Slouching Towards Bethlehem

"I read a lot of Joan Didion when I first graduated from college. Like her, I’m from California and was transplanted to New York. Didion is unflinching, but even though she’s observing us from an intellectual place and writing without embellishment, her observations are so clear and so right-on that they end up having an emotional effect on us."

"My favorite essay in this collection is ‘Goodbye to All That.’ One quote has always resonated with me: ‘I was late to meet someone, but I stopped at Lexington Avenue and bought a peach and stood on the corner eating it and knew that I had come out of the West and reached the mirage.’ As a child, I lived all over the world – we moved a million zillion times – and I never felt completely happy until I was in New York City. Like Didion, I felt that I’d reached the mirage; I’d found a place where..."