Ten Years Gone from New York

I'll always miss it.

I’m excited about this workshop I’m teaching on May 9 on WHY WE WRITE. You can register for it here. This workshop will be excellent prep for 1000 Words of Summer, which starts May 30 and runs through June 12. More about that here.

If you’re in Atlanta, I’ll be doing this extremely fun event on April 30 with Matthew Shaer, sponsored by A Capella Books, Grocery on Home, and the Origin Stories Podcast.

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Hi friends.

Ten years ago last month I left New York to move to New Orleans. New York is one of those places you never leave behind completely if you lived there for more than a few years and feel even a little affectionately toward it, which I absolutely do. You are always sort of looking over your shoulder wondering how New York is doing. Add to that my business (publishing) is there, and I’m always going to be scanning the instagram stories of all my friends still in Brooklyn for what’s going on or reading restaurant reviews of places I’ll never go and apartment listings of neighborhoods I haven’t been to in years. And I’m always going to ask someone who still lives in the city, “Hey, how’s New York doing?”

The reports are sometimes mixed: Recently a lifelong New Yorker came to visit New Orleans and told me that, post-snowstorms, the entire city was covered in dog shit. Williamsburg, where I lived for fourteen years, is unrecognizable to me, like an old friend who got a facelift and asked for “The Luxury Bitch.” A friend has been recording (and mocking) the lines waiting outside a newly opened bougie coffee place in his neighborhood on his instagram. The lines-as-a-form-of-entertainment always stops me in my tracks. I worry sometimes people don’t know how to have fun anymore but that might be an American problem.

But I don’t care, I still love it there. Visiting its museums and galleries is important to my spiritual and intellectual maintenance. The bookstores of New York are immaculate and influential and their existence cheers me. Honestly a visit to city is worth it just to sit outside at a cafe and look at people’s shoes for an hour. And the people I know there are so, so solid, and the conversations I have when I visit NYC are focused and entertaining and fruitful…although sometimes over too quickly. I am a country mouse now. I like to shoot the shit for a while.

(2015, in Brooklyn Magazine, so busy)

Would you ever move back, sometimes people ask when I’m in town, because I do have a good time there spending my untouched dowry on car services. I like to come in the fall to see a proper season change and so I can check out everyone’s sweaters. Or I like to visit in July when I can get a dinner reservation wherever I like or go see a play cheaply. A few years ago, I stayed in Bay Ridge for a week and I genuinely loved it, even though it took me forty-five minutes to get anywhere I actually needed to go. Although perhaps if I lived there I would realize I didn’t need to go anywhere at all, I was already home. After all, I barely leave my neighborhood here.

But no, I couldn’t come back. I no longer have the youthful energy required to hustle on those streets and I will never be rich. (Fiction writer.) And I love where I live now so much. It is home. Someone said I got out when the getting was good but everyone else is free to leave, too. But I understand if you don’t want to. It really is cool there.

Ask me what I miss the most about living in New York and I think it actually might be the marathon. A whole city beaming. I hope they all know how much collective power they have. In my small blue city in the Deep South, we savored their mayoral election and cheered from here. I always want New York to be safe.

Jami

You are reading Craft Talk, the home of #1000wordsofsummer and also a weekly newsletter about writing from Jami Attenberg. I’m also on bluesky and instagram.