for its high morale and readiness to go to the Gulf), the defendants could in this light be seen as victims of “a political trial,” of a “legal lynching,” of a case “rigged from the very beginning” by the decision of “the white press” that “whoever was arrested and charged in this case of the attempted murder, rape and sodomy of a well-connected, bright, beautiful and promising white woman was guilty, pure and simple.”

For Alton H. Maddox, Jr., the message to be drawn from the case was that the American criminal justice system, which was under any circumstances “inherently and unabashedly racist,” failed “to function equitably at any level when a Black male is accused of raping a white female.” For others the message was more general, and worked to reinforce the fragile but functional mythology of an heroic black past, the narrative in which European domination could be explained as a direct and vengeful response to African superiority. “Today the white man is faced head on with what is happening on the Black Continent, Africa,” Malcolm X wrote.

Look at the artifacts being discovered there, that are proving over and over again, how the black man had great, fine, sensitive civilizations before the white man was out of the caves. Below the Sahara, in the places where most of America’s Negroes’ foreparents were kidnapped, there is being unearthed some of the finest craftsmanship, sculpture and other objects, that has ever been seen by modern man. Some of these things now are on view in such places as New York City’s Museum of Modern Art. Gold work of such fine tolerance and workmanship that it has no rival. Ancient objects produced by black hands…refined by those black hands with results that no human hand today can equal. History has been so “whitened” by the white man that even the black professors have known little more than the most ignorant black man about the talents and rich civilizations and cultures of the black man of millenniums ago….

“Our proud African queen,” the Reverend Al Sharpton had said of Tawana Brawley’s mother, Glenda Brawley: “She stepped out of anonymity, stepped out of obscurity, and walked into history.” It was said in the corridors of the courthouse where Yusef Salaam was tried that he carried himself “like an African king.”

“It makes no difference anymore whether the attack on Tawana happened,” William Kunstler had told New York Newsday when the alleged rape and torture of Tawana Brawley by a varying number of white police officers seemed, as an actual prosecutable crime if not as a window on what people needed to believe, to have dematerialized. “If her story was a concoction to prevent her parents from punishing her for staying out all night, that doesn’t disguise the fact that a lot of young black women are treated the way she said she was treated.” The importance of whether or not the crime had occurred was, in this view, entirely resident in the crime’s “description,” which was defined by Stanley Diamond in The Nation as “a crime that did not occur” but was “described with skill and controlled hysteria by the black actors as the epitome of degradation, a repellent model of what actually happens to too many black women.”

A good deal of what got said around the edges of the jogger case, in the corridors and on the call-in shows, seemed to derive exclusively from the suspicions of conspiracy increasingly entrenched among those who believe themselves powerless. A poll conducted in June 1990 by The New York Times and WCBS-TV News determined that 77 percent of blacks polled believed either that it was “true” or “might possibly be true” (as opposed to “almost certainly not true”) that the government of the United States “singles out and investigates black elected officials in order to discredit them in a way it doesn’t do with white officials.” Sixty percent believed that it was true or might possibly be true that the government “deliberately makes sure that drugs are easily available in poor black neighborhoods in order to harm black people.” Twenty-nine percent believed that it was true or might possibly be true that “the virus which causes AIDS was deliberately created in a laboratory in order to infect black people.” In each case, the alternative response to “true” or “might possibly be true” was “almost certainly not true,” which might have seemed in itself to reflect a less than ringing belief in the absence of conspiracy. “The conspiracy to destroy Black boys is very complex and interwoven,” Jawanza Kunjufu, a Chicago educational consultant, wrote in his Countering the Conspiracy to Destroy Black Boys , a 1982 pamphlet which has since been extended to three volumes.

There are many contributors to the conspiracy, ranging from the very visible who are more obvious, to the less visible and silent partners who are more difficult to recognize. Those people who adhere to the doctrine of white racism, imperialism, and white male supremacy are easier to recognize. Those people who actively promote drugs and gang violence are active conspirators, and easier to identify. What makes the conspiracy more complex are those people who do not plot together to destroy Black boys, but, through their indifference, perpetuate it. This passive group of conspirators consists of parents, educators, and white liberals who deny being racists, but through their silence allow institutional racism to continue.

For those who proceeded from the conviction that there was underway a conspiracy to destroy blacks, particularly black boys, a belief in the innocence of these defendants, a conviction that even their own statements had been rigged against them or wrenched from them, followed logically. It was in the corridors and on the call-in shows that the conspiracy got sketched in, in a series of fantasy details that conflicted not only with known facts but even with each other. It was said that the prosecution was withholding evidence that the victim had gone to the park to meet a drug dealer. It was said, alternately or concurrently, that the prosecution was withholding evidence that the victim had gone to the park to take part in a satanic ritual. It was said that the forensic photographs showing her battered body were not “real” photographs, that “they,” the prosecution, had “brought in some corpse for the pictures.” It was said that the young woman who appeared on the witness stand and identified herself as the victim was not the “real” victim, that “they” had in this case brought in an actress.

What was being expressed in each instance was the sense that secrets must be in play, that “they,” the people who had power in the courtroom, were in possession of information systematically withheld—since information itself was power—from those who did not have power. On the day the first three defendants were sentenced, C. Vernon Mason, who had formally entered the case in the penalty phase as Antron McCray’s attorney, filed a brief which included the bewildering and untrue assertion that the victim’s boyfriend, who had not at that time been called to testify, was black. That some whites jumped to engage this assertion on its own terms (the Daily News columnist Gail Collins referred to it as Mason’s “slimiest argument of the hour—an announcement that the jogger had a black lover”) tended only to reinforce the sense of racial estrangement that was the intended subtext of the assertion, which was without meaning or significance except in that emotional deep where whites are seen as conspiring in secret to sink blacks in misery. “Just answer me, who got addicted?” I recall one black spectator asking another as they left the courtroom. “I’ll tell you who got addicted, the inner city got addicted.” He had with him a pamphlet that laid out a scenario in which the government had conspired to exterminate blacks by flooding their neighborhoods with drugs, a scenario touching all the familiar points, Laos, Cambodia, the Golden Triangle, the CIA, more secrets, more poetry.

“From the beginning I have insisted that this was not a racial case,” Robert Morgenthau, the Manhattan district attorney, said after the verdicts came in on the first jogger trial. He spoke of those who, in his view, wanted “to divide the races and advance their own private agendas,” and of how the city was “ill-served” by those who had so “sought to exploit” this case. “We had hoped that the racial tensions surrounding the jogger trial would begin to dissipate soon after the jury arrived at a verdict,” a Post editorial began a few days later. The editorial spoke of an “ugly claque of ‘activists,’ ” of the “divisive atmosphere” they had created, and of the anticipation with which the city’s citizens had waited for “mainstream black leaders” to step forward with praise for the way in which the verdicts had brought New York “back from the brink of criminal chaos”:

Alas, in the jogger case, the wait was in vain. Instead of praise for a verdict which demonstrated that sometimes criminals are caught and punished, New Yorkers heard charlatans like the Rev. Al Sharpton claim the case was fixed. They heard that C. Vernon Mason, one of the engineers of the Tawana Brawley hoax—the attorney who thinks Mayor Dinkins wears “too many yarmulkes”—was planning to appeal the verdicts….

To those whose preferred view of the city was of an inherently dynamic and productive community ordered by the natural play of its conflicting elements, enriched, as in Mayor Dinkins’s “gorgeous mosaic,” by its very “contrasts,” this case offered a number of useful elements. There was the confirmation of “crime” as the canker corroding the life of the city. There was, in the random and feral evening described by the East Harlem attackers and the clear innocence of and damage done to the Upper East Side and Wall Street victim, an eerily exact and conveniently personalized representation of what the Daily News had called “the rape and the brutalization of a city.” Among the reporters on this case, whose own narrative conventions involved “hero cops” and “brave prosecutors” going hand to hand against “crime” (the SECRET AGONY OF JOGGER D.A., we learned in the Post a few days after the verdicts in the first trial, was that “Brave Prosecutor’s Marriage Failed as She Put Rapists Away”), there seemed an unflagging enthusiasm for the repetition and reinforcement of these elements, and an equally unflagging resistance, even hostility, to exploring the point of view of the defendants’ families and friends and personal or political allies (or, as they were called in news reports, the “supporters”) who gathered daily at the other end of the corridor from the courtroom.

This was curious. Criminal cases are widely regarded by American reporters as windows on the city or culture in which they take place, opportunities to enter not only households but parts of the culture normally closed, and yet this was a case in which indifference to the world of the defendants extended even to the reporting of names and occupations. Yusef Salaam’s mother, who happened to be young and photogenic and to have European features, was pictured so regularly that she and her son became the instantly recognizable “images” of Jogger One, but even then no one got her name quite right. For a while in the papers she was “Cheroney,” or sometimes “Cheron a y,” McEllhonor, then she became Cheroney McEllhonor Salaam. After she testified the spelling of her first name was corrected to “Sharonne,” although, since the byline on a piece she wrote for The Amsterdam News spelled it differently, “Sharrone,” this may have been another misunderstanding. Her occupation was frequently given as “designer” (later, after her son’s conviction, she went to work as a paralegal for William Kunstler), but no one seemed to take this seriously enough to say what she designed or for whom; not until after she testified, when Newsday reported her testimony that on the evening of her son’s arrest she had arrived at the precinct house late because she was an instructor at the Parsons School of Design, did the notion of “designer” seem sufficiently concrete to suggest an actual occupation.

The Jogger One defendants were referred to repeatedly in the news columns of the Post as “thugs.” The defendants and their families were often said by reporters to be “sneering.” (The reporters, in turn, were said at the other end of the corridor to be “smirking.”) “We don’t have nearly so strong a question as to the guilt or innocence of the defendants as we did at Bensonhurst,” a Newsday reporter covering the first jogger trial said to The New York Observer , well before the closing arguments, by way of explaining why Newsday ’s coverage may have seemed less extensive on this trial than on the Bensonhurst trials. “There is not a big question as to what happened in Central Park that night. Some details are missing, but it’s fairly clear who did what to whom.”

In fact this came close to the heart of it: that it seemed, on the basis of the videotaped statements, fairly clear who had done what to whom was precisely the case’s liberating aspect, the circumstance that enabled many of the city’s citizens to say and think what they might otherwise have left unexpressed. Unlike other recent high-visibility cases in New York, unlike Bensonhurst and unlike Howard Beach and unlike Bernhard Goetz, here was a case in which the issue not exactly of race but of an increasingly visible underclass could be confronted by the middle class, both white and black, without guilt. Here was a case which gave this middle class a way to transfer and express what had clearly become a growing and previously inadmissible rage with the city’s disorder, with the entire range of ills and uneasy guilts that came to mind in a city where entire families slept in the discarded boxes in which new Sub-Zero refrigerators were delivered, at twentysix hundred per, to more affluent families. Here was also a case, most significantly, in which even that transferred rage could be transferred still further, veiled, personalized: a case in which the city’s distress could be seen to derive not precisely from its underclass but instead from certain identifiable individuals who claimed to speak for this underclass, individuals who, in Robert Morgenthau’s words, “sought to exploit” this case, to “advance their own private agendas”; individuals who wished even to “divide the races.”

If the city’s problems could be seen as deliberate disruptions of a naturally cohesive and harmonious community, a community in which, undisrupted, “contrasts” generated a perhaps dangerous but vital “energy,” then those problems were tractable, and could be addressed, like “crime,” by the call for “better leadership.” Considerable comfort could be obtained, given this storyline, through the demonization of the Reverend Al Sharpton, whose presence on the edges of certain criminal cases that interested him had a polarizing effect that tended to reinforce the narrative. Jim Sleeper, in The Closest of Strangers , described one of the fifteen marches Sharpton led through Bensonhurst after the 1989 killing of an East New York sixteen-year-old, Yusuf Hawkins, who had come into Bensonhurst and been set upon, with baseball bats and ultimately with bullets, by a group of young whites.

An August 27, 1989, Daily News photo of the Reverend Al Sharpton and a claque of black teenagers marching in Bensonhurst to protest Hawkins’s death shows that they are not really “marching.” They are stumbling along, huddled together, heads bowed under the storm of hatred breaking over them, eyes wide, hanging on to one another and to Sharpton, scared out of their wits. They, too, are innocents—or were until that day, which they will always remember. And because Sharpton is with them, his head bowed, his face showing that he knows what they’re feeling, he is in the hearts of black people all over New York. Yet something is wrong with this picture. Sharpton did not invite or coordinate with Bensonhurst community leaders who wanted to join the march. Without the time for organizing which these leaders should have been given in order to rein in the punks who stood waving watermelons; without an effort by black leaders more reputable than Sharpton to recruit whites citywide and swell the march, Sharpton was assured that the punks would carry the day. At several points he even baited them by blowing kisses….

“I knew that Bensonhurst would clarify whether it had been a racial incident or not,” Sharpton said by way of explaining, on a recent Frontline documentary, his strategy in Bensonhurst. “The fact that I was so controversial to Bensonhurst helped them forget that the cameras were there,” he said. “So I decided to help them…I would throw kisses to them, and they would go nuts.” Question , began a joke often told in the aftermath of the first jogger trial. You’re in a room with Hitler, Saddam Hussein, and Al Sharpton. You have only two bullets. Who do you shoot? Answer: Al Sharpton. Twice .

Sharpton did not exactly fit the roles New York traditionally assigns, for maximum audience comfort, to prominent blacks. He seemed in many ways a phantasm, someone whose instinct for the connections between religion and politics and show business was so innate that he had been all his life the vessel for other people’s hopes and fears. He had given his first sermon at age four. He was touring with Mahalia Jackson at eleven. As a teenager, according to Robert D. McFadden, Ralph Blumenthal, M. A. Farber, E. R. Shipp, Charles Strum, and Craig Wolff, the New York Times reporters and editors who collaborated on Outrage: The Story Behind the Tawana Brawley Hoax , Sharpton was tutored first by Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. (“You got to know when to hit it and you got to know when to quit it and when it’s quittin’ time, don’t push it,” Powell told him), then by the Reverend Jesse Jackson (“Once you turn on the gas, you got to cook or burn ’em up,” Jackson told him), and eventually, after obtaining a grant from Bayard Rustin and campaigning for Shirley Chisholm, by James Brown. “Once, he trailed Brown down a corridor, through a door, and, to his astonishment, onto a stage flooded with spotlights,” the authors of Outrage reported. “He immediately went into a wiggle and dance.”

It was perhaps this talent for seizing the spotlight and the moment, this fatal bent for the wiggle and the dance, that most clearly disqualified Sharpton from casting as the Good Negro, the credit to the race, the exemplary if often imagined figure whose refined manners and good grammar could be stressed and who could be seen to lay, as Jimmy Walker said of Joe Louis, “a rose on the grave of Abraham Lincoln.” It was left, then, to cast Sharpton, and for Sharpton to cast himself, as the Outrageous Nigger, the familiar role—assigned sixty years ago to Father Divine and thirty years later to Adam Clayton Powell—of the essentially manageable fraud whose first concern is his own well-being. It was for example repeatedly mentioned, during the ten days the jury was out on the first jogger trial, that Sharpton had chosen to wait out the verdict not at 111 Centre Street but “in the air-conditioned comfort” of C. Vernon Mason’s office, from which he could be summoned by beeper.

Sharpton, it was frequently said by whites and also by some blacks, “represented nobody,” was “self-appointed” and “self-promoting.” He was an “exploiter” of blacks, someone who “did them more harm than good.” It was pointed out that he had been indicted by the state of New York in June of 1989 on charges of income tax evasion and grand larceny. (He was ultimately acquitted of the larceny charges; the tax evasion charge is pending.) It was pointed out that New York Newsday , working on information that appeared to have been supplied by federal law enforcement agencies, had in January 1988 named him as a federal informant, and that he himself admitted to having let the government tap his phone in a drug-enforcement effort. It was routinely said, most tellingly of all in a narrative based on the magical ability of “leaders” to improve the common weal, that he was “not the right leader,” “not at all the leader the black community needs.” His clothes and his demeanor were ridiculed (my husband was asked by Esquire to do a piece predicated on interviewing Sharpton while he was having his hair processed), his motives derided and his tactics, which were those of an extremely sophisticated player who counted being widely despised among his stronger cards, not very well understood.

Whites tended to believe, and to say, that Sharpton was “using” the racial issue—which, in the sense that all political action is based on “using” one issue or another, he clearly was. Whites also tended to see him as destructive and irresponsible, indifferent to the truth or to the sensibilities of whites—which, most notoriously in the nurturing of the Tawana Brawley case, a primal fantasy in which white men were accused of a crime Sharpton may well have known to be a fabrication, he also clearly was. What seemed not at all understood was that for Sharpton, who had no interest in making the problem appear more tractable (“The question is, do you want to ‘ease’ it or do you want to ‘heal’ it,” he had said when asked if his marches had not worked against “easing tension” in Bensonhurst), the fact that blacks and whites could sometimes be shown to have divergent interests by no means suggested the need for an ameliorative solution. Such divergent interests were instead a lucky break, a readymade organizing tool, a dramatic illustration of who had the power and who did not, who was making it and who was falling below the line; a metaphor for the sense of victimization felt not only by blacks but by all those Sharpton called “the left-out opposition.” We got the power , the chants go on “Sharpton and Fulani in Babylon: volume 1 the battle of New York City,” a tape of the speeches of Sharpton and of Leonora Fulani, a leader of the New Alliance party. We are the chosen people. Out of the pain. We that can’t even talk together. Have learned to walk together .

“I’m no longer sure what I thought about Al Sharpton a year or two ago still applies,” Jerry Nachman, the editor of The New York Post , who had frequently criticized Sharpton, told Howard Kurtz of The Washington Post in September 1990. “I spent a lot of time on the street. There’s a lot of anger, a lot of frustration. Rightly or wrongly, he may be articulating a great deal more of what typical attitudes are than some of us thought.” Wilbert Tatum, the editor and publisher of the Amsterdam News , tried to explain to Kurtz how, in his view, Sharpton had been cast as “a caricature of black leadership”:

He was fat. He wore jogging suits. He wore a medallion and gold chains. And the unforgivable of unforgivables, he had processed hair. The white media, perhaps not consciously, said, “We’re going to promote this guy because we can point up the ridiculousness and paucity of black leadership.” Al understood precisely what they were doing, precisely. Al is probably the most brilliant tactician this country has ever produced….

Whites often mentioned, as a clinching argument, that Sharpton paid his demonstrators to appear; the figure usually mentioned was five dollars (by November 1990, when Sharpton was fielding demonstrators to protest the killing of a black woman alleged to have grabbed a police nightstick in the aftermath of a domestic dispute, a police source quoted in the Post had jumped the payment to twenty dollars), but the figure floated by a prosecutor on the jogger case was four dollars. This seemed on many levels a misunderstanding, or an estrangement, or as blacks would say a disrespect, too deep to address, but on its simplest level it served to suggest what value was placed by whites on what they thought of as black time.

In the fall of 1990, the fourth and fifth of the six defendants in the Central Park attack, Kevin Richardson and Kharey Wise, went on trial. Since this particular narrative had achieved full resolution, or catharsis, with the conviction of the first three defendants, the city’s interest in the case had by then largely waned. Those “charlatans” who had sought to “exploit” the case had been whisked, until they could next prove useful, into the wings. Even the verdicts in this second trial, coinciding as they did with the most recent arrest of John (the Dapper Don) Gotti, a reliable favorite on the New York stage, did not lead the local news. It was in fact the economy itself that had come center stage in the city’s new, and yet familiar, narrative work: a work in which the vital yet beleaguered city would or would not weather yet another “crisis” (the answer was a resounding yes); a work, or a dreamwork, that emphasized not only the cyclical nature of such “crises” but the regenerative power of the city’s “contrasts.” “With its migratory population, its diversity of cultures and institutions, and its vast resources of infrastructure, capital, and intellect, New York has been the quintessential modern city for more than a century, constantly reinventing itself,” Michael Stone concluded in his New York magazine cover story, “Hard Times.” “Though the process may be long and painful, there’s no reason to believe it won’t happen again.”

These were points commonly made in support of a narrative that tended, with its dramatic line of “crisis” and resolution, or recovery, only to further obscure the economic and historical groundwork for the situation in which the city found itself: that long unindictable conspiracy of criminal and semi-criminal civic and commercial arrangements, deals, negotiations, gimmes and getmes, graft and grift, pipe, topsoil, concrete, garbage; the conspiracy of those in the know, those with a connection, those with a friend at the Department of Sanitation or the Buildings Department or the School Construction Authority or Foley Square, the conspiracy of those who believed everybody got upside down because of who it was, it happened to anybody else, a summons gets issued, and that’s the end of it. On November 12, 1990, in its page-one analysis of the city’s troubles, The New York Times went so far as to locate, in “public spending,” not the drain on the city’s vitality and resources it had historically been but “an important positive factor”:

Not in decades has so much money gone for public works in the area—airports, highways, bridges, sewers, subways and other projects. Roughly $12 billion will be spent in the metropolitan region in the current fiscal year. Such government outlays are a healthy counterforce to a 43 percent decline since 1987 in the value of new private construction, a decline related to the sharp drop in real estate prices…. While nearly every industry in the private sector has been reducing payrolls since spring, government hiring has risen, maintaining an annual growth rate of 20,000 people since 1987….

That there might well be, in a city in which the proliferation of and increase in taxes were already driving private-sector payrolls out of town, hardly anyone left to tax for such public works and public-sector jobs was a point not too many people wished seriously to address: among the citizens of a New York come to grief on the sentimental stories told in defense of its own lazy criminality, the city’s inevitability remained the given, the heart, the first and last word on which all the stories rested. We love New York, the narrative promises, because it matches our energy level.

January 17, 1991

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Joan Didion (1934–2021) was the author, most recently, of Blue Nights and The Year of Magical Thinking , among seven other works of nonfiction. Her five novels include A Book of Common Prayer and Democracy . 

William R. Taylor, “The Launching of a Commercial Culture: New York City, 1860–1930,” in John Hull Mollenkopf’s Power, Culture, and Place: Essays on New York City (Russell Sage Foundation, 1988), pp. 107–133. ↩

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Goodbye to All That: Writers on Loving and Leaving New York

By maria popova.

The magnificent Cheryl “Sugar” Strayed — one of the finest hearts, minds, and keyboards of our time, whose Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar is an existential must and was among the best psychology and philosophy books of 2012 — had a rude awakening to NYC. On the warm September afternoon of her twenty-fourth birthday, she saw a man get stabbed in the West Village. He didn’t die, but the shock of it — and the shock of the general bystander-indifference as a waiter assuringly said to her, “I wouldn’t worry about it,” while pouring her another cup of coffee on the sunny sidelines — planted the seed of slow-growing, poisonous worry about the greater It of it. Strayed writes:

I couldn’t keep myself from thinking everything in New York was superior to every other place I’d ever been, which hadn’t been all that many places. I was stunned by New York. Its grand parks and museums. Its cozy cobbled streets and dazzlingly bright thoroughfares. Its alternately efficient and appalling subway system. Its endlessly gorgeous women clad in slim pants and killer shoes and interesting coats. And yet something happened on my way to falling head over heels in love with the place. Maybe it was the man getting stabbed that no one worried about. Or maybe it was bigger than that. The abruptness, the gruffness, the avoid-eye-contact indifference of the crowded subways and streets felt as foreign to me as Japan or Cameroon, as alien to me as Mars. Even the couple who owned the bodega below our apartment greeted my husband and me each day as if we were complete strangers, which is to say they didn’t greet us at all, no matter how many times we came in to buy toilet paper or soup, cat food or pasta. They merely took our money and returned our change with gestures so automatic and faces so expressionless they might as well have been robots. … This tiny thing … grew to feel like the greatest New York City crime of all, to be denied the universal silent acknowledgment of familiarity, the faintest smile, the hint of a nod.

That realization was the beginning of the end. On a cold February afternoon, Strayed and her husband began packing their New York lives into a double-parked pickup truck. They were done after dark, long after they had anticipated — for living in New York is the art of transmuting a shoebox into a bottomless pit of stuff, only to have it unravel into a black hole of time-space that swallows you whole each time you move shoeboxes — and all that remained was that odd morning-after emptiness of feeling, which Strayed captures with her characteristic blunt elegance:

I’d entered the city the way one enters any grand love affair: with no exit plan. I went willing to live there forever, to become one of the women clad in slim pants and killer shoes and interesting coats. I was ready for the city to sweep me into its arms, but instead it held me at a cool distance. And so I left New York the way one leaves a love affair too: because, much as I loved it, I wasn’t truly in love. I had no compelling reason to stay.

Dani Shapiro , author of the freshly released and wonderful Still Writing: The Pleasures and Perils of a Creative Life — had a rather different experience:

The city, was what people from New Jersey called it. The city, as if there were no other. If you were a suburban Jewish girl in the late 1970s, aching to burst out of the tepid swamp of your adolescence (synagogue! field hockey! cigarettes!), the magnetic pull of the city from across the water was irresistible. Between you and the city were the smokestacks of Newark, the stench of oil refineries, the soaring Budweiser eagle, its lit-up wings flapping high above the manufacturing plant. That eagle — if you were a certain kind of girl, you wanted to leap on its neon back and be carried away. On weekend trips into the city, you’d watch from the backseat of your parents’ car for the line in the Lincoln Tunnel that divided New Jersey from New York, because you felt dead on one side, and alive on the other.

She moved to the alive side at nineteen, to live with a boyfriend she soon married, only to find herself divorced at twenty. (“How many people can claim that?,” Shapiro asks clearly rhetorically — and, clearly, she’d be surprised.) Now, thirty years later, she has a Dear Me moment as she looks back:

I wish I could reach back through time and shake some sense into that lost little girl. I wish I could tell her to wait, to hold on. That becoming a grown-up is not something that happens overnight, or on paper. That rings and certificates and apartments and meals have nothing to do with it. That everything we do matters. Wait , I want to say — but she is impatient, racing ahead of me.

And though she became a writer — a Writer in the City — Shapiro found herself strangely, subtly, yet palpably unfitted for the kind of life the city required:

I could lecture on metaphor; I could teach graduate students; I could locate and deconstruct the animal imagery in Madame Bovary . But I could not squash a water bug by myself. The practicalities of life eluded me. The city — which I knew with the intimacy of a lover — made it very possible to continue like this, carried along on a stream of light, motion, energy, noise. The city was a bracing wind that never stopped blowing, and I was a lone leaf slapped up against the side of a building, a hydrant, a tree.

Writing now from her small study in scenic Connecticut, two hours north of the city, she reflects on her choice to leave after — and despite — having attained her teenage dream:

My city broke its promise to me, and I to it. I fell out of love, and then I fell back in — with my small town, its winding country roads, and the ladies at the post office who know my name. I did my best to become the airbrushed girl on its billboards, but even airbrushed girls grow up. We soften over time, or maybe harden. One way or another, life will have its way with us.

Roxane Gay , author of the beautiful Ayiti , recalls her first impressions of New York as a child in Queens — its city-street grit, its Broadway glitter, its daily human tragedies and triumphs unfolding on every corner. Above all, however, the city sang its siren song of unlimited diversity and unconditional acceptance to her — a young black girl with an artistic bend — as she became obsessed with attending college there:

If I went to school in New York, surely all my problems would be solved. I would learn how to be chic and glamorous. I would learn how to walk fast and wear all black without looking like I was attending a funeral. In adolescence, I was becoming a different kind of stranger in a strange land. I was a theater geek and troubled and angry and hell-bent on forgetting the worst parts of myself. In New York, I told myself, I would no longer be the only freak in the room because the city was full of freaks.

But despite being admitted into NYU — her most dreamsome fulfillment of idyllic fantasy — her parents had their doubts about the city’s dangers and distractions, so they sent her to a prestigious school a few hours away. And yet Gay continued to fuel the fantasy of New York’s make-or-break magic wand of success — a fantasy especially entertained by aspiring writers:

New York City is the center of the writing world, or so we’re told. New York is where all the action happens because the city is where the most important publishers and agents and writers are. New York is where the fancy book parties happen and where the literati rub elbows and everyone knows (or pretends to know) everything about everyone else’s writing career. At some point, New York stopped being the city of my dreams because it stopped being merely an idea I longed to be a part of. New York was very real and very complicated. New York had become an intimidating giant of a place, but still I worried. If I wasn’t there as a writer, was I a writer anywhere?

And yet she did became a writer — a great one — even though she left the fairy Gotham godmother for a tiny Midwestern town, where she now teaches, writes, and revels in the unconditional unfanciness and comforting underwhelmingness of it all. After a recent visit to the city to meet with her agent — for though a Real Writer may live anywhere, a Real Writer’s agent invariably lives in New York — she reflects:

New York was a strange land, and I was still a stranger and would always be one. Overall, that visit was fun. The city was good to me and I looked forward to returning and soon. But. There was nothing for me to say goodbye to in New York because I never truly said hello. I became a writer without all the glamorous or anti-glamorous trappings of New York life I thought I needed.

Goodbye to All That: Writers on Loving and Leaving New York is an exquisite read in its entirety and a wonderful addition to these 10 favorite nonfiction reads on NYC . For an antidote, complement it with some cartographic love letters to the city from those who decided to stay and the mixed experiences of those who came and went.

— Published October 9, 2013 — https://www.themarginalian.org/2013/10/09/goodbye-to-all-that-book/ —

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Read 12 Masterful Essays by Joan Didion for Free Online, Spanning Her Career From 1965 to 2013

in Literature , Writing | January 14th, 2014 3 Comments

Image by David Shankbone, via Wikimedia Commons

In a classic essay of Joan Didion’s, “Goodbye to All That,” the novelist and writer breaks into her narrative—not for the first or last time—to prod her reader. She rhetorically asks and answers: “…was anyone ever so young? I am here to tell you that someone was.” The wry little moment is perfectly indicative of Didion’s unsparingly ironic critical voice. Didion is a consummate critic, from Greek kritēs , “a judge.” But she is always foremost a judge of herself. An account of Didion’s eight years in New York City, where she wrote her first novel while working for Vogue , “Goodbye to All That” frequently shifts point of view as Didion examines the truth of each statement, her prose moving seamlessly from deliberation to commentary, annotation, aside, and aphorism, like the below:

I want to explain to you, and in the process perhaps to myself, why I no longer live in New York. It is often said that New York is a city for only the very rich and the very poor. It is less often said that New York is also, at least for those of us who came there from somewhere else, a city only for the very young.

Anyone who has ever loved and left New York—or any life-altering city—will know the pangs of resignation Didion captures. These economic times and every other produce many such stories. But Didion made something entirely new of familiar sentiments. Although her essay has inspired a sub-genre , and a collection of breakup letters to New York with the same title, the unsentimental precision and compactness of Didion’s prose is all her own.

The essay appears in 1967’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem , a representative text of the literary nonfiction of the sixties alongside the work of John McPhee, Terry Southern, Tom Wolfe, and Hunter S. Thompson. In Didion’s case, the emphasis must be decidedly on the literary —her essays are as skillfully and imaginatively written as her fiction and in close conversation with their authorial forebears. “Goodbye to All That” takes its title from an earlier memoir, poet and critic Robert Graves’ 1929 account of leaving his hometown in England to fight in World War I. Didion’s appropriation of the title shows in part an ironic undercutting of the memoir as a serious piece of writing.

And yet she is perhaps best known for her work in the genre. Published almost fifty years after Slouching Towards Bethlehem , her 2005 memoir The Year of Magical Thinking is, in poet Robert Pinsky’s words , a “traveler’s faithful account” of the stunningly sudden and crushing personal calamities that claimed the lives of her husband and daughter separately. “Though the material is literally terrible,” Pinsky writes, “the writing is exhilarating and what unfolds resembles an adventure narrative: a forced expedition into those ‘cliffs of fall’ identified by Hopkins.” He refers to lines by the gifted Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins that Didion quotes in the book: “O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall / Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap / May who ne’er hung there.”

The nearly unimpeachably authoritative ethos of Didion’s voice convinces us that she can fearlessly traverse a wild inner landscape most of us trivialize, “hold cheap,” or cannot fathom. And yet, in a 1978 Paris Review interview , Didion—with that technical sleight of hand that is her casual mastery—called herself “a kind of apprentice plumber of fiction, a Cluny Brown at the writer’s trade.” Here she invokes a kind of archetype of literary modesty (John Locke, for example, called himself an “underlabourer” of knowledge) while also figuring herself as the winsome heroine of a 1946 Ernst Lubitsch comedy about a social climber plumber’s niece played by Jennifer Jones, a character who learns to thumb her nose at power and privilege.

A twist of fate—interviewer Linda Kuehl’s death—meant that Didion wrote her own introduction to the Paris Review interview, a very unusual occurrence that allows her to assume the role of her own interpreter, offering ironic prefatory remarks on her self-understanding. After the introduction, it’s difficult not to read the interview as a self-interrogation. Asked about her characterization of writing as a “hostile act” against readers, Didion says, “Obviously I listen to a reader, but the only reader I hear is me. I am always writing to myself. So very possibly I’m committing an aggressive and hostile act toward myself.”

It’s a curious statement. Didion’s cutting wit and fearless vulnerability take in seemingly all—the expanses of her inner world and political scandals and geopolitical intrigues of the outer, which she has dissected for the better part of half a century. Below, we have assembled a selection of Didion’s best essays online. We begin with one from Vogue :

“On Self Respect” (1961)

Didion’s 1979 essay collection The White Album brought together some of her most trenchant and searching essays about her immersion in the counterculture, and the ideological fault lines of the late sixties and seventies. The title essay begins with a gemlike sentence that became the title of a collection of her first seven volumes of nonfiction : “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” Read two essays from that collection below:

“ The Women’s Movement ” (1972)

“ Holy Water ” (1977)

Didion has maintained a vigorous presence at the New York Review of Books since the late seventies, writing primarily on politics. Below are a few of her best known pieces for them:

“ Insider Baseball ” (1988)

“ Eye on the Prize ” (1992)

“ The Teachings of Speaker Gingrich ” (1995)

“ Fixed Opinions, or the Hinge of History ” (2003)

“ Politics in the New Normal America ” (2004)

“ The Case of Theresa Schiavo ” (2005)

“ The Deferential Spirit ” (2013)

“ California Notes ” (2016)

Didion continues to write with as much style and sensitivity as she did in her first collection, her voice refined by a lifetime of experience in self-examination and piercing critical appraisal. She got her start at Vogue in the late fifties, and in 2011, she published an autobiographical essay there that returns to the theme of “yearning for a glamorous, grown up life” that she explored in “Goodbye to All That.” In “ Sable and Dark Glasses ,” Didion’s gaze is steadier, her focus this time not on the naïve young woman tempered and hardened by New York, but on herself as a child “determined to bypass childhood” and emerge as a poised, self-confident 24-year old sophisticate—the perfect New Yorker she never became.

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Joan Didion, New York, and Me

Jaime Herndon

Jaime Herndon finished her MFA in nonfiction writing at Columbia, after leaving a life of psychosocial oncology and maternal-child health work. She is a writer, editor, and book reviewer who drinks way too much coffee. She is a new-ish mom, so the coffee comes in extra handy. Twitter: @IvyTarHeelJaime

View All posts by Jaime Herndon

“I can remember now, with a clarity that makes the nerves in the back of my neck constrict, when New York began for me, but I cannot lay my finger upon the moment it ended…” I know, I know. Despite how iconic and amazing Didion is, that quote is pretty hackneyed. But the thing is, it’s representative of my relationship with NYC, including NYC-centric literature. I’ve lived in NYC at three different points in my life and each time, it was very different. Different, I expected. What I didn’t expect was to ever fall out of love with it, or at the very least, be ambivalent. Interestingly, my relationship with NYC-centric literature has been the same way.

The first time I lived in NYC, I was 22 and there for grad school. My move-in day was delayed a day or two because of the 2003 blackout — it wasn’t the most auspicious start. My first weekend there, I had dinner at the communal table at Angelica Kitchen, had a late night book browsing session at St. Mark’s, and went to the Guggenheim for the first time. My neighborhood was dotted with Tasti D-Lite (Pinkberry had not yet arrived), Kim’s Video and Music, Ollie’s, and Labyrinth Books. On weekends, I would pick a neighborhood to explore and leave my apartment early, the day wide open for me. The grad program wasn’t a good fit and I left after a year, but I had fallen in love with the city and was already planning my return.

After a summer-long practicum in the city for school in 2008, I knew I would come back one day. In 2011, I moved back — somewhat begrudgingly, though I wasn’t sure why — for grad school, shortly before Hurricane Irene. Again, not a great start. After living down south for four years, the differences were shocking. I had gotten used to walking down the sidewalk, smiling and making eye contact with people, and having conversations with cashiers, clerks, and fellow customers in line — and suddenly all of that was gone. Not just gone, it was purposely avoided. My first day of classes, it rained. When I got to the building, I was one of the last people to get into the elevator, and I made some sort of joke about something, which was met with absolute silence. Clearly I wasn’t in Carolina anymore.

In 2010, Chad Harbach wrote an article titled “MFA vs. NYC,” in the lit mag n+1 (excerpted on Slate ). In it, he examined what he felt were the two American literary scenes: the NYC writing culture and the MFA program writing culture. He wrote about the ways they overlap and do not, the things they value, the status symbols in both, the writer and their behaviors in both, and cultural habits of the communities. I had read his article when in my own writing program, and found it entertaining and mostly true. His 2014 book by the same name, which included essays by writers with and without MFAs, commenting on programs, teaching, and the larger game of writing and publishing, was one I read in nearly one sitting, appreciating all of the questions brought up and ideas put forth.

I had loved Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking , and when I read her essay “Goodbye to All That” in late 2011 several months into my writing program, I thought yes, exactly. Living in Manhattan at nearly 31 was very different than living in Manhattan at 22. I was living one street over from where I’d lived nine years prior, but the neighborhood had changed a bit. It was an odd sort of déjà vu, with a side of gentrification.

I stayed for four years, leaving in order to live near family when I became pregnant with my son. In that time, I did find pockets of solace — I often spent hours and hours at Strand and then working at a table at The Bean, sipping a dirty chai; I walked in new neighborhoods and explored all the falafel places I could. I had my favorite blocks, a favorite candy store, my favorite museums. Thinking about my time working at Bank Street Books still makes me nostalgic. But either the city had changed, or I had. Maybe both.

The two books Goodbye To All That (yes, a nod to Didion’s essay) and Never Can Say Goodbye came out when I was living in the city, and I tore through both of them. The former is a collection of essays about “loving and leaving” New York, and the latter is a book of essays about love for New York. But those descriptions are too pat, too dismissive, of what’s in these essays, which is probably why I love and relate to them. Feelings of isolation, financial struggles, real estate envy, finally making it your home — it all reminds me of what I loved about living there, and what I don’t miss; the inexplicable urge to defend the city while also being fed up with it at the same time. Wanting to leave, but at the same time, having the contradictory thought of maybe trying to find some sort of way to hold on.

Writing well about place can be tricky. Southern literature has a knack for establishing place as a sort of character in itself. I think writing well about cities is especially hard, particularly in fiction. Too overpowering and it just feels fake and overwhelming; too mild and it can feel blah. The worst is when it just doesn’t feel authentic. But when authors do it well, it transports us. Not just into the story, but into places like Maycomb, Alabama (Harper Lee); or late at night after closing time at the Met (E.L. Konigsburg); or Eatonville, Florida (Zora Neale Hurston).

When I lived in the city, I rarely read novels set there. When I left, at first I couldn’t get enough. It was like I wanted to remind myself of what I left, but only in an abstract sort of way. Now, I don’t miss it so much, but I also don’t read as many books set in NYC. I used to love the city, be at home in it; that slowly morphed into unease with it, and eventually, the need to leave. Now, I just feel wistful at times, and look forward to my next visit, whenever that may be.

I know some writers like to scoff at Didion’s popularity among writers, as if that diminishes her prose or intellect. While her essays and various observations about New York may be overly quoted or have become a shorthand of sorts, it doesn’t make them disposable. And just as her writing has meant different things to me at different times, so has New York and its literature — and all of these will stay with me in some way for the rest of my life.

If you’re interested in reading more books about New York City, check out this list of must-read NYC novels , and if you want to read more Joan Didion but aren’t sure where to start, this post about which book to read depending on what adventure you want is a good place to start!

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Goodbye To All That Essay Summary By Joan Didion

Table of Contents

“Goodbye to All That” is a celebrated essay written by Joan Didion , published in her 1968 collection of essays titled “Slouching Towards Bethlehem.” The essay serves as a memoir and reflection on Didion’s experience of living in New York City during the 1950s and 1960s and her eventual departure from the city.

Goodbye To All That Essay Summary By Joan Didion- In the essay, Didion begins by recounting her arrival in New York at the age of twenty, describing her wide-eyed fascination with the city’s allure and the excitement she felt at being part of its vibrant cultural scene.

She delves into her experiences as a young woman navigating the city’s social circles, discussing her relationships and encounters with various influential figures in the literary and artistic world.

Goodbye To All That Essay Summary By Joan Didion- However, as the essay progresses, Didion’s tone becomes increasingly disillusioned. She describes the challenges and hardships of living in New York, including the high cost of living, the intense competition, and the feeling of constantly being on the outskirts of success.

Goodbye To All That Essay Summary By Joan Didion- She reflects on the transitory nature of relationships and the loss of innocence and idealism that often accompanies the pursuit of personal and professional fulfillment in the city.

About Joan Didion

Goodbye To All That Essay Summary By Joan Didion- Joan Didion is a highly influential American writer known for her distinctive style and insightful observations of American culture and society. She was born on December 5, 1934, in Sacramento, California. Didion’s writing career spans several decades, and her works have had a profound impact on literature, journalism, and the field of creative nonfiction.

Goodbye To All That Essay Summary By Joan Didion- Didion attended the University of California, Berkeley, where she studied English and won an essay contest sponsored by Vogue magazine, which launched her career as a writer.

She worked as an editor for Vogue in New York City and later transitioned to writing essays and articles for various publications, including The New York Review of Books and The Saturday Evening Post.

Goodbye To All That Essay Summary By Joan Didion- One of the hallmarks of Didion’s writing is her distinctive style characterized by spare and incisive prose. Her works often explore themes of identity, memory, loss, and the complexities of American society. She has a keen eye for cultural trends and has been hailed for her ability to capture the spirit of different eras, particularly in her essays that provide insightful commentary on the political and social climate of the time.

Some of Joan Didion’s most notable works include “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” (1968), “The White Album” (1979), and “Play It as It Lays” (1970). In addition to her essays and novels, she has also written screenplays, including the adaptation of her own novel “Play It as It Lays” for the film released in 1972.

Goodbye To All That Essay Summary By Joan Didion- Throughout her career, Joan Didion has received numerous awards and accolades for her writing, including the National Book Award for Nonfiction for “The Year of Magical Thinking” (2005), which is a memoir about the year following the death of her husband.

Her works continue to be celebrated for their insightful exploration of the human experience and their lasting impact on the literary landscape.

Joan Didion’s essay “Goodbye to All That” is a poignant and introspective reflection on her time living in New York City during the 1950s and 1960s. Through her personal experiences and observations, Didion captures the initial excitement and allure of the city, followed by a growing disillusionment and the eventual decision to leave.

Goodbye To All That Essay Summary By Joan Didion- The essay explores themes of disillusionment, the transient nature of relationships, the pursuit of personal and professional fulfillment, and the passage of time. Didion’s departure from New York symbolizes not just a physical farewell to the city but also a symbolic shedding of her old self and a quest for a new beginning.

Goodbye To All That Essay Summary By Joan Didion- “Goodbye to All That” has resonated with readers for its relatability and its exploration of universal themes of change, identity, and the complexities of urban life. It remains a significant work in the realm of personal essays and stands as a testament to Didion’s skill as a writer in capturing the essence of a time and place while delving into the depths of her own psyche.

Q: Who is Joan Didion?

A: Joan Didion is an American writer known for her works in various genres, including essays, novels, and screenplays. She was born on December 5, 1934, in Sacramento, California. Didion is renowned for her distinctive writing style characterized by concise and incisive prose, as well as her keen observations of American culture and society.

Q: What is “Slouching Towards Bethlehem”?

A: “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” is a collection of essays written by Joan Didion, published in 1968. The book’s title is taken from the W.B. Yeats poem “The Second Coming,” and it reflects the themes of societal unrest and cultural decline explored in the essays. The collection covers a range of topics, including Didion’s experiences in California, her reflections on the 1960s counterculture, and her observations of American society at the time.

Q: What is the significance of “Goodbye to All That”?

A: “Goodbye to All That” is one of the most notable essays in Joan Didion’s collection “Slouching Towards Bethlehem.” It stands out for its introspective portrayal of Didion’s experience living in New York City and her decision to leave the city behind.

The essay has resonated with many readers due to its exploration of disillusionment, the pursuit of personal fulfillment, and the themes of change and identity. It has become a classic in the genre of personal essays and is often referenced as a powerful reflection on the complexities of urban life.

Q: What are some other notable works by Joan Didion?

A: Joan Didion has written numerous notable works throughout her career. Some of her other well-known books include “The White Album” (1979), a collection of essays reflecting on the 1960s and ’70s, “Play It as It Lays” (1970), a novel that explores themes of existentialism and disillusionment in Hollywood, and “The Year of Magical Thinking” (2005), a memoir recounting the year following the death of her husband. Didion’s works have received critical acclaim and have had a significant impact on literature and the field of nonfiction writing.

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The New York Public Library Acquires Archive of Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne

a woman and man on a sofa talking and smiling

Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne, 1970s

The New York Public Library has acquired the archives of Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne . The dual collection comprises the couple’s literary and personal papers and stands as a rich testament to two of the most successful and important writers in postwar America.

The collection offers a substantial account of their life and work, including personal and professional documents that illustrate their careers and intellectual legacies. Noteworthy pieces in the collection include:

Correspondence spanning six decades, including letters to and from Margaret Atwood, Richard Avedon, Candice Bergen, Helen Gurley Brown, Michael Crichton, Nora Ephron, Allen Ginsberg, Lillian Hellman, Diane Keaton, Justice Anthony Kennedy, Norman Lear, Jacqueline Onassis, Philip Roth, Charles Schulz, Tennessee Williams, and many others;
Several hundred photographs, many of them candid images taken throughout the couple’s life, including photographs from their 1964 marriage and of the family at home and on travels;
Screenplay drafts—26 in total—that the couple worked on together that reveal the iterative nature of their collaborations.

The collection, once processed, will be available to researchers at the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, one of the Library’s world-renowned research centers, a fitting final home for the bicoastal couple’s papers. Although a California native, Didion considered both New York and California as home. The pair met in New York and spent significant periods living in the city. In Didion’s final interview with Time magazine in January 2021, she was asked: "Which feels more like home: New York or California?" Didion responded, "Both."

The collection of approximately 240 linear feet provides exceptional detail into the life and work of Didion and Dunne, beginning with memorabilia from Didion’s infancy and encompassing their careers, their marriage and family, and finally their deaths. It is the most comprehensive collection of the authors' materials and includes personal and professional papers; manuscripts and typescripts for journalism, essays, books and screenplays; photographs; correspondence; art and ephemera; inscribed copies of books from Didion and Dunne’s library; and more.

A typed letter and envelope and photo of a woman in a dress from a magazine

Letter and clipping from Joan Didion to her family during her early years at Vogue, 1957

The acquisition was approved by the Library’s Program & Policy Committee of the Board of Trustees at its January 26, 2023, meeting. The processing, preserving, and cataloging of the archive will begin immediately, after which the collection will be housed in the Manuscript and Archives Division at the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building. It is expected to be available to patrons in early 2025.

“The Library is thrilled to announce that our outstanding research collections will now include the archive of Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne, iconic voices of postwar American journalism, fiction and screenwriting,” said Declan Kiely, Director of Special Collections and Exhibitions at The New York Public Library. “We anticipate that the Didion and Dunne papers, once processed, will become one of our most heavily used collections and an essential resource for scholars, students, and those interested in their intensely collaborative life and work. Both deeply intimate and professionally significant, this collection is incomparable in its scope of materials, providing unprecedented insight into their creative process. We can’t wait to make this available to the public and inspire the next generation of thinkers and writers.”

a woman in a black short-sleeved shirt sits in a curved back rattan chair smiling

Joan Didion, 1960s

Further highlights of the acquisition include:

Early journalistic writings including notes and typescripts from her interview with former Manson Family member Linda Kasabian and a file entitled “Haight Ashbury 1967” filled with autograph notes, typescripts, fragments, and a checklist of the pieces Didion wished to include in Slouching Towards Bethlehem;
Annotated transcripts of the alleged Central Park Five “confessions” (later revealed to be false) for Didion’s ahead-of-its-time New York Review of Books essay on the case;
Dunne’s extensive correspondence with the murderer of Brandon Teena, which led to a New Yorker piece that was adapted into the 1999 film Boys Don’t Cry ;
Notes and drafts related to Didion's later works The Year of Magical Thinking and Blue Nights;
Extensive records of menus, recipes, guest lists, setup notes, and handmade cookbooks documenting the couple's dinner parties;
Didion’s “Babyhood” book with portions filled out by her mother, with clippings and cards inserted celebrating her birth, a lock of her hair, and calendars noting early milestones—for example, 12 January 1935: “laughed aloud”;
Over 140 letters between Didion and her family from her college and Vogue years, 1954–1957.

As agent for the sale of the archive, Marsha Malinowski of Marsha Malinowski Fine Books & Manuscripts LLC writes: “The Estate could not be more pleased with the placement of the Joan Didion/John Gregory Dunne Archive at The New York Public Library. The synergy of the archive with existing archives at NYPL is nothing short of extraordinary. Together, NYPL’s holdings now document the expansive story of American literary culture of the 20th and 21st centuries with even greater gravitas . ”

Paul Bogaards, the spokesperson for the Didion Dunne Literary Trust, the custodians of the writers’ intellectual property, confirmed the Trust’s enthusiasm for the acquisition: “Joan and John were great admirers and supporters of The New York Public Library, so this is an ideal home for their archive. The Didion Dunne collection will be populated with materials that reinforce the importance of their work as great chroniclers of American life. The archives provide detailed documentation of their writing and creative process and an intimate window into their lives. They will be a welcome and essential resource for future generations of readers, students, and scholars of Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne.”

The Library anticipates the Didion and Dunne papers will become one of its most heavily used collections, an essential resource for scholars, students, journalists, and writers studying Didion, Dunne, American literature and journalism, and more. The archive will join a number of collections from their contemporaries in the Library’s Manuscripts and Archives Division including correspondence from authors who were friends and fellow literary figures, such as the Camilla and Earl McGrath papers, the Tom Wolfe papers, the Jean Stein papers, the Ted Solotaroff papers, and the recently acquired Renata Adler papers (currently undergoing processing), as well as the New York Review of Books records. Didion and Dunne had a close and long-standing relationship with Bob Silvers, co-founder and long-time editor of the New York Review of Books ; Didion once said of Silvers, “I trust him more than anyone.”

"The acquisition of the Didion and Dunne papers reflects the Library’s commitment to collecting the papers of paradigm-changing writers—and in particular, women writers,” said Julie Golia, Associate Director, Manuscripts, Archives, and Rare Books and Charles J. Liebman Curator of Manuscripts. “Didion’s literary contributions, her public persona, and her tenacity in the face of grief have shaped the work of countless intellectual successors, both known and unknown. At The New York Public Library, Didion’s papers will continue to inspire new generations of authors."

While both Didion and Dunne were prolific writers in their own right, they also worked together on screenplays including the 1976 film A Star Is Born , starring Barbra Streisand and Kris Kristofferson; the 1972 film adaptation of Didion’s novel Play It As It Lays , starring Anthony Perkins and Tuesday Weld; and the 1996 Robert Redford and Michelle Pfeiffer film Up Close and Personal (based on the biography of journalist Jessica Savitch). Each draft includes handwritten annotations from both Didion and Dunne; together, they offer in-depth documentation of their editorial partnership and their impact on American popular culture.

Dunne died at 71 in 2003. Two years later, their daughter, Quintana Roo Dunne, died at 39. Didion wrote about her husband’s death and her daughter’s illness in The Year of Magical Thinking (2005), which won the 2005 National Book Award for nonfiction and was adapted for the Broadway stage in 2007 in a one-woman production starring Vanessa Redgrave. Didion died in December 2021 at age 87 from complications of Parkinson's disease.

New York Public Library Acquires Joan Didion’s Papers ( The New York Times )
Where to Start With Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne (NYPL)
Joan Didion in conversation with Sloane Crosley , November 21, 2011 (NYPL)

JOAN DIDION

We are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not..

From the essay “On Keeping a Notebook” in Slouching Towards Bethlehem

ABOUT | QUOTES | BOOKS | NEWS | ARCHIVE

Photo: Jerry Bauer

1934–2021

About joan didion.

Joan Didion was a journalist, novelist, memoirist, essayist, and screenwriter who wrote some of the sharpest and most evocative analyses of culture, politics, literature, family, and loss. She won the National Book Award in 2005 for The Year of Magical Thinking .

THE ARCHIVE

The new york public library acquires the papers of joan didion and john gregory dunne.

JOAN DIDION BOOKS

biography & memoir .

Joan Didion Blue Nights book cover with a portrait of Joan Didion and her infant daughter, Quintana Roo Dunne.

ESSAYS

Joan Didion Let Me Tell You What I Mean book cover with a portrait of Joan Didion.

FICTION

Joan Didion Run River book cover with a photo of tree branches reflected in water

WORLD POLITICS

Joan Didion Salvador book cover with a portrait of Joan Didion

THE NATIONWIDE BESTSELLER

Let me tell you what i mean.

With a foreword by Hilton Als, these pieces from 1968 to 2000, never before gathered together, offer an illuminating glimpse into the mind and process of a legendary figure. They showcase Joan Didion’s incisive reporting, her empathetic gaze, and her role as “an articulate witness to the most stubborn and intractable truths of our time” ( The New York Times Book Review ).

THE LATEST

JANUARY 27, 2023

New york public library acquires joan didion’s papers.

The joint archive of Didion and her husband, John Gregory Dunne, includes manuscripts, photographs, letters, dinner party guest lists and other personal items.

NEW YORK TIMES »

MEMORIAL SERVICE

A celebration of the life of joan didion.

On September 21, 2022, the Cathedral Church of Saint John Divine hosted a celebration of Joan Didion’s life and work.

Joan Didion’s Estate Is Heading to Auction

By Jessica Ritz

ARCHITECTURAL DIGEST »

Joan Didion Talks to Hari Kunzru About Loss, Blue Nights, and Giving Up the Yellow Corvette

By Hari Kunzru

LITERARY HUB »

Joan Didion and the Opposite of Magical Thinking

By Zadie Smith

THE NEW YORKER »

Joan Didion’s Magic Trick

By Caitlin Flanagan

THE ATLANTIC »

Our Lady of Deadpan

By Darryl Pinckney

NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS »

Remembering Essayist Joan Didion, a Keen Observer of American Culture

By Terry Gross

NPR | FRESH AIR »

Didion’s Prophetic Eye on America

By Michiko Kakutani

Joan Didion and the Voice of America

By Hilton Als

The Radical Transparency of Joan Didion

By Frank Bruni

THE DOCUMENTARY

The center will not hold.

Joan Didion reflects on her remarkable career and personal struggles in this intimate documentary directed by her nephew, Griffin Dunne.

PBS NEWSHOUR

Remembering joan didion.

“She captured moments in American culture with penetrating clarity and style,” says PBS News Hour’s Jeffrey Brown in this remembrance of the life and work of Joan Didion.

Gathered here are some of the files, photographs, manuscripts, notes, book jackets, and other items connected to Joan Didion’s life and legacy. We’re making this remarkable body of work accessible to everyone and will be adding stories and galleries as new items become available.

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20 great articles and essays by joan didion, on life and death, goodbye to all that, on morality, on self respect, fixed opinions, or the hinge of history, insider baseball, the women's movement, slouching towards bethlehem, the shopping center, the american frontier reinvented, in sable and dark glasses, marrying absurd, the promises martha stewart made—and why we wanted to believe them, 150 great articles and essays.

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Why i write, the santa ana, some dreamers of the golden dream, fire season in los angeles, the white album, the year of magical thinking, political fictions.

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British playwright David Hare directs Joan Didion's 'The Year of Magical Thinking,' which is Didion

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Joan Didion, revered author and essayist, dies at 87

NEW YORK (AP) — Joan Didion, the revered author and essayist whose precise social and personal commentary in such classics as “The White Album” and “The Year of Magical Thinking” made her a uniquely clear-eyed critic of turbulent times, has died. She was 87.

Didion’s publisher Penguin Random House announced the author’s death on Thursday. She died from complications from Parkinson’s disease, the company said.

“Didion was one of the country’s most trenchant writers and astute observers. Her best-selling works of fiction, commentary, and memoir have received numerous honors and are considered modern classics,” Penguin Random House said in a statement.

WATCH: “When we talk about mortality we are talking about our children,” a conversation with Joan Didion

Along with Tom Wolfe, Nora Ephron and Gay Talese, Didion reigned in the pantheon of “New Journalists” who emerged in the 1960s and wedded literary style to nonfiction reporting. Tiny and frail even as a young woman, with large, sad eyes often hidden behind sun glasses and a soft, deliberate style of speaking, she was a novelist, playwright and essayist who once observed that “I am so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive, and so neurotically inarticulate that people tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their best interests.”

Or, as she more famously put it: “Writers are always selling somebody out.”

Didion received a National Humanities Medal in 2012, when she was praised for devoting “her life to noticing things other people strive not to see.” For decades, she had engaged in the cool and ruthless dissection of politics and culture, from hippies to presidential campaigns to the kidnapping of Patty Hearst, and for her distrust of official stories.

“Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” “The White Album” and other books became essential collections of literary journalism, with notable writings including her takedown of Hollywood politics in “Good Citizens” and a prophetic dissent against the consensus that in 1989 five young Black and Latino men had raped a white jogger in Central Park (the men’s convictions were later overturned and they were freed from prison).

Didion was equally unsparing about her own struggles. She was diagnosed in her 30s with multiple sclerosis and around the same time suffered a breakdown and checked into a psychiatric clinic in Santa Monica, California that diagnosed her worldview as “fundamentally pessimistic, fatalistic and depressive.” In her 70s, she reported on personal tragedy in the heartbreaking 2005 work, “The Year of Magical Thinking,” a narrative formed out of the chaos of grief that followed the death of her husband and writing partner, John Gregory Dunne. It won a National Book Award, and she adapted it as a one-woman Broadway play that starred Vanessa Redgrave.

Dunne had collapsed in 2003 at their table and died of a heart attack even as their daughter, Quintana Roo Dunne Michael, was gravely ill in a hospital. The memoir was a best-seller and a near-instant standard, the kind of work people would instinctively reach for after losing a loved one. Didion said she thought of the work as a testament of a specific time; tragically, “Magical Thinking” became dated shortly after it was published. Quintana died during the summer of 2005 at age 39 of acute pancreatitis. Didion wrote of her daughter’s death in the 2011 publication “Blue Nights.”

“We have kind of evolved into a society where grieving is totally hidden. It doesn’t take place in our family. It takes place not at all,” she told The Associated Press in 2005. Didion spent her later years in New York, but she was most strongly identified with her native state of California, “a hologram that dematerializes as I drive through it.” It was the setting for her best known novel, the despairing “Play It As It Lays,” and for many of her essays.

“California belongs to Joan Didion,” wrote The New York Times critic Michiko Kakutani. “Not the California where everyone wears aviator sunglasses, owns a Jacuzzi and buys his clothes on Rodeo Drive. But California in the sense of the West. The old West where Manifest Destiny was an almost palpable notion that was somehow tied to the land and the climate and one’s own family.”

Didion’s subjects also included earthquakes, movie stars and Cuban exiles, but common themes emerged: the need to impose order where order doesn’t exist, the gap between accepted wisdom and real life, the way people deceive themselves — and others — into believing the world can be explained in a straight, narrative line. Much of her nonfiction was collected in the 2006 book “We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live,” named after the opening sentence of her famous title essay from “The White Album,” a testament to one woman’s search for the truth behind the truth.

“We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five,” she wrote. “We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the ‘ideas’ with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.”

She was a lifelong explorer, writing about a trip to war torn El Salvador in the nonfiction “Salvador,” and completing “A Book of Common Prayer” after a disastrous trip to a film festival in Colombia in the early 1970s. “South and West: From a Notebook,” observations made while driving around the American South, came out in 2017, the same year nephew Griffin Dunne’s documentary “Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold” was released. In 2019, the Library of America began compiling her work in bound volumes.

Photo of Joan Didion by Julian Wasser. Courtesy of National Portrait Gallery.

Didion prided herself on being an outsider, more comfortable with gas station attendants than with celebrities. But she and her husband, whose brother was the author-journalist Dominick Dunne, were well placed in high society. In California, they socialized with Warren Beatty and Steven Spielberg among others and a young Harrison Ford worked as a carpenter on their house. They later lived in a spacious apartment on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, knew all the right people and had a successful side career as screenwriters, collaborating on “The Panic in Needle Park,” a remake of “A Star Is Born” and adaptations of “Play It As It Lays” and his “True Confessions.”

Born in 1934 in Sacramento, California and descended from pioneers who had traveled with the notorious Donner Party, Didion was fascinated by books from an early age. She was encouraged to write by her mother, as a way of filling time, and was especially impressed by the prose of Ernest Hemingway, whose terse rhythms anticipated her own. She was both shy and ambitious, inclined to solitude, but also determined to express herself through writing and public speaking. She graduated from the University of California at Berkeley in 1956 and moved to New York for a job at Vogue after winning a writing contest sponsored by the magazine.

Conservative in her early years, voting for Republican Barry Goldwater in 1964 and contributing essays to William F. Buckley’s National Review, Didion became more liberal later on, attacking the role of religion in politics and the establishment’s “increasingly histrionic insistence” that President Clinton be removed from office for his affair with Monica Lewinsky. She was especially scathing about the quality of political reporting, mocking the “inside baseball” journalism of presidential campaigns and dismissing Bob Woodward’s best-selling books as vapid and voyeuristic, “political pornography.”

Didion married Dunne, whom she had met at a dinner party, in 1964. Two years later, they adopted a baby girl, Quintana Roo. Author couples are notoriously combustible, whether the drunken brawl of Lillian Hellman and Dashiell Hammett or the infidelity and suicidal demons of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath. But despite their own conflicts, Didion says she and Dunne grew and endured.

“Whatever troubles we had were not derived from being writers,” she told the AP. “What was good for one was good for the other.”

Associated Press National Writer Hillel Italie contributed to this report.

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What We Get Wrong About Joan Didion

By Nathan Heller

In the spring of 1967, Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne, freelance writers married to each other and living in Los Angeles, were engaged to write a regular column for the Saturday Evening Post . This was a good gig. The space they had to fill was neither long nor short—about twelve hundred words, a gallop larger than the Comment that opens this magazine. The Post paid them well, and Didion and Dunne each had to file one piece a month. The column, called “Points West,” entailed their visiting a place of West Coast interest, interviewing a few people or no people, and composing a dispatch. Didion wrote one column about touring Alcatraz, another on the general secretary of a small Marxist-Leninist group. The Post was struggling to stay afloat (it went under two years later), and that chaos let the new columnists shimmy unorthodox ideas past their desperate editors. Didion’s first effort was a dispatch from her parents’ house. A few weeks later, her “Points West” was about wandering Newport, Rhode Island. (“Newport is curiously Western,” she announced in the piece, sounding awfully like a writer trying to get away with something.) The column work left time for other projects, and Didion spent the spring through September of 1967 on a ten-thousand-word assignment about the hippie movement, the rest on a novel she’d been struggling with. At some point, an editor suggested that she had the makings of a collection, so she stacked her columns with past articles she liked (a report from Hawaii, the best of some self-help columns she’d churned out while a junior editor at Vogue ), set them in a canny order with a three-paragraph introduction, and sent them off. This was “ Slouching Towards Bethlehem ,” her first nonfiction book. It has claims to being the most influential essay collection of the past sixty years.

Didion, now eighty-six, has been an object of fascination ever since, boosted by the black-lace renaissance she experienced after publishing “ The Year of Magical Thinking ” (2005), her raw and ruminative account of the months following Dunne’s sudden death. Generally, writers who hold readers’ imaginations across decades do so because there’s something unsolved in their project, something that doesn’t square and thus seems subject to the realm of magic. In Didion’s case, a disconnect appears between the jobber-like shape of her writing life—a shape she often emphasizes in descriptions of her working habits—and the forms that emerged as the work accrued. For all her success, Didion was seventy before she finished a nonfiction book that was not drawn from newsstand-magazine assignments. She and Dunne started doing that work with an eye to covering the bills, and then a little more. (Their Post rates allowed them to rent a tumbledown Hollywood mansion, buy a banana-colored Corvette Stingray, raise a child, and dine well.) And yet the mosaic-like nonfiction books that Didion produced are the opposite of jobber books, or market-pitched books, or even useful, fibrous, admirably executed books. These are strange books, unusually shaped. They changed the way that journalistic storytelling and analysis were done.

Because a sentence of Didion is unmistakable, people often presume that her advances were in prose style. The opening of the “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” collection announced her voice:

The San Bernardino Valley lies only an hour east of Los Angeles by the San Bernardino Freeway but is in certain ways an alien place: not the coastal California of the subtropical twilights and the soft westerlies off the Pacific but a harsher California, haunted by the Mojave just beyond the mountains, devastated by the hot dry Santa Ana wind that comes down through the passes at 100 miles an hour and whines through the eucalyptus windbreaks and works on the nerves.

There’s the entwining of sensuous and ominous images. And there’s the fine, tight verbal detail work: the vowel suspensions (“ways an alien place”), the ricocheting consonants (“harsher . . . haunted . . . Mojave”), the softly anagrammatic games of sound (“subtropical twilights and the soft westerlies”). Didion worked hard at her sentences, and no magazine journalist has done better than her best. But style is just the baseline of good writing. Didion’s innovation was something else.

Most writers of nonfiction operate in the sphere of high craft: like a silversmith producing teapots, they work to create elevated and distinctive versions of known objects. A master will produce a range of creative variations, yet the teapots always remain teapots, and the marks of individuation rise from a shared language of form and technique. Didion’s nonfiction was produced in that craftwork tradition, but it operates more in the sphere of art: it declares its own terms and vernacular, and, if successful, conveys meaning in a way that transcends its parts.

The title essay of her second collection, “ The White Album ” (1979), offers the clearest glimpse of how that reimagination happens. The heart of the essay is a cluster of “Points West” columns: brief reports on protests at San Francisco State, a Huey Newton press conference, a studio visit with the Doors—her normal craftwork as a working writer. When composing the “White Album” essay, Didion lined those pieces up like flagstones in a path. Together, she knew, they had to tell a bigger story, because they came from the same place (coastal California) in the same time (1968) and from the same vantage (hers). But what was the story?

To figure it out, Didion started adding stones from elsewhere in the quarry: circumstances surrounding the production of the newsstand columns, details from her home life. She included an extract from a psychological evaluation she’d had that summer. (“The Rorschach record is interpreted as describing a personality in process of deterioration with abundant signs of failing defenses.”) She wrote about remembering a line by Ezra Pound on the drive to report at San Francisco State. She threaded these bits with what she called flash cuts, scene changes separated by space breaks; in other words, she started with the craft part—the polished sentences, the tidy magazine page—and built outward, collaging what was already published with what wasn’t, reframing and rejuxtaposing what had been previously pinned in pristine prose. This process of redigesting published craftwork into art is how Didion shaped her nonfiction books for fifty years. It made her farseeing, and a thorny voice about the way public stories were told.

The prickliness of Didion’s project was on my mind as I read her new collection, “ Let Me Tell You What I Mean ” (Knopf). “New” here refers mostly to the state of the binding, because the newest thing that Didion contributed is twenty years old. The foreword, very fruitful, is by Hilton Als . The volume’s keystone is a few “Points West” columns from 1968 which she in some cases had collaged into previous books but which have not been reprinted in their original, stand-alone form until now. In that sense, “Let Me Tell You What I Mean” is less a selected essays than a rejected essays, a director’s un-cut of her older work. Traditionally, this is the sort of collection squeezed out by itchy heirs after an author’s death.

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It’s happy news, then, that the book still offers some familiar pleasures. The earliest columns, from the late sixties, remain crisp and engaging on the page (not a given for late-sixties writing). Other essays, such as a piece on the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, from 1989, are, if not exactly urgent, nice to have around. Didion stopped publishing new material in 2011, a silence that’s well earned but bittersweet in light of recent events, and “Let Me Tell You What I Mean” is meant to summon the old feelings. Yet the book ends up a study in the limits of Didion’s prose, because its parts, for all their elegance, don’t make a whole. Devoted readers will find the book unrecognizable as a Didion collection in any real sense.

To understand why, it is useful to go back to the summer of 1967, when Didion was writing her report on the hippies—the title essay of “Slouching Towards Bethlehem.” The late-sixties youth movements purported to be about community and coming together, but Didion saw them as a symptom of a shared society unravelling and public communication breaking down. (The title comes from a Yeats poem that begins, “Turning and turning in the widening gyre / The falcon cannot hear the falconer.”) “It was the first time I had dealt directly and flatly with the evidence of atomization,” she later explained. Struggling to describe this dissolution, she decided to express the problem structurally. The hippie essay, written as a series of pruned scenes from the Haight-Ashbury separated by breaks, marked her first true use of flash cuts.

The piece “failed to suggest that I was talking about something more general than a handful of children wearing mandalas on their foreheads,” Didion later wrote. But the concept of atomization, and the collage technique, stuck. When Didion was gathering essays for her first collection, she did something notable with a piece she called “Los Angeles Notebook.” She took one of her “Points West” columns, about the Santa Ana wind, and put a flash cut after it. She lopped off the opening to a critics piece she’d written on books by Helen Gurley Brown and dropped that in, followed by another cut. In this way, she built a new essay from the wholes and bits of old material, tracing out flares of life around Los Angeles in the mid-sixties. They were part of one story, but, crucially, they did not connect.

Didion had spent four years failing to write a novel called “ Play It as It Lays .” What she disliked in the work in progress, about an actress in Los Angeles, was that it smelled of “novel”; everything seemed formed and directed in a way that was untrue to life. In 1969, after reworking the “Los Angeles Notebook” essay, Didion saw how to make the novel work. “Play It as It Lays” (1970) is commonly said to be about anomie, but more specifically it’s about a world in insular pieces, of characters trapped in their Hollywood realms. (Didion envisioned a novel of tight scenes, consumed in a single sitting—a book written as a movie, in other words, and thus caged within the storytelling rhythms of the industry.) The novel’s short chapters, some of them less than a page, change vantage and jump characters among disparate spheres using freeways and white space. “I played and replayed these scenes and others like them, composed them as if for the camera, trying to find some order, a pattern. I found none,” one of her characters says. “Play It as It Lays” was Didion’s first fiction of atomization.

Didion went on to use the collage technique to assemble the long pieces in “The White Album” and the books that followed, reconsidering her own published craftwork and later bringing that scrutiny to texts produced by other people. Where she saw evidence of atomization in American society, she made efforts to push back.

“The only American newspapers that do not leave me in the grip of a profound physical conviction that the oxygen has been cut off from my brain tissue, very probably by an Associated Press wire, are the Wall Street Journal , the Los Angeles Free Press , the Los Angeles Open City , and the East Village Other ,” Didion wrote in a “Points West” column from 1968 which opens the new collection. She likes the alternative press not because it’s good or useful (“I have never read anything I needed to know in an underground paper”) but because it breaks past a communication barrier. These papers assume that the reader “will understand if they talk to him straight; this assumption of a shared language and a common ethic lends their reports a considerable cogency of style.”

Shared language and a common ethic are precisely what Didion had noticed coming apart in the supposedly liberated togetherness of the late sixties. And the problem, in her view, did not fade when the love beads went away. In “ Insider Baseball ,” her influential piece for The New York Review of Books , born of tagging along with the Presidential campaigns of 1988, she argued that the so-called “democratic process” had become unlinked from the people it was supposed to speak to and for:

Access to it is correctly limited to its own professionals, to those who manage policy and those who report on it, to those who run the polls and those who quote them, to those who ask and those who answer the questions on the Sunday shows, to the media consultants, to the columnists, to the issues advisers, to those who give off-the-record breakfasts and to those who attend them; to that handful of insiders who invent, year in and year out, the narrative of public life.

Politics had come to be programming produced for élites, by élites, in a bubble disconnected from others. If this warning seemed eccentric on the eve of electing an institutional Vice-President and, four years later, the Man from Hope, it does not seem so today. The problem Didion first identified in 1967 has been treated as a revelation in recent years.

Her position as a disaffected insider—hanging out with the Doors but crying foul on the Summer of Love, writing for the newsstand but declaiming its idiocy—made her an aggressive contrarian. In fact, her recent canonization notwithstanding, Didion spent most of her career as a magnet for daggers in the letters columns. “Between Joan Didion and me it is still a missed connection,” a reader complained in 1969, responding to a Life column she wrote for a while (abortively, owing to its unpopularity with editors). In The New York Review of Books a decade later: “Evidently where Joan Didion lives problems of love and psyche evaporate in a haze of margaritas by age twenty-one and folks can get down to the real business of living.”

That was in response to a searing broadside against the films of Woody Allen which Didion published in 1979. Allen had recently released “Annie Hall” and “Manhattan,” reaching his peak of appeal among people likely to read essays by Joan Didion in The New York Review of Books . She objected to the films’ urbane-sounding references (“the false and desperate knowingness of the smartest kid in the class”), and she was annoyed by characters’ superficial-seeming efforts to be deep (“They share sodas, and wonder ‘what love is’ ”). In Didion’s view, Allen’s movies were a simpleminded person’s idea of a smart person’s picture. She was needling her readers, naturally, but the objection also shows a lot about her narrative intelligence and about the way she should be read.

If atomization is one of the key concepts in Didion’s work, another is what she came to call “sentimentality”: belief in a story with a preordained shape and an emotional logic. That kind of storytelling was everywhere in America, she thought. And it was insidious, because it allowed destructive ideas to sneak in underneath the petticoats of right-thinking endeavors. One of the columns in the new collection picks apart a meeting of Gamblers Anonymous. What irked Didion was that although the meeting seemed to be about taking responsibility, it actually refracted blame. “I thought that it was simply the predilection of many of the members to dwell upon how ‘powerless’ they were, how buffeted by forces beyond their control,” she wrote. “There was a great deal of talk about miracles, and Higher Presences, and a Power Greater Than Ourselves”—prefab sentimental stories that let gamblers avoid seeing things squarely. Done well, contrarianism is based on the idea that what matters isn’t which team colors you wear but which goal the ball lands in when you kick it. Didion did it well and, as with the hippies , traced how a moment of supposed healing spun toward delusion and drove people farther apart.

Atomization and sentimentality exacerbate each other, after all: you break the bridges of connection across society, and then give each island a fairy tale about its uniqueness. Didion was interested in how that happens. One of her most frequently read essays is a late-sixties account of loving and leaving New York, “Goodbye to All That.” It tends to be remembered as a half-trite paean to a white-collar New York youth, a kind of classed-up precursor to the “ Emily in Paris ” Weltanschauung. Yet the essay’s actual point is astringent. New Yorkers’ mythology about their city’s sophistication and specialness, Didion suggested, was another sentimental narrative. She had found her place in town by embracing that view, but outgrew it in time—“at some point the golden rhythm was broken, and I am not that young any more,” she wrote. And so she moved to Los Angeles, where the grownups live.

This claim for California as a stronghold of urbanity and groundedness was contrary, even petulant. Didion had grown up in Sacramento and began her reporting from California at a moment when the national narrative of the West Coast—what went on there, what it meant—was shaped by editors and emissaries from New York. (That hasn’t changed.) But, where the Eastern press had decided that California stood for futurism, beaches, lush life, and togetherness, Didion insisted on a California of dusty houses, dry inland landscapes, fires and snakes, and social alienation. Like her contemporary the Bay Area poet Robert Hass, she was obsessed with the motions of mind but shy of abstractions; both realized that what is often called “the world of ideas” is vulnerable to tendentious manipulation. And so they pinned their ideas to details of landscape: this realization fixed to this tree, or the sight of the Bevatron at night, that one to a jasmine-covered porch—the Northern California style of intellection. What this meant was that thinking was an experiential process that emerged in movement from place to place—in the flash cuts—and you didn’t need a sentimental narrative in order to give it sense, as you did in New York.

Didion left the city in 1964, but this remained her perception when she returned twenty-four years later:

The insistent sentimentalization of experience . . . is not new in New York. A preference for broad strokes, for the distortion and flattening of character, and for the reduction of events to narrative, has been for well over a hundred years the heart of the way the city presents itself: Lady Liberty, huddled masses, ticker-tape parades, heroes, gutters, bright lights, broken hearts, eight million stories in the naked city; eight million stories and all the same story, each devised to obscure not only the city’s actual tensions of race and class but also, more significantly, the civic and commercial arrangements that rendered those tensions irreconcilable.

Man walks past movie theater called “Neurotoplex” that plays movies about neuroses.

This description of “distortion and flattening,” of reducing life to recognizable story lines, is from “ New York: Sentimental Journeys ,” a study of the Central Park jogger case that Didion wrote, in 1991, for The New York Review of Books . The case—in which a twenty-eight-year-old female banker was brutalized and raped and five youths of color were convicted, and then, decades later, exonerated—became a Rorschach blot, with some people (largely white) seeing a city “systematically ruined, violated, raped by its underclass” and others (largely of color) seeing a city “in which the powerless had been systematically ruined, violated, raped by the powerful.”

Didion saw something else: a city victimized by decades of fatuous thinking and poor planning. New York, she thought, had clung to sentimental narratives about melting pots and special opportunities—“the assurance that the world is knowable, even flat, and New York its center, its motor, its dangerous but vital ‘energy’ ”—to the extent of being blind to the fraying of its civic and economic fibre. In crisis, New Yorkers simply doubled down, appointing heroes or villains in the jogger case, trying to keep the fairy tale aloft. “Sentimental Journeys” was a controversial piece when it appeared, yet it offered a frame for New York’s dramas over the next three decades. Even more important, it insisted on a link between the fate of a society and the way that its stories were told.

What it meant to be a writer—imaginatively and morally—had interested Didion since she spent her teen-age years retyping Hemingway sentences, trying to understand the way they worked. Fifty years later, she wrote about his afterlives in “ Last Words ,” an essay for this magazine condemning the publication of books that Hemingway had deemed incomplete. To edit a dead author’s near-finished work for publication, Didion thought, was to assume that he or she was playing by the usual rules. But it was precisely not working in this consensus realm that made great artists great.

A common criticism of Didion suggests that the peppering of her prose with proper nouns (the Bendel’s black wool challis dress, the Grès perfume) is somehow unserious. (For whatever reason, these complaints usually come from men.) But the correct way to understand this impulse is in the lineage of front writing. As Adam Gopnik has noted in these pages, it is Hemingway who’s forever telling you which wines to enjoy while fighting in Spain, how to take your brasserie coffee—how to make his particular yours. Didion feminized that way of writing, pushing against the postwar idea that women writers were obliged to be either mini Virginia Woolfs, mincing abstractions from the parlor, or Shulamith Firestones, raging for liberation. Part of what Didion took from Hemingway, by her account, was a mind-set of “romantic individualism,” “looking but not joining,” and a commitment to the details that gave distinctiveness and precision to that outside view. A trip to the Royal Hawaiian in the midst of a rocky marriage, the right soap to pack for a reporting trip while your husband stays with the baby: in Didion’s work, these were as important in their hard details as Hemingway’s crabe mexicaine and Sancerre at Prunier. Hemingway mythologized his authorial life style so well that generations of writers longed to live and work his way. Didion saw what he was doing, and appropriated the technique.

Yet what made the modernists daring was sometimes a weak point of their endeavor: the writing doesn’t always let readers know how it wants to be read. Hemingway’s theory was that if you, the writer, could reduce what you saw in your imagination to the igniting gestures and images—don’t elaborate why you feel sad about your marriage ending; just nail the image of the burning farmhouse that launched you on that train of thought—then you could get readers’ minds to make the same turns at the same intersections, and convey the world more immersively than through exposition. He explained his theory rarely and badly (hence the endless rancid chestnuts about lean prose, laconic dialogue, and crossing important things out), but Didion didn’t miss the point. “When I talk about pictures in my mind I am talking, quite specifically, about images that shimmer around the edges. . . . The picture tells you how to arrange the words and the arrangement of the words tells you, or tells me, what’s going on in the picture,” she noted, in “Why I Write.” And yet she added in signposts Hemingway left out. A first-rate Didion piece explains its terms as it goes, as if the manual were part of the main text. She is perpetually on guard about saying stuff either not clearly enough (the title “Let Me Tell You What I Mean” emerges from her work) or so clearly as to be subject to “distortion and flattening,” and thus untrue to what she means.

“I wanted not a window on the world but the world itself. I wanted everything in the picture” is how she puts it in “Telling Stories,” an essay from 1978 included in the new collection. She is explaining why she lost, or maybe never had, a desire to write salable short stories—tightly constructed pieces hung on a “little epiphany.” For her, the key to capturing life on the page without the usual sort of reduction, she says in the same essay, was figuring out how to use the first person across time.

Didion’s “I” ended up nearly as known as Hemingway’s “and,” and carries the same mixed blessing of being caricatured more than characterized. The caricature has Didion as a histrionic oversharer—a kind of literary Tori Spelling. Yet her reasons for embracing the “I” were mostly technical. You had to let readers know who you were and where your camera stood, she thought. It meant that Didion was always in her own crosshairs, and eventually turned the contrarian impulse on herself.

One of the commonest motifs in Didion’s writing is, bizarrely, Oregon Trail-type survivalism. She had been taught that those who colonized California were “the adventurous, the restless, and the daring.” She had been raised to believe that, as her mother put it, California was now “too regulated, too taxed, too expensive.” In “ Where I Was From ” (2003), she finally put this origin story of heroic, contrary individualism under the glass.

Didion built the book in her usual way, setting down reported articles and weaving in flashes of personal context. What created California economically and politically, she showed, was actually constant support from the East-reaching web of American society, industry, and, especially, the federal government. “The sheer geographical isolation of different parts of the state tended to obscure the elementary fact of its interrelatedness,” she wrote. The refusal to acknowledge this public interrelatedness, to insist on the determining value of the personal, the private, and the exceptional, had been California’s fragmenting delusion, and her own. I suspect that “Where I Was From” is among the least read of Didion’s nonfiction books, which is unfortunate, because it’s her “Gatsby”: the book in which she scrutinized her most basic ideas of heroic particularism and found that she had not escaped “the blinkering effect of the local dreamtime.” That’s a moving thing for a writer to acknowledge, and a hard one. The final sentences of the book are Didion’s suggestion that she’s not quite ready, in her life, to give the sentimental story up.

The intense burst of mythologizing that attended Didion’s books about the deaths of her husband (“The Year of Magical Thinking”) and her daughter (“ Blue Nights ,” from 2011) arrived, then, with a certain weirdness. One can now order something called a “Didion dress,” modelled on her late-sixties wardrobe. Not long ago, in a bookshop, I came across a Picador Modern Classics edition of “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” shrunk down to pocket size, presumably to be carried in the way that certain people carry miniature versions of the Bible or the Constitution. I tried and failed to think of a writer who’d treat such a thing more mercilessly than the author of that book.

An artist who has spent years doing the work on her own terms should not look fashionability in the mouth. But it is odd to find Didion embraced by the world of mainstream sentimental thinking which she charged against for decades. One wonders whether the fans for whom she’s now an Instagram totem, or the many journalists who claim her, realize that she cast her career toward challenging precepts and paragons like theirs.

It matters only because everything matters. Didion once wrote, “Style is character,” and, because the phrase has seemed to apply to her life and work, it often gets quoted to mean that character comes down to nothing more than style. But the line, which appears in an essay about Georgia O’Keeffe, is actually about the burden of creative choice. “Every choice one made alone—every word chosen or rejected, every brush stroke laid or not laid down—betrayed one’s character,” Didion wrote. Reducing the world, as on the canvas or the page, is a process of foreclosing on its fullness, choosing this way and not that one, and how you make those choices reveals everything about the person that you are. Didion praised O’Keeffe for “hardness” in trying to render in art what sensible people told her was unrenderable. “ ‘The men’ believed it was impossible to paint New York, so Georgia O’Keeffe painted New York,” she wrote. She was impressed by O’Keeffe’s snubbing of those who received her work devotedly but unseriously: “This is a woman who in 1939 could advise her admirers that they were missing her point, that their appreciation of her famous flowers was merely sentimental.” And she lauded O’Keeffe’s frank engagement with her time. “She is simply hard, a straight shooter, a woman clean of received wisdom and open to what she sees,” Didion wrote, and she meant it, too. ♦

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By The New Yorker

The Morality of Having Kids in a Burning, Drowning World

By Jessica Winter

The Atlantic Publishes “The Great American Novels,” a New List of the Most Consequential Novels of the Past 100 Years

The list launches with events at the New Orleans Book Festival and on April 3 at the Strand, in New York

Today The Atlantic launches “ The Great American Novels ,” an ambitious new project that brings together the most consequential novels of the past 100 years. Focusing on 1924 to 2023––a period that began as literary modernism was cresting and includes all manner of literary possibility, including the experimentations of postmodernism and the narrative satisfactions of genre fiction––the 136 novels on the list include 45 debut novels, nine winners of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and three children’s books. Twelve were published before the introduction of the mass-market paperback to America, and 24 after the release of the Kindle. At least 60 have been banned by schools or libraries. In an introduction to the list, The Atlantic ’s editors write that, together, the books selected represent the best of what novels can do: “challenge us, delight us, pull us in and then release us, a little smarter and a little more alive than we were before. You have to read them.” In 1868, the writer John William DeForest established the idea of the great American novel as a work of fiction that accomplished “the task of painting the American soul.” The Atlantic ’s editors write, “In 2024, our definition of literary greatness is wider, deeper, and weirder than DeForest likely could have imagined. At the same time, the novel is also under threat, as the forces of anti-intellectualism and authoritarianism seek to ban books and curtail freedom of expression. The American canon is more capacious, more fluid, and more fragile than perhaps ever before.” All of the books on “The Great American Novels” list were first published in the United States (or intended to be, as with The Bell Jar and Lolita ). To narrow down the titles further, our editors approached experts—scholars, critics, and novelists, both at The Atlantic and outside of it—and asked for their suggestions. They write, “We wanted to recognize the very best—novels that say something intriguing about the world and do it distinctively, in intentional, artful prose—no matter how many or few that ended up being (136, as it turns out). Our goal was to recognize those classics that stand the test of time but also to make the case for the unexpected, the unfairly forgotten, and the recently published works that already feel indelible. We aimed for comprehensiveness, rigor, and open-mindedness. Serendipity too: We hoped to replicate that particular joy of a friend pressing a book into your hand and saying, ‘You have to read this; you’ll love it.’” At The Atlantic , the list was led by projects editor Ellen Cushing , deputy editor Jane Kim , senior editor Gal Beckerman , associate editor Emma Sarappo , and literary editor Ann Hulbert .

The publication of the “ Great American Novels ” is part of The Atlantic ’s robust and expanded Books section devoted to essays, criticism, reporting, original fiction, poetry, and book recommendations, along with The Atlantic ’s weekly Books Briefing newsletter.

Related Events: New Orleans Book Festival : This afternoon (March 14), The Atlantic is collaborating with the New Orleans Book Festival, at Tulane University, for the festival’s opening session. Editors will dive into the process behind selecting these literary masterpieces while exploring the books’ enduring impact and cultural significance. The first conversation will feature Walter Isaacson in dialogue with The Atlantic ’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg; a second conversation will feature Cushing and Kim, with staff writers and authors Clint Smith and Jemele Hill; a third conversation this evening will feature the novelist Jesmyn Ward with Hill. The festival is free and open to the public, and attendees can register on the festival website . The Strand : On April 3, the Strand will host an in-person event with The Atlantic ’s editors for a discussion on “The Great American Novels.” Tickets are available here . Press Contact: Paul Jackson | The Atlantic [email protected]

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Joan Didions Holy Water

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Published: Mar 19, 2024

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Introduction, immersion in thoughts and emotions, vivid description of the holy water font, blending personal anecdotes and philosophical musings, use of analogies and metaphors, seamless narrative flow, balance between formality and accessibility.

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Carrie Fisher's Favorite Books Were A Testament To Her Wit

C arrie Fisher was a voracious reader and the author of several books including "Wishful Drinking" and "Postcards from the Edge." The legend was known primarily as an actor, most famously for her role as Princess Leia in the original "Star Wars" films, but she was also a literary person ever since her childhood. In fact, in many interviews throughout her life before she died in 2016, Fisher spoke about reading and writing with as much energy as she spoke about performing.

In a conversation with the Los Angeles Times in 2008, Fisher talked about her early life as a reader. "I started reading really early. I wanted to impress my father [Eddie Fisher], who is unimpressable," Fisher began. "For whatever reason, he may have given me the 'Drunken Boat' by Rimbaud ... reading was my first drug. I would just go into these books and never surface until it was over. My family called me 'the bookworm,' and they didn't say it in a nice way. I fell in love with words." Fisher obviously connected with writing and reading, and throughout her life, literature served as a meaningful outlet. In 2008, she spoke to The Week about her favorite books, and why she loved them so much, and since Fisher's such a devoted reader, we had to check them out.

Read more: 22 Celebrities Who Are Unapologetically Childless By Choice (And We Love Them For It)

Carrie Fisher Felt That George Eliot's 'Middlemarch' Was 'One Of The Greatest Books Ever Written'

Carrie Fisher told The Week that she loved George Eliot's 1871 novel "Middlemarch." Eliot, whose real name was Mary Ann Evans, went by a pseudonym because she felt that male authors were treated with more credibility than their female counterparts. But this gumption and creativity were part of the reason that Fisher loved the novel so much. "One of the greatest books ever written by a woman, especially in those early days," the "Star Wars" lead explained. "Although Mary Anne Evans gave herself a male pen name, she showed incredible ambition and scope in her writing — the world she created, the characters she imagined. I love that line in the book that reads: 'The really delightful marriage must be that where your husband was a sort of father, and could teach you Hebrew, if you wished it.' It was hard to be a woman in those days, but her storytelling was exceptional."

It's no light read, and reviewers on Goodreads noted its length, but, like Fisher, how much they loved it. "Middlemarch is a behemoth book at almost 1000 pages," one reviewer began, "but it's a book that grows with you." While the reading process is lengthy, fans felt it was worthwhile. "I conquered the biggest tome for this year. And I loved it," another wrote . It's one of the great English novels.

David Sedaris' 'Naked' Was 'One Of The Funniest Books' Fisher Had Ever Read

Carrie Fisher was a huge fan of American author and humorist David Sedaris, particularly his 1997 collection of essays "Naked." She told The Week why she enjoyed the nonfiction book so much. "This collection of personal essays made me laugh as hard as any book I've ever read," Fisher explained. "I also discovered that I needed glasses when reading this, but still it's one of the funniest books ever."

The Goodreads community, like Fisher, raves about Sedaris's book. "David Sedaris's biting, hilarious memoir about his family and his teenage years made me laugh out loud," one reviewer began. "Not your typical, chuckle to yourself on the bus laugh, no, Sedaris made me guffaw as he recounted his [first] job working at a mall cafeteria, and when his sister first got her period." People reported unanimously that they couldn't contain their laughing fits when reading Sedaris. "Laugh out loud reading... great tales about an interesting family from one of the funniest essayists around... thank you NPR for turning me on to David Sedaris!" another reviewer wrote. Clearly, this Fisher-endorsed book is a quality read.

Joan Didion's 'Play It As It Lays' Influenced Fisher's Own Writing Style

Joan Didion's 1970 novel "Play It as It Lays" made it onto Carrie Fisher's list. While Didion was best known for her style of writing known as New Journalism, her novels are timeless. "I love her use of spare narrative throughout this story about an unfulfilled actress looking for purpose in her life," Fisher told The Week . "I admired the style then and have tried to pattern some of my own writing in that fashion."

The novel made a mark on several Goodreads fans as well, but it's no light read. "Gambling, domestic violence, sexual abuse, drugs, alcohol, promiscuity, insanity, depression, snakes, suicide," a reviewer began. "These are all elements of 'Play It As It Lays,' and much, much more. This is stark, wide-eyed, slap in the face prose that grabs the reader and holds you from beginning to end." Another reviewer spoke about the alluring challenge of the book. "This is a cruel book populated by cruel characters whose hearts, for the most part, stay cold and brutish even in the desert's blistering heat," they wrote . "I have enjoyed Didion's essays, so I was expecting some of the themes, but I had not prepared myself for something so delirious and fragmented." Despite the dark themes of the novel, many readers called it a masterpiece and admitted, like Fisher, that Didion shaped their own literary voices. Singer Lorde counted Didion among her most influential authors too .

Carrie Fisher Enjoyed 'My Old Sweetheart' By Susanna Moore Because Of Her Relationship With Her Mother

Carrie Fisher was a fan of Susanna Moore's 1982 novel "My Old Sweetheart." The novel deals with layered family dynamics, something that seems universally appealing to readers. In fact, in Taylor Swift's top five books, she lists several books that deal with complex family relationships , proving that it's a successful theme for a gripping read. For Fisher, Moore's novel appealed to her because of the mother/daughter dynamic. "She's an extremely talented writer," Fisher told The Week . "Her first novel, set in the 1950s, is about a woman who grew up with a very eccentric mother, which, of course, is why I related to it." Fisher spoke of her own challenging relationship with her mother, Debbie Reynolds. While the two eventually became close, Fisher didn't speak to Reynolds for close to ten years.

It was the fraught familial relationship that drew Fisher to Moore's iconic book. "This book is a marvelous novel set in Hawaii about a twisted, co-dependent mother/daughter relationship," a reviewer began on Goodreads . "A young woman looks at her childhood and her mother's intoxicating beauty and suffocating need in the hopes of trying to understand the past and not duplicate the same unhealthy relationship with her own daughter." While it's a complex read, "My Old Sweetheart" drew readers in and did not disappoint.

Fisher Felt That Finishing Marcel Proust's 'Swann's Way' Was An Achievement

French author Marcel Proust wrote a seven-part novel called "In Search of Lost Time." The epic work was actually fashioned from Proust's own memories, and the publication spanned from 1913 to 1927. The first book in this collection is "Swann's Way," or "Du côté de chez Swann," as it was originally published in French. For Carrie Fisher, simply reading this enormous first book was an accomplishment. "I'm also showing off that I've actually gotten through 'Swann's Way' , the first volume in Proust's monumental work 'In Search of Lost Time . ' Just getting through those first 100 pages, where he could not fall asleep until his mother kissed him good night, was an achievement alone," she told The Week .

Despite the marathon-like read expected of devoted fans, reviewers on Goodreads were positive about Proust's first novel. "I know it is impossible for me to write a proper review for Proust," one person began. "I can only bow my head in front of his genius and be awed by his writing. That's because you have to be a magician of words to pull off a 600-page novel where nothing happens and the reader is glued to the page, wanting more." Another fan wrote , "My goodness, Proust could write." Clearly, Fisher isn't the only one who saw the gem of Proust's work, and enjoyed the bragging rights that came with finishing his saga.

Read the original article on Women.com .

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The week’s bestselling books, March 24

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Hardcover fiction

1. The Women by Kristin Hannah (St. Martin’s Press: $30) An intimate portrait of coming of age in a dangerous time and an epic tale of a nation divided.

2. The Hunter by Tana French (Viking: $32) A taut tale of retribution and family set in the Irish countryside.

3. North Woods by Daniel Mason (Random House: $28) A sweeping historical tale focused on a single house in the New England woods.

4. Wandering Stars by Tommy Orange (Knopf: $29) Three generations of a family trace the legacy of the Sand Creek Massacre of 1864 and the Carlisle Indian Industrial School.

5. The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store by James McBride (Riverhead: $28) The discovery of a skeleton in Pottstown, Pa., opens out to a story of integration and community.

6. Until August by Gabriel García Márquez, Anne McLean (Transl.), (Knopf: $22) The extraordinary rediscovered novel from the Nobel Prize-winning author — a moving tale of female desire and abandon.

7. Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin (Knopf: $28) Lifelong BFFs collaborate on a wildly successful video game.

8. Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar (Knopf: $28) An orphaned son of Iranian immigrants embarks on a remarkable search for a family secret.

9. Maktub by Paulo Coelho (HarperOne: $25) An essential companion to the inspirational classic “The Alchemist,” filled with timeless stories of reflection and rediscovery.

10. The Bee Sting by Paul Murray (Farrar, Straus & Giroux: $30) A family comes apart, financially and otherwise, in post-crash Ireland.

Hardcover nonfiction

1. The Creative Act by Rick Rubin (Penguin: $32) The music producer’s guidance on how to be a creative person.

2. Atomic Habits by James Clear (Avery: $27) The self-help expert’s guide to building good habits and breaking bad ones via tiny changes in behavior.

3. The Wager by David Grann (Doubleday: $30) The story of the shipwreck of an 18th century British warship and a mutiny among the survivors.

4. How to Know a Person by David Brooks (Random House: $30) The New York Times columnist explores the power of seeing and being seen.

5. The House of Hidden Meanings by RuPaul (Dey Street Books: $30) A brutally honest new memoir from the pop culture icon.

6. Burn Book by Kara Swisher (Simon & Schuster: $30) An accounting of the tech industry and its founders who wanted to change the world but broke it instead.

7. Grief Is for People by Sloane Crosley (MCD: $27) A deeply moving and suspenseful portrait of friendship and loss.

8. Supercommunicators by Charles Duhigg (Random House: $30) An exploration of what makes conversations work.

9. 3 Shades of Blue by James Kaplan (Penguin Press: $35) The story of how jazz arrived at the pinnacle of American culture in 1959 and how towering artists Miles Davis, John Coltrane and Bill Evans created the iconic jazz album “Kind of Blue.”

10. Hits, Flops, and Other Illusions by Ed Zwick (Gallery Books: $29) The filmmaker’s dishy, behind-the-scenes look at working with some of the biggest names in Hollywood.

Paperback fiction

1. Dune by Frank Herbert (Ace: $18)

2. A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sarah J. Maas (Bloomsbury: $19)

3. Happy Place by Emily Henry (Berkley: $19)

4. A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara (Anchor: $18)

5. The Midnight Library by Matt Haig (Penguin: $18)

6. Trust by Hernan Diaz (Riverhead: $17)

7. Horse by Geraldine Brooks (Penguin: $19)

8. Bride by Ali Hazelwood (Berkley: $19)

9. The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu (Tor: $19)

10. Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone by Benjamin Stevenson (Mariner Books: $19)

Paperback nonfiction

1. Killers of the Flower Moon by David Grann (Vintage: $18)

2. Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner (Vintage: $17)

3. The Artist’s Way: 30th Anniversary Edition by Julia Cameron (TarcherPerigee: $19)

4. The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine by Rashid Khalidi (Picador: $20)

5. All About Love by bell hooks (Morrow: $17)

6. The Trump Indictments by Melissa Murray, Andrew Weissmann (Norton: $22)

7. The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk, M.D. (Penguin: $19)

8. The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion (Vintage: $17)

9. Everything I Know About Love by Dolly Alderton (Harper Perennial: $18)

10. Dinners With Ruth by Nina Totenberg (Simon & Schuster: $19)

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Visitors study the multimedia installation “The Juniper Tree,” which features red-and-white bannerlike paintings, a wooden ladder, kimono, paper masks and more.

Critic’s Pick

Joan Jonas: A Trailblazer Shines at MoMA

A bounteous and playful survey of the 87-year-old artist’s career on the vanguard highway fills the museum and the Drawing Center.

Visitors study the multimedia installation “The Juniper Tree” (1976/1994) in the exhibition “Joan Jonas: Good Night Good Morning” at the Museum of Modern Art, which includes slides and sound. Credit... Clark Hodgin for The New York Times

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By Holland Cotter

March 20, 2024 Updated 10:03 a.m. ET

I’m not a humanist, I’m a creaturist. Have been since childhood. The pyramidal view of the world that I grew up with — Man as the crown of creation, with all other animals, four-legged, feathered and scaled, ranked and devalued downward — has never made sense.

Hierarchies in art, with painting and sculpture enthroned at the top, don’t make sense either. When it comes to form, I’m a pluralist verging on everything-ist. I find too much beauty in too many cultures to be anything else. All materials — from marble, to sweetgrass, to pixels — have equal potential. It’s what’s done with them — physically, expressively, spiritually — that counts.

No American artist better matches my existential and aesthetic proclivities than Joan Jonas, one of the great and still undersung creative figures of our time. A trailblazer in the realms of video, performance, conceptual and installation art, she arrived, more than 60 years ago, at a point on the vanguard highway where the feminist and the early environmentalist movements met, and she has kept moving forward since.

Two women watch a video-sculpture installation that mixes Arctic landscapes, folk tales, music and hanging glass.

Any art season is bright that brings a consideration of her career, and this spring does, in two enchanting concurrent shows. The artist’s long-overdue first New York retrospective, “Joan Jonas: Good Night Good Morning,” fills the sixth floor of the Museum of Modern Art. And a bounteous survey of her work on paper, titled “Joan Jonas: Animal, Vegetable, Mineral,” is at the Drawing Center in SoHo.

Born in New York City in 1936, Jonas trained as a sculptor, but time spent in the city’s downtown avant-garde art world quickly expanded her ideas not only of what could be sculpture, but of what could be art. The options she spotted — none of which the mainstream art world took seriously at the time — included bodies in motion; images projected on screens; sounds that created moods and defined space; and arrangements of objects — new and old, made and found — that told stories.

In the early 1960s, she began studying with the radical Judson Dance Theater choreographers Trisha Brown, Steve Paxton and Yvonne Rainer. She also paid close attention to the gender-scrambling work of the fringe theater magus Jack Smith, who created, from junk shop pickings, stage sets that were also sculptural environments.

She began performing herself, at first alone in her SoHo loft, then with fellow artists. She eventually bought a video camera, newish technology at the time, and started shooting. As she later said: “I didn’t see a major difference between a poem, a sculpture, a film, or a dance.” And in the MoMA show, which documents more than half a century of her art, she weaves all of these together.

Nature was in the work from the start. Several of the earliest filmed performances took place outdoors. In the 1968 video titled “Wind” that opens the show a handful of performers, under the artist’s direction, pose and dance on a frigid, snow-covered Long Island beach. The real choreographer, though, is an incoming winter gale so strong it all but knocks them down. Only two figures in the film seem not to struggle. Mirrors attached to their clothing make them look half-transparent, as if the storm could blow, unresisted, through them.

Mirrors, reflecting and refracting reality, became a signature element of Jonas’s early work. In a 1969 piece set on a tree-shaded lawn at Bard College, performers holding tall, outward-facing mirrors make the audience gathered on the grass and seen in shifting reflection, the real performers.

And in a 1972 video, “Left Side Right Side,” Jonas turns a mirror on herself, abruptly and repeatedly changing its position, in the process doubling her image and dividing it. The suggestion is that self-reflection, physical and psychological, can be both an instrument of self-knowledge but also a source of confusion, the latter evident in her halting efforts to distinguish “left” from “right” when using her mirrored face as a point of reference.

Self-imaging was common practice in early feminist work. Apart from her inclusion in the 2007 survey “Wack! Art and the Feminist Revolution,” Jonas is still seldom mentioned in this political context. But she should be, if for no other work than her 1970s solo performances, live and filmed, as an alter ego named Organic Honey, an “electronic erotic seductress” (Jonas’s words) who is a charismatic but critical embodiment of female creativity and around whom Jonas composed a series of installations.

These walk-in assemblages encompassed prop-like objects (musical instruments, furniture, masks, rocks, Asian and African textiles), sonic elements (human howls, animal hums, percussive clapping, folk fiddling), videos, prerecorded and live, and at least one live performer, Jonas herself. The multimedia, multidisciplinary format became the model for her subsequent major works, versions of which make up much of the MoMA show, organized by Ana Janevski, a curator in the museum’s department of media and performance, working with the curatorial assistants Lilia Rocio Taboada and Gee Wesley, and Jonas herself.

As is the case with most interesting art, the basic format was flexible, with plenty of give for rethinking and revising, for adding new things and carrying old ones over into developing versions. (Several installations at MoMA are serially dated, e.g. “1976/1994/2005.”) Such malleability also solves a basic practical problem built into performance-centered art: How do you keep it vital when the original performer or performers have stepped away? At 87, Jonas now performs somewhat less regularly than she once did — she’ll be performing three times at MoMA, on March 26 and again in May — but her installations, visually complex and textured, are dynamically personable on their own.

And over time, specific features gained emphasis. One was her use of storytelling. New York’s ’60s avant-garde rejected narrative as reactionary, romantic. But it was always there, submerged, in Jonas’s art, and rose fully to the surface in the “The Juniper Tree” (1976) which comes at about midpoint in the MoMA show.

With its suspended ranks of bannerlike red-and-white paintings and tools and toys for props the installation clearly suggests a stage set. And as the title indicates, the piece has a direct source in literature: a Grimm Brothers fairy tale, one in which birds and humans merge identities.

Animals of various kinds have been a constant presence in Jonas’s art. Portraits of her pet dogs, life companions, recur from the 1970s onward. Of the 300 pieces in the first-ever and heart-liftingly beautiful survey of her works on paper at the Drawing Center almost all depict nonhuman beings — dogs, rabbits, snakes, turtles, insects — based on images seen by Jonas in books or in the wild. (For decades she has lived part of each year in rural Nova Scotia.)

And recent installations at the end of the MoMA show extend the creatural spectrum at the Drawing Center into the ocean and up into the air.

For some time now Jonas has been working with the marine biologist and environmentalist David Gruber, incorporating his gorgeous, cautionary films of deep-sea life into her art. Their latest collaboration, commissioned by MoMA, includes a video that plays inside one of Jonas’s several “theater box” sculptures, funnel-shaped wooden containers designed for single-person viewing. It documents a rarely recorded event: the birth of a sperm whale, an endangered species, and the tender communal efforts of the entire whale herd to ensure the vulnerable newborn’s survival in its first difficult hours in the world.

Hanging above this piece in the high-ceilinged gallery is another, more abstract image of collective life: a group of large paper and bamboo kites with shapes and colors that bring to mind the avian images in the Drawing Center show. “Soaring like birds,” in Jonas’s description, the kites were made, following folk traditions in Vietnam, and hand-painted by Jonas. They pick up the theme of natural vitality —- the movement of wind and breath —- that runs through the world, and the show, even in the face of a precarious planetary destiny.

In the avant-garde milieu from which Jonas emerged the word “spiritual” was not admissible, but Jonas, who has traveled globally and experienced art’s many, many forms and uses, isn’t afraid of it. In a 2014 interview with PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, she said: “One thing that has come with age is wanting to really think about spiritual matters and concentrate more on things of the spirit. In a way, that’s very down to earth.”

And down to earth is where her art has always been directed, to an earth in which all of us creatures have an equal stake.

Joan Jonas: Good Night Good Morning

Through July 6, Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53 Street, Manhattan, (212) 708-9400; moma.org .

Joan Jonas: Animal, Vegetable. Mineral

Through June 2, The Drawing Center, 35 Wooster Street, Manhattan; (212) 219-2166, drawingcenter.org .

Holland Cotter is the co-chief art critic and a senior writer for the Culture section of The Times, where he has been on staff since 1998. More about Holland Cotter

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The Whitney Biennial, New York’s most prominent showcase of new American (or American-ish) art, is currently underway. Will this year’s edition go down as a notable one ?

You’ve seen Dawn Baillie’s posters for thrillers, comedies and dramas outside cineplexes. Now her work is being exhibited at Poster House in Manhattan.

An engrossing exhibition at the Neue Galerie in Manhattan offers a small number of fabled lush paintings by Gustav Klimt — and plenty of other treasures .

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