Goodbye to All That Critique In “Goodbye to All That” by Joan Didion, from The Art of the Personal Essay, Didion shares her experience in New York. She explains the process she goes through and challenges she faces in a unfamiliar place. Through the challenges faced and how she dealt with them, the audience is able to see the struggle of a young woman in New York City and ultimately the loss of her innocence. “Goodbye to All That” by Joan Didion is an essay that successfully delivers a relevant lesson in life. This essay begins with Didion’s life in New York as a young adult and continues through her life as an adult. She believes that New York is like “all the movies I [she] had ever seen and all the songs I [she] had ever sung and all the stories I [she] had ever read about New York” (681). Didion enjoys the lonely and carefree life in New York. She “was in love with the city” but then she realized that “I [she] did not belong there, did not come from …show more content…
Her use of pathos allows the audience to experience her emotions. The audience is able to sympathize with her broken dream. She later comes to an understanding: “I [She] was not one to profit by experience of others, that it was a very long time indeed before I [she] stopped believing in new faces and began to understand the lesson in that story, which was that it is distinctly possible to stay to long at the Fair” (687).The realty of living one’s dream is not as expected. In Didion’s case, her life in New York began to wear off after a while. In the end, the author tells her husband “how difficult it would be for us [them] to ‘afford’ to live in New York right now, about how much ‘space’ we need” (688). Didion uses that excuse as an escape from the now commonplace life in New York. The readers are able to relate to the experience that Didion goes through as a young and naïve girl in New