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By Piper Coleman
Around the time of my fourteenth birthday my mom gave me a copy of Joan Didion’s essay collection entitled “Slouching Towards Bethlehem.” Upon first glance, it seemed to be a book about California and the ‘60’s. I placed it on my shelf, not wanting to discard a gift but also not wanting to waste my time on a book that seemed to have little to offer. I don't recall exactly what sparked my interest in the book later that year, but I will never forget being mesmerized by Didion’s writing style: a seamless combination of Hemingway and Faulkner—an oscillation between concise statements and sentences that seem to go on forever. “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” expands a wide range of topics, most of which I knew nothing about, and yet I could not stop underlining and dog-earing and circling. I have re-read nearly all of the essays, and you will scarcely find a page that is not marked up.
I am now three days away from my twentieth birthday, and I recently re-read the book’s final essay, “Goodbye to All That.” Didion moved from California to New York when she was twenty, and this essay is her candid reflection on the near-decade she spent there. She writes that “one of the mixed blessings of being twenty and twenty-one and even twenty-three is the conviction that nothing like this, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, has ever happened to anyone before.” She continues, “I could make promises to myself and to other people and there would be all the time in the world to keep them. I could stay up all night and make mistakes, and none of it would count.” At this point in re-reading the essay, I was thinking about what my life would be like if I moved to New York at twenty and that I probably could not afford any form of housing in this economy. Then, a passage struck me. It caught me by surprise, even though I had it bracketed and starred:
“That was the year, my twenty-eighth, when I was discovering that not all of the promises would be kept, that some things are in fact irrevocable and that it had counted after all, every evasion and every procrastination, every mistake, every word, all of it.”
I will soon be the age that Didion was when she moved to New York and believed that she had all the time in the world to do everything she wanted to do. It left me wondering if, in my twenty-eighth year, I too will wake up and be reminded of every mistake and every evasion and every unfulfilled promise. Will I too lose track of the time? Will I wish I had done things differently? Maybe everyone has a similar realization at some point. Maybe we all must experience our twenties and then reflect on them with some regret—although I hope it would be with more compassion than regret.
Piper Coleman, of Bowling Green, Ky., is a member of the McConnell Scholar Class of 2025 at the University of Louisville. She studies geography, political science, and philosophy.