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meant a whole slew of awful jobs, so be it.
    It appears that time has turned that young woman, who imagined herself a romantic heroine, into something of a comic character, but I remain fond of her. We are relatives, after all. Like all the places where I’ve actually lived, New York City is much more than a “context” or “setting” for me. Within weeks of my arrival in New York, I was someone else, not because there had been a revolution in my psychological makeup or any trauma. It was simply this: people saw me in a light in which I had never been seen before. Although I had always felt at home with my parents and sisters, I was never really comfortable with my peers. By the time I found myself in college, my feeling that I was not inside but outside had intensified. There’s no question that I cultivated this to some degree, that I prided myself on my difference, but I confess it hurt and surprised me to be regarded as “strange.” I had friends I loved and teachers I loved, but rumors in which I was variously characterized as wild, monkishly studious, or just plain weird haunted my career as a college student. I recall my father telling me with a smile that one of his students had described me as “very unique.” In New York, this all but ended. Whatever exoticism I may have possessed came from my midwestern sincerity and lack of worldly sophistication. Transformations of the self are related to
where
you are, and identity
is
dependent on others. In Minnesota, I felt embattled. I rebelled against a culture that touted “niceness” above truth, that wallowed in an idea of “equality” that had come to mean “sameness” and “intolerance”—not of the sick, dying, ugly, or handicapped but of those who distinguished themselves by talent or beauty or intelligence. The “hoity-toity” were really batted around out there. Pretension wasn’t suffered for an instant, and for a girl who walked around dreaming she was a combination of George Eliot and Nora Charles in
The Thin Man,
life could be hard. In Minnesota, I lusted after every quality that was in short supply—artifice, irony, flamboyant theatricality, fierce intellectual debate, and brilliantly painted lips.
    In New York, “niceness” wasn’t an overriding value, but then neither was “goodness,” a value I frankly and unashamedly clung to for dear life. I had to reorient myself to accommodate a new world. For example, I naively assumed that most people had had some kind of religious education, that religion remained a fact of most people’s lives and provided the ground for moral life. I was startled to discover, however, when we were assigned the first book of the Bible for a literature class, that a majority of my fellow students had never read Genesis. Nevertheless, I wasn’t an “odd duck” in New York, the city that accommodates or ignores all ducks. And despite the harshness of everyday life—the raw, cold, scraping sensation of never leaving the street, because my apartment felt as if it were
in
the street—I was at home in New York. This feeling of being “home at last” corresponds to my idea about the city, an idea shaped by books, movies, and plays, an idea of infinite possibility.
    There is an incident, however, that made me understand what New York is for the people who come here to stay. I had been living in Manhattan for two years. I had met my future husband, and we were invited to a dinner at Westbeth—the housing project in the West Village for artists. I was delighted to be there in that company. I was in love. I was happy without having sought happiness. I vaguely remember wearing something silly, but no one minded. Everyone at the table looked like a marvel to me, but there was one man in particular who shone that night. It seemed to me that he had stepped right out of a Noel Coward play. His jokes were witty, his repartee sharp, and his manner nonchalant. He had written a book on Andy Warhol—no surprise. He was