John Guare, the playwright, once told me that to live in the town where you grew up (in his case, New York) is to turn walking around your neighbourhood into reading your diary: “everything has a history”. I had been in the city for two and a half years at that point – it was 2010 – and I remember very clearly having two simultaneous and contradictory thoughts: I’m so sad I don’t have that, and I’m so happy I don’t have that. You move away from home because every street corner triggers associations and then you spend the next 20 years feeling bad about it.
I mention all this because Lena Dunham has written a long piece in the New Yorker about her own breakup with New York, a sort of homage to Goodbye to All That, the famous Joan Didion essay of 1967 in which Didion left the city for California amid much eloquent and extremely Didionesque agonising about what it all meant. Unlike Didion, who moved to New York when she was 20, Dunham grew up there and in the piece, which is very charming, she itemises all the ways in which she was ill-suited to the place.
