Saying Goodbye To A Narcissist Quotes

In The White Album, Joan Didion famously wrote down her packing list, radical at the time—Tampax!—and revealing in its intimacy and simplicity. As a storytelling device, it was admirable in what it told the reader about the writer, about her life, and about what it meant to be a woman in the world, without seeming to say much. Didion wrote the list in 1979, but it has gained new life in the last ten years, surpassing, at times, the popularity of her “Goodbye to All That” essay about leaving New York, which has seemingly been redone by every writer leaving the city ever since. Less mentioned is the fact she returned twenty-five years later and made it her permanent home. (Does any other city require a defense of departure? Did people feel the need to declare why they were leaving Paris? Was it that New York was an identity and other cities were just places to live, or does New York simply attract a higher concentration of narcissists?)