This anthology features essays from women about loving and leaving New York City. Contributors Meghan Daum, Emily Gould, Emily Carter Roiphe and Melissa Febos will join editor Sari Botton for a panel discussion and reading.

About GOODBYE TO ALL THAT:

In 1967, Joan Didion wrote an essay called “Goodbye to All That,” a work of such candid and penetrating prose that it soon became the gold standard for personal essays. Like no other story before it, Didion’s tale of loving and leaving New York captured the mesmerizing allure Manhattan has always had for writers, poets, and wandering spirits.

In Goodbye to All That: Writers on Loving and Leaving New York , edited by Sari Botton, 28 women writers take up Didion’s literary legacy by sharing their own stories about New York.

With stellar contributions from some of today’s most beloved female authors of memoir and literary fiction—Cheryl Strayed, Dani Shapiro, Emma Straub, Emily Gould, Emily St. John Mandel, Hope Edelman, and more—Goodbye to All That tells the stories of their own love/hate relationships with New York, as well as the city’s gravitational pull on them—even at the worst of times.

These striking essays often begin as love stories do, with the passion of something newly discovered—the crush of the subway crowds, streets filled with manic energy, and the sudden, unblinking certainty that this is the only place on Earth where one can become exactly who she is meant to be. They also share the grief that comes like a gut-punch, when the great Eastern metropolis loses its magic and the pressures of New York’s frenetic life wear thin on even the most fervent dwellers. As friends move away, rents soar, and love—still—remains just out of reach, each writer’s goodbye to New York is both singular and universal, like New York itself.

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