IF ONLY

This is not my first time reading Joan Didion's "Goodbye To All That"--I read it once before in my freshman writing class--and I must admit I had almost identical reactions to it both times. Half of me wants to love Didion and her long, rambling sentences, yet the other half of me resents her because I cannot do what she can. The tone of this piece always gets to me, as well. I cannot relate to her homesickness and consistent bitterness towards New York.

That being said, Didion immediately sets the tone and the stage for her story of nostalgia in the very first sentence of the piece: "It is easy to see the beginnings of things, and harder to see the ends." Right away the tone of "If only I knew then what I know now" appears and hangs over the story. Moreover, the words "harder to see the ends" instantly implies that this is a story of her past, and not necessarily one she likes. The following sentence appropriately adds to the tension already set by the first sentence. In fact, it entrenches us in her bitterness:

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, can never cut through the ambiguities and second starts and broken resolves to the exact place on the page where the heroine is no longer as optimistic as she once was.

This massive four line sentence hands the reader Didion's bitterness towards these five blind years in New York. The hard "c" alliteration/assonance consistently strewn throughout the sentence adds to its bite. We feel the bite throughout the entirety of this excerpt because it left red marks on our hands it was so sharp.

At the end of the first paragraph, Didion says,

I know now that almost everyone wonders something like that, sooner or later and no matter what he or she is doing, but one of the mixed blessings of being twenty and twenty one and even twenty-three is the conviction that nothing like this, all avidence to the contrary notwithstanding, has ever happened to anyone before.

In this final and running sentence, Didion extends herself and her own maturing experience to the general world around her. Surely everyone else must and does go what she went through. She sees now that she was not the only one. This realisation is carried out throughout the story right until the very end.

Didion is actually very good at sticking to her themes. She is always connecting her story back to into itself and the structure of this is very admirable. In the second paragraph she says "was anyone ever so young? I am here to tell you that someone was." This connects easily back to the end of the first paragraph.

Also in the second paragraph I noticed that in the first sentence "Of course it might have been some other city had circumstances been different and the time been different and had I been different, might have been Paris or Chicago or even San Francisco..." she repeats the word "different" and though it isn't what Lanham would call "compulsive repetition" necessarily, it is noticeable and iterates her point well.

In this story Didion is continually dragging us into her blind past and then just as quickly dragging us back out of it into her all-knowing present. She says,

All I could do during those years was talk long-distance to the boy I already knew I would never marry in the spring. I would stay in New York, I told him, just six months, and I could see the Brooklyn Bridge from my window. As it turned out the bridge was the Triborough, and I stayed eight years.

In this sentence, Didion uses her long-winded, nostalgic sentence to effectively contrast with the shorter sentence and snap us back into the reality of the present.

When she talks about her first year in the city when she was "late to meet someone but stopped at Lexington Avenue and bought a peace and stood on the corner eating it" I find that passage to be the most potent and powerful of the whole story. She could "taste the peach and feel the soft air blowing from a subway grating on [her] legs and [she] could smell lilac and garbage and expensive perfume and [she] knew it would cost something sooner or later..." I live this memory with her every time I read it because somehow it comes to life with all the senses of that moment described.

She goes on to say that she felt that way because she did not belong there on Lexington Avenue, "but when you are twenty-two or twenty-three, you figure that later you will have a high emotional balance, and be able to pay whatever it costs....At that time making a living seemed a game to me, with arbitrary but quite inflexible rules." I connect these two distant sentences from the same paragraph because they are stated with a sense and tone of the impending future's reality. The whole piece is written like this, as I've said before. But it is these two sentences that she returns to in particular at the end of the piece and we finally learn what her learned. She did have to pay the costs, things were revocable and not everything was within her reach. And, more significantly, as the years went by, the Upper East Side truly made her sick. She was sick with lust for money--making a living was no longer a game, but a necessity. Didion expresses this very well. Again, this is where she extends herself and her experience from the specific to the general. Everyone realises what she realises eventually. I think despite the fact that she admits this the whole time, she is always surprised by it.