There is a genre of New York memoir that functions, essentially, as an act of grief. The city that the author knew — that specific, unglamorous, dangerous, electric city — is gone, and the memoir is an attempt to hold it in place with prose before memory finishes the job that time began. Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s Fleishman Is in Trouble touched this. Patti Smith’s Just Kids built an altar to it. Now comes Arbitrary Stupid Goal, and it may be the finest entry in this tradition in twenty years.
The Lower East Side That No Longer Exists
The book is set in the Lower East Side of the 1970s and 80s — a neighborhood that was, by any objective measure, extremely difficult to live in and, by any subjective measure of those who did, utterly irreplaceable. The author grew up in a building full of artists, eccentrics, survivors, and people who had simply run out of options and made a life out of what remained.
« I wrote this book to remember the people. But I also wrote it to warn whoever finds it: once a place loses its people, you cannot get them back. Not with investment. Not with art installations. Not with anything. »
The result is funny, heartbreaking, and absolutely essential. Read it if you love cities. Read it especially if you love New York. And then go walk around whatever neighborhood you live in and pay attention, because the world in this book disappeared so fast, and no one saw it coming.
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