When I’m busy I become omnivorous in my reading habits. I graze on fiction and non-fiction, poetry and snippets of essays. I don’t engage in a long-term relationship but read for comfort, pleasure, reminders of what I love about words and humans and the world. I curl into bed at the end of a busy teaching day, grateful for the hours of silence and solitude ahead of me (albeit in sleep), and read just a few paragraphs, words or stanzas, before my eyes beg to close.

A few old lovers have been inhabiting my bed at these hours. Joan Didion’s creative non-fiction Goodbye to All That chronicles eight years in her twenties spent in New York—a city which she says is only for the very rich, very poor and very young. The story begins with a green Didion arriving in New York in a dress which had ‘seemed very smart in Sacramento’ and ends when she is not so young anymore and spiraling into what might be a first episode of major depression. The writing breaks my heart and makes me feel alive, but in a different way to when I first read it at twenty-four. Then, I understood the essay as a piece about falling in love with a place. Now I think of its themes as being our own mortality (as experienced by those freshly graduated from being the very young), a deep weariness with oneself and the transactional nature of our lives on earth—everything exacts a price.