Please Stop Writing ‘Why I Left New York’ Pandemic Essays

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From HuffPost:

Broadway: shuttered. Neighborhood bars and restaurants: delivery and pickup only. The subway: emptied of commuters. As New York City buckles under the assault of the coronavirus pandemic, rapidly becoming one of the hardest-hit cities in the world, everything quintessentially New York has been blighted in some way.

Some of these things were already widely reviled and yet have reached new depths thanks to COVID-19. Let us consider, for example, the “why I left New York” essay, a genre made iconic by Joan Didion and then rapidly made trite by thousands of lesser writers who woke up one day and realized, stirringly, that a larger apartment could be had for less money literally anywhere else. 

For years, the “why I left New York” essay has been a honeytrap for writers, an opportunity to muse with unearned solemnity about the most predictable traits of the city they chose to leave: It’s expensive, it’s exhausting, it’s dense, it’s hard to find nature or a dishwasher or a parking space. 

In the face of an acute coronavirus outbreak, one more obvious motivation to flee for wide-open spaces has joined this list: “I didn’t want to be here, with all the sick people and crowded hospitals, sheltering in place in a smaller-than-ideal apartment.”

And so an already-suffering city has been assaulted with a slew of “why I let New York during the pandemic” essays.

. . . .

Aside from a few unique flourishes ― Mealer weaves in the history of his own great-grandmother and her daughter, who died in the 1918 flu epidemic ― all of these essays tread the same tedious ground: an acknowledgment that New Yorkers were meant to stay home, an enumeration of reasons why it was personally preferable for the author and their family to nonetheless relocate (a larger residence, the great outdoors, support from family, avoiding crowded NYC hospitals and grocery store lines), a catalog of hygiene practices followed during the illicit journey (Clorox wipes, mainly). 

. . . .

Gessen and Daum dismissively note that they will fall afoul of a “narrative” that fleeing the city is harmful and that they will be shamed — in terms that imply the narrative and the shaming are the true evils. Like all the worst personal essays, these are not unflinching examinations of the writers’ own behavior, but lazy exercises in self-justification and projection. 

. . . .

“Three weeks ago,” Daum opens her essay, “I fled New York City for the countryside. I know there are arguments against this, some expressed more thoughtfully than others.” This is a criminally negligent lede, in which she not only implies that the validity of the sheltering-in-place policy lies in how thoughtfully people express their support for it rather than in the literal body count that it would reduce, but quickly foists the full burden of thoughtfulness and argumentation onto her opposition. At any rate, her essay barely bothers to engage with those arguments, a disappointing move from a writer whose previous “why I left New York” essay, “My Misspent Youth,” takes a ruthless scalpel to her own self-defeating delusions. 

. . . .

This time, Daum is not interested in puncturing her self-mythology or confronting her fecklessness. The decision to leave New York seems to happen to her. “I had, somewhat unexpectedly, acquired a 10-week-old Newfoundland,” she explains, in a sentence so purposefully opaque it ought to be in passive voice. How did she acquire the puppy? Unexpectedly in what sense? This is brushed over; the dog is here, and through no avowed fault of her own, she finds herself burdened with the guilt of confining a large, energetic puppy in a small city apartment. This guilt is her ticket out. The decision to take him away, she writes, “didn’t feel great, but it didn’t feel wrong.” She chooses Appalachia, “in the middle of nowhere yet within an hour of a hospital that wasn’t yet pegged to be overrun.” Not pegged to be overrun, presumably, until New Yorkers looking for a rural retreat sprinkle their viral load throughout the community.

Daum’s piece, like all pieces in the genre, lovingly explores the benefits she personally experienced from fleeing the city, while glossing quickly over how it might affect others. She hopefully offers that she may have freed up a bed in New York’s ICUs by leaving, without closely engaging with the possibility that her arrival could plunge an Appalachian community into a health care crisis. She admits that raising a Newfoundland puppy in a city apartment was never a good idea, but doesn’t bother to cross-examine herself on this point beyond hand-waving: “I don’t know what I was thinking.”

Link to the rest at HuffPost

PG wonders if a “Why I Never Lived in New York” pandemic essay would be similarly upsetting to the toiling masses laboring at HuffPost.

5 thoughts on “Please Stop Writing ‘Why I Left New York’ Pandemic Essays”

  1. More like ‘essays’ on passively/aggressively not taking responsibility for the consequences of your self-entitled actions.

  2. We have them here too. For a while they came from cities to rural places to ‘escape the virus’ – risking bringing it with them: holidaymakers coming to Scottish islands and other remote communities, often in camper-vans, stripping small local shops of much needed supplies along the way – this was back at the start of our lockdown, when our rural communities were only just getting organised with volunteers and stock levels, especially in supplying essentials to people like my husband whose health problems mean that he shouldn’t leave the house at all for some time – and that means that I have to severely limit my food shopping trips as well. Thank God for Amazon! I now understand why dogs get so excited about their daily walk. Me too. But seriously, our (Scottish) government had to reach an agreement with the ferry companies that they would only carry locals or essential workers to and from the islands. And police are still having to deter holidaymakers from Scottish beauty spots. (They can and have issued fines.) The medical provision is excellent in these places, but it just isn’t designed to cope with any large influx of potentially seriously ill incomers. Our government and police did get control of it and I’m told that the situation in the Highlands and Islands is currently better than anywhere else on these islands – population density is low, and I believe cases are mild – but the renewed influx of necessary tourism will have to be managed somehow or other – and I wouldn’t like to be the one trying to plan for it.

  3. Puerto Rico had an influx from NYC of folks that took anti-fever meds to get on a plane to San Juan. All ended up on respirators after most likely infecting everybody on their plane and their post-landing path. This after the island went on lockdown well before NYC and after the governor asked the FAA to cancel all flights from NY, Connecticut, and Florida, to no effect.

    https://abc3340.com/news/nation-world/puerto-rico-seeks-ban-on-flights-from-us-covid-19-hot-spots

    They eventually had to mandate 14 days quarantine to everybody coming from everywhere. Plenty of empty hotel rooms to hold them but no tests to spare. What exactly were they expecting? Miracles?

    Common sense has never been common but the current crisis has really highlighted how rare it is.

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