On Joan Didion's "Goodbye to All That" and leaving and returning home
Since I first read Joan Didion’s “Goodbye to All That,” the final essay in her debut essay collection in the summer of 2012, I have never gone more than a few months without revisiting it. As a writer myself it functions as a sort of North Star for me, something I turn my eyes to when I’m need of reorienting myself, when I want to remind myself the standard I’m aiming for and of the power of words to tremendously affect oneself. There is a slight irony in an essay by Joan Didion holding that place in my mind and heart though as, though many days I view her prose as a sort of platonic ideal to pursue, my writing has very little in common with hers stylistically.
Whenever I revisit Didion’s work, I’m often taken aback by the fact that it isn’t written the way I remember it. In my memory, I think of her paragraphs as consisting of short, punchy sentences, her essays as a masterclass in pointed concision.Yet that’s not really how she writes. While her sentences and paragraphs never stretch on and on to staggering degrees like Thomas Pynchon’s or Cormac McCarthy’s, there’s still a lot going on in them. They’re just structured so flawlessly and without extraneous ornamentation that they never seem bloated, or draw attention to themselves. There is also something ineffable about her phrasing, the way she orders words in a way no one else would, making her best sentences land like a twist of the knife that both wounds and heals. I’m not perceptive enough to figure out what exactly it is about them that makes them work like that, but I can confidently and personally attest to their power.
“Goodbye to All That” does what any great piece of writing does, which is make the topic at hand, at least temporarily, the single most interesting thing in the world. In a vacuum, I do not really care about a young Californian woman moving to New York City and the way it impacted her. Stories like that are ubiquitous and quite often tiresome, laden with an unearned profundity. Yet Didion with her poignancy and unimpeachable prose makes this feel like the most important journey ever taken, one that, in our own ways, we all have taken in one way or another.
It captures how a six month detour can easily turn into an eight year stay, how easily one can trick themselves into believing that “nothing like this, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, has ever happened to anyone before,” though that sensation does not always vanish after one has proceeded past one’s early twenties, repeating itself time and time again at moments of both wonder and shame; how impossible it is to note exactly when and how one’s optimism about one’s present and future vanished while still knowing that such a thing has occurred at some point now lost to memory. I imagine that, no matter how old I get, there will still be moments and past decisions that will cause a future version of myself to ask, as she often did, “was anyone ever so young,” while also wondering, as the song that Didion heard playing in a jukebox did, “where is the schoolgirl who used to be me?” She writes that “if it was late enough at night I used to wonder that.” When I find myself up late, smoking a cigarette or listening to a record I haven’t heard in years, I am often prey to the same thoughts.
I have never been to New York, let alone moved there for eight years, but I do know the strange mixture of dislocation and awe, that comes from moving to an area long mythologized but never lived in, those moments when places that have only been icons and images become real, a part of your own personal history even as those former elements never pass away. Even after the Golden Gate Bridge became the bridge that took me from the city to Marin County, I was never not cognizant of the fact that I was driving on the Golden Gate Bridge those rare times I ventured north; Berkeley never simply became the home of my favorite bookstore, always remaining the epitome of hippie idealism and free-spirited living I’d have broadcast to me from any number of books and movies over the years. One way of saying this is that every drive into a previously unexplored part of the Bay Area became an adventure; another is that I never stopped feeling like a tourist. It’s hard to live in someone else’s myth. When I returned to Akron after two great years, there was a feeling of a homecoming, a return to the place that had shaped me instead of a place that I was always trying to make sense of and carve out a place within.
But there is also something lost. While my life has been enriched by the innumerable people, places, landscapes, bookstores, parks, and cafes I have loved across this continent, each one seems to cleave away a piece of my heart, leaving it somewhere that can only be retrieved at a specific location I may never have the chance to return to. It’s that not you can never go home again or that your home stops feeling like home -- it’s just that you gain other homes as well, relative as they may be. I think that’s just an inherent part of being alive, though it’s one I have yet to make full peace with.
There are no lessons to be learned from these experiences. Whatever one gleans from them is often no help as the circumstances that led to them are not repeatable. Even if one does find one, it may take years to “come to understand the particular moral of the story,” and by that point, its chance of being relevant has greatly diminished. For Didion, the lesson that she came to learn was that “it is distinctly possible to stay too long at the Fair,” but by that point, has one not already stayed too long? That is not the lesson I’ve learned, and that lesson too seems irrelevant now and I’m not sure how much that insight will come to matter the next time I find myself at a crossroads needing to make sense of what has happened and what may come next. That may be a moral in itself, but if it is, I’m not quite sure what to do with it.
One of the hardest things to learn, to truly learn, obvious as it is, is that our actions do count, that the past is permanent and cannot be undone, that our tendency to believe that “nothing is irrevocable” is just a comforting lie. At some point, we are forced to realize “that it had all counted after all, every evasion, every procrastination, every mistake, every word, all of it.” Some bridges cannot be rebuilt and we drive down many roads only once no matter how badly we yearn to revisit those past highways.
Three decades after writing this essay, Joan Didion wrote in an extended reflection on her home state that there is no real way to deal with everything we lose. There’s ways of coping and moving on, but if there’s a definite solution, one that is not at its core temporary or relative, I have yet to discover it. One can return to their native land, but they are changed by the time away, coming back to a place that is now familiar and strange. The essay ends with her and her husband returning to California and I read it as both mournful and hopeful. What is lost cannot be regained, but new joys can be found and forged. It may take some time, but if you’re lucky, eventually Los Angeles stops being ‘the Coast’ and just becomes a new home.