a really big essay on New York, and grief, and love

Behold! I have had a thought.

Hello!

Hi! Three things:

1. Did you know that some interpretations of the Bible believe that the plague of frogs over Egypt was in fact just one really massive frog? I did not! But I am now obviously delighted by it. You can read a bit about it here.

2. I usually keep my book recommendations for the end of the year, so I can do one big round-up, but truly I could not wait to tell you about Antonio Tabucchi’s Pereira Maintains. It’s set in Portugal in the early days of the dictatorship, and is about this old, widowed, forlorn art journalist who doesn’t want to get involved in politics, until he meets some young idealistic writer who could have been his son, had he had children, and…well I’ll leave you to discover the rest yourself. It may sound a bit dour but it’s actually extremely charming and touching, and occasionally very funny. Also: under 200 pages. The ideal novel.

3. The third Outsiders Arts Club is at the end of the month! If you missed it when I first discussed it here: the OAC is a quarterly night in London organised by me, where people can enjoy a free glass of wine or three while hanging out in a gallery in south London, surrounded by other fun people. There’s a snappy ten-minute talk from an arts industry insider, followed by a ten-minute Q&A. Crucially: on the walls are over 50 paintings from around 15 up and coming artists, all handpicked by me, and all available to buy on the night, for between £200 and £500. Just pick a piece and leave with it on the night! It’s great fun. You can find more information and buy a ticket on our website, if that sounds like your sort of thing.

Bye!

A column

I should have done this when I was still in New York. I know it; was aware of it when I first decided to write it. My original plan was to sit down at JFK while waiting to board my flight and type it all up before going home. Somehow I knew the whole thing would disappear like a puff of smoke the moment I got back to Europe but well, sometimes it is what it is. I went to a stew party on Saturday night and I ate a lot of stew, and I drank a lot of wine, and on Sunday I just didn’t want to think about anything. I sat on my phone and I ate one of the most harrowing meals a person can have, then I got on the plane and I watched the Dark Knight while crossing the Atlantic and here we are, just over 48 hours later.

The odd thing is that New York is the only place which has this effect on me. I found it entirely easy to write about Venice once back in London. I never struggled to conjure some image of it in my mind, and to go from there. I could probably do it today if I wanted to, even though I lived there back in 2022. The shortest possible explanation for that trip going somewhat poorly is probably the one I put in the mouth of one of my characters, who both was and wasn’t me, and who featured in that novel I wrote which didn’t go anywhere.

“Venice is heavenly but it’s not heaven”, my woman thought at some point while feeling especially forlorn down in the lagoon, and that’s more or less the epiphany I got in real life. I guess I escaped to Italy for a while because I was in search of some form of salvation, after the horrors of the pandemic. I went to the most beautiful place I could think of, then I found out that you cannot be healed by beauty alone. Oh, and I just don’t gel with the southern European way of life. I’m fine with both of those conclusions: they’re neat and make sense to me. I like going to Venice on holiday, for short amounts of time, but I would never spend more than one or two weeks there consecutively again, and that’s okay. What about New York, though? I have this weird and sticky relationship with the place and I don’t really get it. I hope spelling it out will help me think about it. You can come along for the ride, I guess.

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1. July 2014

I’m 22 years old and I have a salary, which feels quite novel to me. I’ve always wanted to go to New York, like everyone else. I discuss it with some friends who say they want to come with me and I explain to them that I don’t want them on my trip. I want to experience the city alone. They insist; I cave. I explain that I will be expecting to spend the majority of my time alone, but will happily share a place to stay with them, and maybe go out in the evening together sometimes. We do not have a deal.

Because we’re 22, the trip is poorly planned. We’re there for two weeks and end up getting the world’s smallest Airbnb in Jackson Heights, deep inside the armpit of Queens, for the first half of the holiday. I sleep on an inflatable mattress on the sofa and it sticks to my skin, because it’s boiling outside, even at night, and the flat has no aircon. My two friends, who only knew each other through me before this, end up bonding over their irritation at my childish behaviour. They tour New York together. I do whatever it is I do.

I spend the second half of the trip sleeping on a friend of a friend’s couch in Crown Heights, which is too small for me to lie on with my legs straight. The cushions keep falling off it when I roll into a ball. For a week, I don’t really sleep and don’t really do anything. I guess on some level I’d assumed that life would happen at me, once liberated from the shackles of my stupid friends. I’d managed to build a life out of thin air in London at 17 - surely I could recreate a slice of the magic five years later?

Instead, I end up walking around Brooklyn and the Lower East Side a lot, drinking endless black iced coffees and eating dollar slices of pizza. I sit on terraces and I read the New York Times. I watch the sun rise while sitting on the roof because I just can’t sleep. I…god, I just don’t know what I did, is the truth. A week can be such a long time if you play your cards right, but that’s not what I did.

On the flight back, it’s established that my friends had a good time and I only had an okay one. I do not return to New York for nearly a decade, having failed to see the point of it.

2. September 2023

One of my closest friends in the entire world dies in the spring and I spend the summer in a haze of blinding grief. 2022 wasn’t a great year for me and I’d spent the first few months of 2023 trying to recover from that, and then Agnes died and the whole thing just went out the window.

In June, I realise I can’t have alcohol in my flat because I no longer trust myself not to drink it, alone, in the middle of the night, crying in the kitchen. I empty the nice bottle of whisky an acquaintance had bought me in the sink. A couple of weeks later, I remember my vague plans to eventually, maybe go to New York at some point in 2024, provided I’ve saved enough, in order to visit one of my oldest friends who now lives there. I book tickets to New York for September, only a few weeks later. You never know what may happen to your friends, so you should see them while you can.

I arrive and on my first morning I wake up at dawn and, not knowing what else to do, I ride the subway all the way down from Williamsburg to Coney Island. The city is sweltering and the sun too intense to go swimming in the middle of the day, but the mornings are perfect. For a while, I’m one of the only people on the beach. I swim in the ocean and the whole scene both feels entirely unreal and like the only tangible thing that’s happened to me in months.

I spend a week in town and I feel amazingly, grossly alive. I meet my friend’s best friend in New York and I develop a massive crush on him. At a party on a rooftop, I follow him around like a lovesick puppy, hanging to his every word. I’d not fancied anyone in a long time. It feels really good, even though he doesn’t seem all that interested in me.

On the last day, my friend and I go back to Jackson Heights, where we’d stayed together all those years ago, and we have an amazing ceviche and decide that we’d been too harsh on our temporary neighbourhood. We go to MoMa PS1 and don’t really find the art to our liking but, in the gift shop, something stirs in me and I realise I have to come back. I have no idea how to do it - I don’t know anything about visas, I barely have any savings, I’ve never done any foreign reporting - but somehow it just feels like something I need to do.

I’m exhausted and a part of me thinks: can I do it? And then I tell myself: “one more heave”. I end up repeating this to myself dozens, maybe hundreds of times for weeks and months afterwards. It becomes my mantra. One more heave. One more heave. One more heave.

3. March 2024

I get to my sublet by Nostrand Avenue, on the A train, and I realise the shower is only ever cold and there’s no hairdryer in the flat. It’s mostly fine, because I failed to find a place for my entire month there, and will consequently bounce around from room to room across Brooklyn, but it still feels like a chilly welcome.

After I got back to London in September, I crumbled to dust for a little while. Somehow I felt entirely rootless there; single, freelance, all my oldest French friends no longer in town, and now left without the one British friend who felt like home. What was I doing in England? What was I doing anywhere? Still, I gritted my teeth and put my plan into action. Scheming is, I’ve always found, quite a balm to the soul, so I’d got to work.

By Christmas, I’d wrangled a work visa, a newsletter that gave me some financial stability, and the promise to get commissioned while stateside by a weekly newspaper. I didn’t really know what I wanted to do with that time in New York. I just felt I had to be there.

I begin my trip by walking for three to four hours every single day for ten days, for no obvious reason. I work and I go out in the evening and I walk, and walk, and walk. I only stop when spending the weekend at my friend’s flat, and finding myself on her couch for two hours, not sleeping or writing or even playing a video game or watching television or scrolling, but merely lying there, catatonic, so mentally and physically drained that I’m unable to do anything but be entirely still. I’d tried to conquer New York by relentlessly pounding its streets, and the streets had won.

The rest of the trip isn’t quite as intense, though I struggle with Americans. I try to go for drinks or dinner with just about any person I can think of who lives in town and may reply to my social media messages, and mostly I find that I can’t read any of those people. Do they like me? Love me? Tolerate me? Never want to see me again? I just don’t know. Most of the time, those first meetings go well, then they don’t reply to any follow-up suggesting we do it again.

I wonder if something’s wrong with me but close friends assure me that New Yorkers are both unreasonably busy and quite geared towards transactional relationships. If my friendship doesn’t get them anything, they probably will stay home instead of going out and meeting me a second time. They just work too hard and for too many hours every week to laze around with pointless strangers. I have no idea if that theory is right or not but I choose to believe it, as any other option would be too wounding to the ego.

I leave in April, not quite knowing what I made of it all. I think I probably want to come back, as I feel there’s some unfinished business I need to deal with. I’m not sure I could put any of it into words, but somehow the city both feels cold to me, yet like somewhere I just can’t stay away from.

The day after my return to London, I get a call from my father, telling me that I ought to fly home soon if I want to see my grandfather one last time.

4. October 2024

My grandad passed away at the very end of July and I was sad for a while after that, but then I went to Paris for a long weekend at the very beginning of September and that made me feel better. Four days after that, I got a call from a friend informing me that David, my ex-boyfriend turned close friend, had died that morning.

I arrive back in New York six weeks later and find it hard to differentiate between the temporary fog of jetlag and the maddening fog of grief. I feel numb and I feel insane and I’m in pain and I feel nothing at all, because nothing feels real. I do have a sublet for the whole month this time, though. Swings and roundabouts. I land and only spend a day in New York before heading to South then North Carolina, for this pre-election piece I’m working on.

I come back then head to Philadelphia for a bit, for a different story, and then I return. Something interesting happens around then, as I realise that using New York as a base is helping me to think of it as more of a home. There’s nothing like other, even more foreign places to turn this one foreign place into familiar territory, nearly by default.

There’s a week to go before the election and my editors tell me they don’t need anything else from me for the time being, but I’m vibrating with anxiety at the prospect of Donald Trump winning again so I end up doing just about anything I can think of in the city. I walk from the top to the bottom of Central Park and I go to Prospect Park’s zoo; I visit Howard’s Beach, because I always wondered what happened in that place where you took the AirTrain, and I go to every single exhibition I can find.

I go to DC for the election and, for reasons we’ll skip, end up spending most of the trip entirely alone, staying in an empty flat near Capitol Hill. I have to file an overnight piece from the bars where all the staffers and interns hang out - an idea that seemed fun when we thought he would lose - and I leave my pub crawl the moment I realise he hasn’t. I hide my glass of wine under my jacket and drink it on the walk back to the flat. The streets are completely empty and it’s eerily warm. I walk past the Capitol and I think: oh, what have you done. I want to go back to New York. I want to be in a place that feels safe and good to me.

I have a few days left in America before going back to London and I have no idea what to do with them. I joke with friends that I’ve done it; I’ve completed New York. I’m not really joking. By the time I get back to JFK, I feel at peace. New York is not a place I want to live in but it is a place I wanted to know better and, having achieved that, I can now leave it alone. Not everyone is marriage material and that’s fine. A relationship isn’t cheapened by running its course.

5. October 2025

The ends were looser than expected. For several months, I convince myself that I cannot possibly fly back to the US - not with all these stories of visitors getting arrested and disappeared - and I tell the man I love that I will simply have to meet him in Montreal instead. He entertains the idea for a while, and I end up changing my mind as I think about how fun it would be to witness Mamdani’s victory in real life.

I just don’t know what to expect, though. I’ve only been away for a year but somehow so much has happened in that time that I worry there won’t be space for me over there. I’d also made my peace with not returning to New York anytime soon, and there is something disquieting about bringing old haunts back from the dead. Nothing good can be gained from poking at ghosts.

I shouldn’t have worried. I land and get on the A train and it feels like I never left. I discover a new neighbourhood, again, but still make sure to visit the places I used to spend time in. Here’s 5th avenue in Brooklyn, with all its thrift stores; here’s the top of Prospect Park, which I love; here’s that block on Bergen Street where I once sat on the pavement, in the middle of the afternoon, because I remembered that Agnes was dead and it stopped me in my tracks.

In some ways it feels odd that the city is just the same as I’d remembered it, knowing what’s happening elsewhere in the US. Stuck in its own bubble, New York feels like a sweet, hard-edged dream. I’m not unhappy to be here but it does feel like I’m escaping again, at a time when there isn’t actually anything that needs escaping from. It’s a pleasant distraction, but a distraction nonetheless.

6. March 2026

Again, the weirdest thing happens: I know that I know New York well, but the idea of going there again feels like a daunting adventure. For some reason, I always remember it as more stressful and needlessly intense than it actually is. Again, I land and find that it’s just as I left it.

I realise, a few days in, that I find it impossible to define my relationship with the city. I’ve spent enough time there that I’ve already done every possible tourist thing I could ever want to do. I have my favourite spots and spots I’d rather avoid. I have some friends here and people I’d rather not bump into. There are some in-jokes about various neighbourhoods which I will merrily laugh along to, because I feel I truly get them.

Still - still! - it just doesn’t feel like home. I meet people and it reminds me of a time when I interacted with Brits at a time when my English wasn’t quite flawless yet. I could make myself understood but, I could tell, mostly failed at charming the people whose interest I sought. Really, the truth is that I’m happy to be here because I’m happy to be in love and I’m happy to see people whose company I enjoy, but I just don’t get New York. I don’t think I ever will. I fly home after ten days and I feel nothing about it. It merely is a fact of life, that I am going from point A to point B.

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I have little object permanence when it comes to New York but god, I could tell you everything about the first few times I encountered London. I remember it all so well, even after all these years. Mostly, I remember being 18 and having lived there for four or maybe five months, and having a friend visit from France.

“You just don’t really have any friends here, do you?”, she asked me quite bluntly at the end of her trip, and I guess I had to admit that no, I did not. Obviously that felt like a bit of a failure on my part, but on some level I didn’t really mind. I wasn’t alone. I was living in London, and so I had London with me.

Venice gave me a similar experience, in a way, even though I didn’t always love its company, and I still love my hometown of Nantes in the way that people love other people. New York just doesn’t give me that, despite everything.

I could probably give you some reasons why I never completely fell for it. I could tell you about the time, just last week, when this huge, visibly mad man got on my subway carriage and screamed and banged the walls with his tight fists and pounded the ground with his enormous feet and walked - prowled - from door to door like a caged bear, and I was so scared I thought I was going to cry, and it was one of those express trains with the stops that feel like they last for a lifetime, and by the time I left the train my teeth were chattering and my hands were shaking, and every New Yorker I told this story to gave me a version of “ah yeah, that happens”.

I could say that, as a European, I just can’t get along with with a city that doesn’t have a centre. In some ways I know New York pretty well but in others I don’t, because the whole place is just so massive and there’s often no reason to visit a neighbourhood unless you live there, so I got to know Crown Heights then I stopped going there, and I got to know Bed Stuy then I stopped going there, and I got to know Park Slope then…well, actually I still walk down there sometimes, but not all that often.

I’ve spent probably dozens of hours walking up and down acres of Manhattan but there’s just too much of it for me to truly feel like it’s got under my skin. There are a few blocks running from Chinatown to the Lower East Side, all the way from the bridge and up towards the Grey Art Museum, which I would say feels intimately familiar to me. There’s the short walk from the subway to the Whitney, and the museum mile down Central Park. There’s a specific bit round Soho and the West Village which I always end up recognising. These are my pockets. I don’t have any other ones on the island, I think. Isn’t that pitiful? Somehow it makes me feel ashamed of myself, and it makes me feel very small.

I could try to argue a million other things but, ultimately, I think the truth of the matter is that there is no version of me - a thirty-something white collar professional - that is a New Yorker. I don’t want to work hard, ever, and I don’t want to go to the gym in the morning or the evening, and I don’t want to wake up early, and I don’t want to spend a hundred dollars on a restaurant meal, and I don’t want to wear trainers, and I don’t like that smoking is banned everywhere, even though I don’t smoke anymore, and I think that, most of all, I just hate this idea of “if you can make it here, you can make it anywhere”. The knowledge that I would very obviously not make it in most places does not bother me at all, and I don’t need my hide to become tougher in order to prove something to myself.

There’s a cold, metallic aftertaste to New York and I’m just not that interested in it. I like it when things are unintentionally charming and that’s just not something you come across often over there. I’m sure there’s a version of life in New York that’s soft and delightful but I reckon you have to work pretty hard to get it, and earn a whole pile of cash, and be very intentional about it surrounding you like a cocoon. I think that defeats the point.

Obviously I’m also aware of the flipside here, which is that New York is a thrilling place. It’s addictive and compelling; pulsates with energy, and makes you feel so viciously alive. I reckon that’s what drew me to it in the first place, back in 2023 when my whole life just reeked of death. All the things I now find exhausting and sharp about New York were what slapped me across the face back then, which is what I’d sorely needed.

I’m definitely still in the process of trying to get back up, having been felled by all that grief, but I’m not sure I need all these reminders that I’m not dead anymore. I’m past that. I like that my life in London both encompasses a lot of the city yet feels like I’m always at home. I think it’s something we do well here, what I’d call “exciting comfort”. Or maybe I’m just making excuses again.

I love Nantes and I love London and I would love to spend more time in Tangier and I’m glad I spent time in Venice even though it didn’t really go according to plan. I needed New York for a while and I’m so glad I found it when I did, but it’ll just never burrow itself inside my heart in the way these other places have. I think that’s fine. I’ll be back there soon anyway, to see my guy. New York and I will nod at each other, politely, then we’ll get on with our lives.