“Goodbye to All That”

GRILLED PEACHES with HOMEMADE RICOTTA

Four years ago, after a string of terrible jobs and a long winter without heat, I started to wonder if New York was the right place for me. A number of my friends had begun to migrate home after college, back to Phoenix and Portland and Oakland—places I had never been and couldn’t picture. At night, after serving people coffee all day and making eight dollars in tips, I often found myself staring at photos of my old friends’ new lives—sunset hikes through craggy brush-covered mountains, lantern-lit tents on the beach under the stars, homemade chicken coops in the backyards of entire houses that cost less than a New York City studio. They all looked fitter, healthier, happier than I had ever seen them in New York, a kind of celestial glow throbbing around them and emanating out of my computer screen.

So, one night, after a bit too much wine, my friend Willa and I bought two tickets to California. For ten days we adventured from Los Angeles to Santa Rosa to San Francisco, eating the brightest produce I had ever seen, riding two-seater bicycles around the Mission, feeling the sun on our backs. And then those ten days were up, and I arrived home to a rainy and unseasonably cold New York, still smelling like In-N-Out Burger and carrying a backpack full of peaches from the Ferry Building. My first day back I bought sixty dollars’ worth of cheese from an old man at the farmers’ market because I felt bad for him and cried at a wooden flute rendition of “Chariots of Fire” playing in a nail salon before crawling into bed and wallowing for almost thirty-six hours.

Just when I thought nothing could pull me out of the “Am-I-still-in-love-with-New-York?” pity hole I had buried myself in, I noticed Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem on my bedside table. I had meant to pack it to read on my trip but had forgotten, and there it sat, still unread and giving off that wonderful new-book smell. I cracked it open and read the first line to the essay “Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream”: “This is a story about love and death in the golden land, and begins with the country.” For the next four hours, as the light outside my apartment window went from yellow to orange to blue to black, I devoured every essay. By the time I got to “Goodbye to All That” and read the first two paragraphs I was crying like I hadn’t cried in years.

Didion’s ability to capture perfectly what it is to be young and hopeful and in love with a place—specifically this place, this city, that has molded and broken so many—is the reason that “Goodbye to All That” has remained a cult classic forty-eight years after its publication. The essay first appeared in a 1967 edition of the Saturday Evening Post, where it was titled “Farewell to the Enchanted City.” Didion changed the name to “Goodbye to All That” for its 1968 publication in Slouching Towards Bethlehem, perhaps as a nod to Robert Graves’s 1929 autobiography of the same name, in which he writes about his “bitter leave-taking of England.” Didion’s leave-taking is not bitter, but her feelings of grief over leaving the city that she loved “the way you love the first person who ever touches you and you never love anyone quite that way again” are real.

What stuck with me most about the essay wasn’t the moment that Didion realized that it was time for her to move on; it was the small moments she shared with this city when it was still so new and beautiful and exciting to her that stood out. Like the day she stood on the corner of Sixty-Second Street and Lexington Avenue eating a peach: “I could taste the peach and feel the soft air blowing from a subway grating on my legs and I could smell lilac and garbage and expensive perfume.” It’s the tiniest, most innocent moment, but the familiarity of it knocked the wind out of me. Rather than feeling, as Didion did, that it was time to leave New York City, I felt my love of this place renewed.

I pulled myself out of bed. I strapped on my backpack full of California peaches and hopped on my bike, suddenly aware of and immensely grateful for the early springtime smells of Brooklyn—hot concrete, wet mulch, old cigarettes, new grass, deli coffee. I rode to my friend Sam’s apartment, a tiny sublet with a clown-car’s worth of strange roommates and an enormous roof with a view of Manhattan that made it bearable. We climbed to the roof and split the peaches—which were now bruised and soft—and grilled them on a greasy hibachi.

Our friends came, bringing jelly jars of homemade farmer’s cheese, and fresh herbs grown on their fire escape, and bottles of wine pilfered from restaurant jobs. That night I felt vaguely aware that I was only twenty-four, that if Didion was right I still had four more years until I would feel, as she had, that I had “stay[ed] too long at the Fair.” I’m here now, in my twenty-eighth year—my tenth in New York—and I’m still waiting.

“GOODBYE TO ALL THAT”

Grilled Peaches with Homemade Ricotta

Makes 6 filled peach halves

3½ cups whole milk

½ cup heavy cream

¾ teaspoon coarse sea salt

3 tablespoons fresh lemon juice

3 ripe peaches, cut in half and pitted

2 tablespoons olive oil, plus more for drizzling

2 teaspoons sugar

Flaky sea salt (such as Maldon), for serving

Coarsely ground black pepper, for serving

Pour the milk, cream, and salt into a large, heavy-bottomed pot and cook over medium-low heat, stirring occasionally, until the temperature reaches 190°F on a candy thermometer. Remove the pot from the heat and stir in the lemon juice. Allow the mixture to sit for 5 to 7 minutes before straining it through a sieve lined with three layers of cheesecloth. Let the cheese drain into a bowl for 1 to 2 hours.

Preheat a grill to medium.

Brush the peaches with the olive oil and dust them lightly with the sugar. Place the peaches, flesh-side down, on the grill and cook until char marks appear, about 2 minutes. Transfer the peach halves to bowls and spoon the fresh ricotta over them. Drizzle the ricotta with olive oil and sprinkle with flaky sea salt and coarse black pepper. Serve immediately.