I don’t recall why I first picked it up, but I can still conjure up the musty smell of the paperback I borrowed from the University College London library and the jarring contrast of being engrossed in Didion’s 1950s New York during a train ride between London and Manchester. As Didion writes in another equally brilliant collection, The White Album, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” The trick to getting through your twenties intact, it seemed to me, was looking ahead to the narrative I could impose on that decade later in life. Reading that sentence for the first time at twenty-one and knowing, at some level, that she was right was not nearly as comforting as realizing that there was an antidote to feeling young and confused-and that antidote was narrative. “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 writes in “Goodbye to All That,” an essay about her time in New York in her twenties. It was Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem, not Yeats’s poem, that has been my totem throughout my twenties, because she has that gift that all great writers do of hitting on universal truths by admitting very personal ones. Joan Didion must have felt the same way when she chose the poem as an epigraph for her essay collection of the same name. It’s a feeling everyone has at some point, but for a 20-something in the midst of an identity crisis, it sounded especially appropriate. “Things fall apart the center cannot hold,” Yeats writes. Yeats’s poem “The Second Coming” by way of encouragement to a peer going through a quarter-life crisis.
I came across a Facebook post recently in which someone offered W.B.
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