Refer to Explorations in Literature for a complete version of this narrative.

In "Goodbye to All That," Joan Didion writes that the days before she "knew the names of all the bridges were happier than the ones that came later."

Which evidence from the text best supports the idea that her first years in New York were better than her last years in the city?


"To an Eastern child, particularly a child who has always had an uncle on Wall Street and who has spent several hundred Saturdays first at F.A.O. Schwarz and being fitted for shoes at Best’s and then waiting under the Biltmore clock dancing to Lester Lanin, New York is just a city, albeit the city, a plausible place for people to live."

"I still believed in possibilities then, still had the sense, so peculiar in New York, that something extraordinary would happen any minute, any day, any month."

"Of course it might have been some other city, had circumstances been different and the time been different and had I been different, might have been Paris or Chicago or even San Francisco,...."

"All I could do during those three days was talk long-distance to a boy I already knew I would never marry in the spring. I would stay in New York, I told him, just six months, and I could see the Brooklyn Bridge from my window."







the answer is "I still believed in possibilities then, still had the sense, so peculiar in New York, that something extraordinary would happen any minute, any day, any month."