Books We're Reading - Manhattan, When I Was Young

"...once I am seated in front of my computer, everything comes clear.  If I have spent a lifetime writing one thing or another, it is because it is the only way I can figure out what I am thinking."

I started reading Manhattan, When I Was Young on a whim.  A recently selected memoir in a friend's book club, her story appealed to me - after all, Cantwell was a journalist for Mademoiselle, Vogue and The New York Times.  A transplant to Manhattan, she became spellbound by it's mystery, caught up in it's hustle and bustle, and remained in the Village for the rest of her life.  The book, divided into sections based on the apartments in which she resided, depicts her head-over-heels love for and growing relationship with the city - all the while candidly detailing her struggles as a wife, a mother and a woman. 

Mary moves to New York from a small town in Rhode Island with a close friend and precious few belongings.  Arriving without an immediate means of making money, she is encouraged by her betrothed, "half the reason [she] was in New York," to pursue an artistic career; after all, he thinks it will help her "improve [her] mind," a pursuit he's seemingly always "anxious to have [her] do."  With no concrete idea of what she wants post-college, and without the support of her recently deceased and idolized father, she begins to forge a new identity for herself - one initially based quite a bit on what her new paternal substitute desires.

She soon marries, and reveres her new husband.  Wracked with self-doubt, she is grateful for the cultural education he gives her, an entrance into a society she is too anxious to pursue on her own.  She sees herself as less than her sophisticated contemporaries; not-quite belonging, but increasingly enchanted by her new world.  As her story unfolds, recounting glamorous nights out on the town side by side a growing number of psychiatric appointments, Mary begins to seek out a new path.  A life of her creation.  Her very own New York.

I suppose it's unflattering for both me and the author to say I identified with her; after all, I'm a simple blogger having a one-sided love affair with Manhattan, not yet anywhere near as artistically accomplished.  To say that I related to her insecurities and confusion certainly doesn't do me any favors, but this book spoke to me so much for those very reasons.  Her nail-biting panic at work, feeling like she was never saying or doing the right thing for a demanding superior.  Her fears about her husband leaving her, the man she looked up to and couldn't imagine her life without.  Her constant search for internal happiness, and the realization after her world gets pulled out from under her that she was happy all along, never able to fully comprehend it in the moment. 

This book filled me with so many 'A ha!' moments.  It broke my heart.  And, most of all, it made me infatuated with this town, my town, all over again.