Non Fiction Unit Entry 1

Throughout the non fiction unit, there has been one text in particular that's really stuck with me since I first read it. Jane Didion's Goodbye To All That was a perfect example of how I'd want to write my memoir. It felt more raw and honest then some other pieces where the author writes about themselves. Here it feels like she is hiding nothing, rather she introduces information about her environment and how it made her feel in a way that was almost darkly poetic. Gradually, we can see the light leaving her eyes as her perception of the city changes and its clear what she thought would be was no so easily what she got, which is a painful lesson people eventually learn.

Her story is one I know I will have to face one day- leaving my hometown to start completely new on my own. But more then that, its of discovering who she was without the safety of her old life.
"But where is the school girl who used to be me" was one on of my many favorite lines in this text. She so gracefully takes a simple thought and writes it in a way that almost sounds achingly romanticised, as if she's living in a ancient Greek tragedy and her fate has already been set, one that she does not wish to fulfil.

Its almost sad, how she makes being young into a highlight of her life. As if her whole youth was spent fervently anticipation her grand future, but once she reached there all she realized was how much better she thought it would be. That's another painful reality of life I suppose. It makes me want to capture every important moment in my youth and paint it on the page with my words. I want to share the absurdities of life and then turn it into a peice of art, like Didion did.

Whats lovely that she does so well is relating something that seems complex to something that's universal, like when she describes her love for the city like the love you have for the first person who ever shows you what beng in love truly feels like. Its magical, breathtaking and life altering.
"I still believed in possibilities then, still had a sense so peculiar to New York, that something extraordinary would happen any minute, any day any month." I so often get lost in this exact hopeful feeling that my life woud take a turn and it would be in that moment that I would truly start living.

I aso enjoied how she emphasised on the "idea of New York" to an outsiders perspective compared to living there on a daily basis. She described the city as a "infinitely romantic notion, the mysterious nexus of all love and money and power, the shining and perishable dream itself" and goes on to elaborate on how the place was like Oz, a dream within a dream. But she speaks in a past tense and as a reader I had to remind myself that this was how she saw NYC before she was there, and that a more negative light was soon to shine on the beloved city.