Never Can Say Goodbye Writers on Their Unshakable Love for New York

“Gets right to the heart of what it feels like to be a New Yorker—slightly insane, broke, and madly in love. These essays made me laugh out loud with recognition. New York City isn’t an easy place to live, but is anything easy really worth doing?” —Emma Straub, author of The Vacationers

The follow-up to the award-winning anthology Goodbye to All That, Never Can Say Goodbye is an exuberant celebration of New York, featuring contributions from luminaries such as Elizabeth Gilbert, Susan Orlean, Rosanne Cash, Nick Flynn, Whoopi Goldberg, Phillip Lopate, Owen King, Amy Sohn, Alexander Chee, and many others. These essays take place in dive bars and museums, cinemas and old restaurants, horse-drawn carriages and subway cars, capturing the true essence of life in New York. Never Can Say Goodbye is ultimately a love letter to the Big Apple and a must-have for every lover of New York—regardless of whether or not you call the city home.

Sari Botton is the editor of the anthology Never Can Say Goodbye: Writers on Loving and Leaving New York and a writer whose work has appeared in The New York Times, New York Magazine, The Sun, The Village Voice, Harper’s Bazaar, More, Marie Claire, and other publications. She is the editorial director of the TMI Project (TMIProject.org), a nonprofit organization that holds memoir and true storytelling workshops in jails, shelters, veterans’ hospitals, cancer wards, schools, and other places where people don’t usually get to tell their stories or be heard. Botton lives in upstate New York, where she still keeps a MetroCard in her wallet.

Contributions by Elizabeth Gilbert, Susan Orlean, Roseanne Cash, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Phillip Lopate, Nick Flynn, Adelle Waldman, Colin Harrison, Owen King, Amy Sohn, Patricia Engel, Elliott Kalan, Jenna Wortham, Adam Sternbergh, Anna Holmes, Starlee Kine, Rachel Syme, Stephen Elliott, Julie Klam, Kathleen Hale, Maureen Johnson, Isaac Fitzgerald, Saeed Jones, and Jon-Jon Goulian.