Re-reading “Goodbye to All That” today - in the era of online, shortform oversharing - it’s striking to a contemporary reader how those 1967 sentences trail on and curl over themselves, like smoke lifting off a cigarette in a breezeless room. For millennial writers who grew into the body of essays, novels and literary journalism Didion already had waiting for them, it was like sitting down to grainy footage of a party that ended long before they would ever arrive. Only a great artist creates and ruins a genre at the same time. But at the date of her death Thursday at the age of 87, Joan Didion’s 1967 essay “Goodbye to All That” remains the permanent sunspot obscuring the center-vision of many maturing writers even contemplating leaving a place like New York and telling other people about it. Perspective, after all, is one of the great pleasures of getting older. Anyone who’s completed the climb out of their early twenties hopefully has the wits to remember when life was as vivid as Kodachrome and the experience to recognize that perhaps all those new colors were duller than they seemed.
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