The Work of Escaping from New York

Sorry, Lena Dunham: The only good "Escape from New York" starred Kurt Russell and didn't require a New Yorker subscription

Y’all are gonna miss meow when I’m gone

The farewell to New York essay arrives with the regularity of subway delays and more emotional ballast than the hull of a mid-19th century whaling ship in hot pursuit of Moby Dick. The latest portentous offering belongs to Girls creator and star Lena Dunham,¹ who recently informed readers of The New Yorker that she has broken up with the city that birthed her. The decision warrants four thousand words and the gravitas normally reserved for first responder funerals and diplomatic communiqués announcing the end of military conflicts.

Dunham tells us she "cannot tell you the moment that New York began for me, only that I began in New York." She was born into the city, carried by her mother through SoHo when it was still an industrial wasteland rather than a shopping mall with better lighting. As a child she, like the feline protagonist of Disney’s Oliver & Company, feared the subway and was traumatized when a man attempted to defecate on her doorstep. The city terrified her, yet there she remained, waiting for transformation.²

The New York goodbye has become a literary genre unto itself, a sermon delivered from the mount of accumulated urban wisdom. Joan Didion did it with "Goodbye to All That,"³ explaining that the city belongs to the very young. Dunham's grandmother insisted New York was no place for a child. Dunham eventually decided it was no place for her, departing for the fey/elfin mysteries of Wales and settling in London, where the streets are wider and she feels at peace calling seltzer "sparkling water."

Reading these farewell declarations is like listening to a departing neighbor explain at excruciating length why their new McMansion and accompanying homeowners association will be superior to yours. The subtext is always the same: I have outgrown this place. I have changed. I am special for having seen through the area’s charms.

Here’s the thesis and the tea, sis: the only "Escape from New York" content worth consuming was directed by John Carpenter and stars former minor league baseball player Kurt Russell as the iconic Snake Plissken. In that 1981 dystopian classic, Manhattan has been converted into a maximum security prison where criminals roam free. When the President's plane crashes inside, convicted bank robber Snake is offered a pardon to go in and rescue him. Unlike Dunham, Snake doesn't need 2,000 words to express his feelings about the city. He just wants out and has to wrestle "King of the Heart Punch" Ox Baker to do so.⁴

The urban exodus narrative follows its own tired formula. First comes the crushing realization that the narrator was never truly happy in the metropolis. Then the catalogue of complaints — too fast, too noisy, too dirty. Finally, the blissful discovery that life exists beyond the five boroughs, that bagels elsewhere, while inferior, are merely part of the sacrifice for newfound peace.

The "Why I Left New York" genre has metastasized across media platforms since the 2010s, with notable examples cluttering the digital pages of Jezebel, VICE, and countless personal blogs. A 2017 Jezebel piece even jokingly noted that "the rate of essays published about people leaving New York has seen an increase of 400 percent," as well as satirical responses like "Hello to All That: Why I'm Staying in New York Until I Die," which begged departing residents to "please don't write a 'Leaving New York' essay. It makes us suspect that that was your plan all along."⁵

The reality is simpler. People move. They leave cities for suburbs, suburbs for farms, farms for hippie communes or militia complexes. They follow jobs, partners, parents, whims. They flee high rents and seek backyards. This has been happening since humans first built settlements. Yet only the departure from certain cities — New York, San Francisco, occasionally Los Angeles — demands ceremonial annotation in our failing legacy publications.

The writer who leaves New York imagines their departure diminishes the city somehow, as if their absence creates a void that Manhattan's remaining eight million residents will feel acutely. They believe their story of urban disillusionment holds universal meaning, that their particular complaints about subway delays or sidewalk shit heaps represent a deeper truth.

This conceit is uniquely metropolitan. No one pens farewell essays to Hays, Kansas — this despite the fact that The New York Times has told us that little "Paris of the Plains" has one hell of a prairie art scene. A smaller city doesn't demand renunciation because it never promised salvation in the first place, only sanctuary.

I need to return to Lena Dunham’s description of her Manhattan childhood because she does hand over to posterity some truly precious observations: she loathed "the smell of rotting fish on Canal Street" and Central Park because she once saw "an ailing pigeon, laboring through its final breaths, sitting atop what looked to be a nest of its own intestines." She tells us she "hated St. Marks Place, because I had seen a handsome young guy asleep on a stoop with a needle in his neck," and she hated "Sixteenth and Third — inconveniently, the block my school was on — because I had once passed a dapper elderly gentleman in a camel overcoat, who'd smiled warmly, then begun to twitch and let loose a sudden stream of shocking expletives." Perish the thought!

Dunham writes that her relationship with New York ended like "the most mature sort of breakup — the sort where we can still have coffee sometimes." Relationships end, cities continue. London, her new love that is — at least in the opinion of someone who has stayed in each for the grand total of about a month — equally fine and equally crummy, will eventually disappoint her too. The skyline may be more modest and the British Museum more filled with purloined pottery, but the humanzees remain the same complicated creatures they were in Manhattan.

The city dweller who moves to Wales or Washington state or rural Connecticut isn't escaping anything except perhaps the highest of all rents. They're simply trading one set of problems for another, exchanging familiar annoyances for novel ones. The peace they find isn't in the new location but in the temporary relief of unfamiliarity.

Living in scene-kid cities has always seemed like an expensive way to be uncomfortable. Most ugly Americans (myself included) make ruthlessly practical choices about where to live, prioritizing family connections, affordable housing, manageable commutes. They don't expect their zip code to complete them. They don't need to publicly divorce their hometown when they leave.

The goodbye essay reveals more about the writer than the city. It shows someone who believed that a place could transform them, someone who expected streets and buildings to provide meaning that can only come from within. The disappointment isn't that New York failed them; it's that no external circumstance — not even the world's most celebrated city — can fulfill the promises we make to ourselves. After all, even when cruising down Chicago’s Magnificent Mile in a leased Jaguar with a team of escorts in tow, you’re still just a humanzee in a coupe.

So the great Dunham, that zaftig It Girl of the Obama decade, has left New York. The city continues unaltered, its nothing-to-see-here rhythms and no-eye-contact folkways unchanged by the presence of her absence. Her departure deserves neither celebration nor mourning, just the acknowledgment we give to any personal choice. Live there or do not. There is no goodbye.

1. Still a girl, I suppose, in the sense that millennial-hood is the kingdom where no “kid” ever ages and dies — no kid who matters, that is.

2. Look, I've always regarded NYC as a cesspool, but one that it is perfectly fine for people to live in (most people live in cesspools; it’s what we do). I've chosen to build my life where housing costs don't require selling vital organs and where I can park without taking out a second mortgage. But if you enjoy living in a shoebox while paying Monaco prices for the privilege, more power to you. The scene is the scene, whether you're working that ridiculously overproduced art-left hustle or that low-IQ dissident-right Dimes Square angle — you do you and get that bag before you get got, even if that bag is much smaller than what fellow Pittsburgher Andy Warhola was able to seize through his assembly-line production of pop-culture detritus.

What gets me is the profound silliness of Dunham's city trauma. Having grown up on a farm, I watched livestock getting put down, chickens being dispatched, and various varmints being eliminated as a regular part of daily life. A dying pigeon on a sidewalk or a huge heap of feces isn't a life-altering event — it's Tuesday. As Epictetus might observe, nothing is shocking in itself; only your reaction to it can be shocking. The New York departure essay genre isn't about the city — it's about the writer's delicate sensibilities colliding with basic urban miseries that millions navigate without needing therapy or a book deal. When you treat ordinary city inconveniences as personal affronts requiring literary exorcism, perhaps the problem was never the address.

3. That link takes you to the Didion essay, but I much prefer I, Claudius author Robert Graves’ World War 1 memoir of the same title.

4. This scene, viewable below, is only trumped, as cinematic slugfests go by the subsequent Carpenter-helmed fight from They Live that featured the talents of pro wrestler “Rowdy” Roddy Piper and Keith David.

5. It’s hard to understate how many of these thumbsucking essays appeared during the second Obama term. Nearly all of them have been memoryholed, much like the Great Chill Wars of that same period (although the “Against Chill” side had its merits, I was and remain on team chill). “Quit lit” was another staple of this era, and Slate (remember them?) anointed “ya boi here” a “king” of the genre. But, formulaic though it was, it at least had more meat on the bones than these insubstantial vegan substitutes.