east
I remember very precisely when I realized I hated New York. I was seventeen and coming to the end of a summer program at Columbia, sitting outside at a coffee shop with some friends. I felt the sun on my face; I realized I hadn't felt the sun on my face in a while. I mean, that can't be true, there's plenty of sun in New York, but it felt true, it felt like I'd spent the whole month there being shadowed by skyscrapers and also like, rained on, can you even believe, anyway, I remember sitting there very calmly thinking oh actually I fucking hate this city, the first in a series of realizations that just because everyone assumed I would love something did not mean that I actually would. (Coffee, vegetarianism, working in publishing.)
It became kind of a thing with me, how much I hated New York. I knew it was annoying and performative but I couldn't get myself to stop performing it, especially as I got to the end of college and my first year out, making sure it was clear to everyone that I wasn't one of those girls who was going to graduate with a Lit degree and move to New York and like, write, because that was very basic, by which I realize now I mostly meant honest about what you wanted.
But also there was another thing, a thing that wasn't entirely clear to me until I was reading Stephanie Danler's Sweetbitter during this summer's extended convalescence. The narrator says: "Crossing the Hudson I thought of crossing Lethe, milky river of forgetting... Let's say I was born in late June of 2006 when I came over the George Washington Bridge at seven a.m. with the sun circulating and dawning, the sky full of sharp corners of light, before the exhaust rose, before the heat gridlocked in, windows unrolled, radio turned up to some impossibly hopeful pop song, open open, open."
Because a thing I did not understand at seventeen but came to, reading a hundred thousand narratives like Sweetbitter, essays and blog posts and books, and having blurry conversations at bad parties with girls who looked and sounded so much like me that they made me think I might not be sweating so much as simply disintegrating, was that this was what a New York narrative demanded of you: to be from nowhere, and to say that this was the place that made you. To submit to it as essential, central, the one and the only. I was scared to say that I was a writer but I was even more scared that if I became a writer in New York someone would say that the city made me that way. And New York did not make me a writer or anything else, ever. Los Angeles did.
I knew this is in my bones before I had the words for it. I came back to the city for the first time after selling SONG in May of 2015 and I still didn't like it but suddenly I could tolerate it; I realized that a decade spent in and out had given me a very comfortable working relationship with New York. But also of course I had written my book and sold it way out west. I had staked a very certain claim for myself elsewhere. Before I had always felt like New York was trying to swallow me. Now, finally, it felt clear to me that it was only a city, a place I could come to and then, as soon as I was ready, that I could leave again.
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This is to say, I will be in New York reading from A SONG TO TAKE THE WORLD APART at McNally Jackson in one week and one day. Join me?
My second novel, GRACE AND THE FEVER, is also available for pre-order.
And speaking of formative experiences and fear of admitting what you want, here is a Tumblr post about a dude.