I’m very late to reading 2013’s Goodbye to All That, a collection of 28 essays by women writers who have left New York City, including Emily Gould Cheryl Strayed, Emma Straub, Dana Kinstler… well, they’re all notable writers and they’re all gone. They do a collectively wonderful job paying homage to Joan Didion, who wrote the essay that named the collection.

I’ll cross 20 years living here in October. I’ve rented in Queens, Brooklyn, Union Square and now the West Village. Our son goes to school here. It’s very much home. But it is interesting to find out, in a seven year old book plucked from the radiator in the lobby where neighbors leave books for the taking, that the Great Lakes Bar in Park Slope shut down years ago, or that the Riviera Cafe on 7th avenue south, which I saw shut down, was there for much longer than I’d thought.

Somehow, we let the state close down Cafe Loup just because the owners owe some taxes. Nobody asked me, as a citizen, if I’d rather have Loup or their tax money, but the answer is Loup! Also, I was assured that Cedar Tavern would come back after it shut down a few years back.

It’s odd to be finishing the book right when Gould is shutting down her independent publishing operation, Emily Books. Or to notice that none of these writers had time to lament the closure of The Awl, which published both my wife and me before it closed and is a badge of honor for us both.

“I wanted more from my city,” wrote Dana Kinstler and I can’t help but agree. In a city so expensive that then mayor and now president hopeful Michael Bloomberg once called it “a luxury good.”

It’s hard to not want more from a city that charges multiples more for monthly rent than a mortgage, taxes and insurance would cost elsewhere (but not elsewhere within a reasonable commute of the city) where the road is also paved badly and difficult to bicycle on.

Even for a die-hard New Yorker, this book makes you think “I’m not getting enough.” It also makes you wonder if the city can still be considered a literary city when it now has so few book shops. Thankfully, we still have The Strand, and Alabaster Bookshop but I half expect we’ll be taking donations to keep the remaining Barnes & Noble locations kicking before too long.

The founder of Brazenhead Books, the speakeasy used bookstore that you had to know some one to get into is “indefinitely closed” after the death of its founder. Les Bleus Literary Salon is also on hiatus after its founder, well, said goodbye to all that.

It’s fun to read the essays from different eras. The writers who came here in the 80s and early 90s really did get the more punk rock, club scene, performance art scene, cheap rent, cheap drugs, cheap bars experience the rest of us didn’t. But there’s also a bygone era of dotcom commerce with two distinct publishing and media booms, both long gone. Still, you’re reminded, that each generation of New York’s visitors finds something new, makes something new and leaves little but other people’s nostalgia for it behind.

So far as moving goes — there is a provincialism in provincial places. I know that, I was raised in New Mexico. But there’s provincialism in big provinces, too. “City hicks,” is a term I’ve used. Technology says we can live any place and there are no longer a lot of book stores anywhere.

Though, London looks cool, if expensive.

ETA: I did write my own “Goodbye to all that,” though I haven’t left. It’s here in McSweeney’s.