Letter 12: Joan Didion on Letting Go
Saying Goodbye to All That the Joan Didion Way (How to know when your time somewhere is done)
Goodbye To All That
How many miles to Babylon?
Three score miles and ten—
Can I get there by candlelight?
Yes, and back again — If your feet are nimble and light
You can get there by candlelight.
— Joan Didion in her essay Goodbye to All That, 1967
In 1956, Joan Didion left California for New York City with a suitcase, a typewriter and a sense that everything was about to begin. She was 21 and freshly hired by Mademoiselle magazine after winning a writing contest. It was one of those twists that shifts the course of a life.
New York gave her “the sense, so peculiar to New York, that something extraordinary would happen any minute, any day, any month.” She wandered bookstores. She stayed out too late. She watched the seasons turn and imagined they were turning her, too.
Within this magic of New York, she also met John Gregory Dunne, a Times journalist. They got introduced through a mutual friend in the research room of a library. “We amused each other,” Didion would later say, “and I thought he was smart.” The two soon fell into a creative partnership, writing side by side. They would marry in 1964.
It is easy to see the beginnings of things, and harder to see the ends.
— Joan Didion, Goodbye to All That, 1967
And not long after, they decided to leave New York behind. The magic had done its work. As if the spell of the city had lifted. In Goodbye to All That, Didion writes about this very experience of deciding to leave a place behind, in an exploration on how we often enter new chapters with blind hope, but struggle to recognise when it's time to leave. It is a farewell to New York but also a map for how to leave behind a version or idea of the life you had for yourself, with grace.
5 Reflections on Knowing When it is Time to Let Go, Inspired by Joan Didion’s Goodbye to All That
We don’t always recognise an ending when we are in it. Sometimes it shows up as a growing restlessness, a sudden stillness, a moment that used to feel electric now landing flat. Maybe it's a city you once loved. Maybe it's a job, a friendship or a version of yourself…
These five reflections, drawn from Joan Didion’s Goodbye to All That, are less about geography and more about inner terrain. They are for the thresholds - the in-betweens - when you're not quite where you were, and not yet who you're becoming and helping with trying to name what no longer fits, and being able to walk away with grace.