Excerpted from Goodbye to All That. During the first half of , I left Brooklyn to spend three months in Moscow.
I had no idea what I was supposed to be doing there. I managed to make it to a squat toilet outside a train station that I had to pay—god, figuring out that transaction! I felt my foreignness emphatically all the time.
I never really came around to the food. My Russian boyfriend was an established writer, and I compared myself with him a lot. It was not a flattering comparison. So I felt like a phony who might be found out at any time.
I was wandering around the city and procrastinating about my book for many hours every day. I was still coasting on the burst of editorial goodwill that had floated me into the book deal, and there were a couple of easy-peasy freelance assignments that had helped me to pay for my plane ticket.
Other than this goofy assignment and my book, I was supposed to be writing something about my impressions of Moscow for an oligarch-funded English-language Russian magazine; my impressions of Moscow were so stupid that even that fluffy publication politely declined to publish them.
