Today I reread Joan Didion’s “Goodbye to All That” — basically the only “why I left a city” essay that’s ever mattered — because of the “Goodbye Chicago: What It’s Like To Live In A City You Tried To But Couldn’t Love” Huff-post that’s got many of my Chicago friends hilariously chapped this week.
My own experiences of Chicago were, frankly, very close to that guy’s in a lot of ways — minus that unfortunate bar anecdote, which any editor wanting to protect their writer would have cut instead of trolling for hate clicks. And I do find it rich that, while the writer points out that breaking into friend groups in Chicago IS super fucking hard (it doesn’t help that all the white people there did seem to have previously attended high school together in Michigan/Indiana/Illinois), many of the responses on my feed were call-outs of their own interactions with Dude when he attempted to reach out online when he moved there, stories meant to embarrass him and further paint him in a “can you believe this guy?” light. These people seem to miss that this insular shaming doesn’t do much to dispel his theory that it’s...really insular there. A fellow transplant I met through Meetup.com and I floated around every blue-line adjacent bar for six months before we had the blessed fortune to meet a large crew of friends from a nearby suburb and get folded in. Before that point we were both about to move back to where we came from (she’s since left Chicago too to head back west herself but like me, she met the love of her life there).
BUT. While I never quite loved Chicago, I know that anyone’s experience of a city is entirely subjective and, perhaps most of all, tethered to where they came from. I spent my first three to twelve months in Chicago just being alienated by the radically different landscape around me, cringing when people really said “pop” when they meant soda, and deeply missing my most familiar place (New York). Some of my “Chicago Be Like” ideas are likely valid, while others were just my experience alone. What makes Didion’s “why I left New York” essay superior is how she intermittently qualifies her statements with the fact that her lens is subjective. A relationship with a new city is a love triangle between the person, their place of “home” (literal or chosen) and the new place.
For example, save for Great Gatsby when I re-read it after moving to Chicago, Didion’s notion below NEVER occurred to me until I left New York and talked to others who’d never been — because New York has never been foreign to me:
I am not sure that it is possible for anyone brought up in the East to appreciate entirely what New York, the idea of New York, means to those of us who came out of the West and the South. To an Eastern child, particularly a child who has always has an uncle on Wall Street and who has spent several hundred Saturdays first at F.A.O. Schwarz and being fitted for shoes at Best’s and then waiting under the Biltmore clock and dancing to Lester Lanin, New York is just a city, albeit the city, a plausible place for people to live, But to those of us who came from places where no one had heard of Lester Lanin and Grand Central Station was a Saturday radio program, where Wall Street and Fifth Avenue and Madison Avenue were not places at all but abstractions (“Money,” and “High Fashion,” and “The Hucksters”), New York was no mere city. It was instead an infinitely romantic notion, the mysterious nexus of all love and money and power, the shining and perishable dream itself. To think of “living” there was to reduce the miraculous to the mundane; one does not “live” at Xanadu.
I never had these big ideas of NYC living because I was born in Manhattan, and my mother’s from the Bronx, and moving back there was just a foregone conclusion growing up. People from the Midwest can’t be any more objective about Chicago’s qualities than I am about New York’s.
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