(Apparently not. Mr. Sullivan also invoked the romantic-love theme in a recent blog post, describing New York as his “mistress,” though he felt “married to Washington,” his once and future home. And in a 2010 exit essay on The New York Times blog City Room, Christopher Solomon, who came from the Pacific Northwest, wrote: “Oh, I pursued you. We went to the opera, to plays, to gritty little restaurants in Queens. You — the city — were always my date. But you never belonged to me. Eventually you, too, moved on, taking your buzzing neon promise of fame to the next newcomer.”)

By framing the relationship as a love affair, it makes the inevitable breakup with the literary capital seem less like a career failure than a coming to the senses after a youthful infatuation.

“In my early twenties, I felt that my life could be one big experiment, and in my mid-twenties I am coming to terms with the fact that no, my life is actually my life,” wrote Chloe Caldwell in her anthology entry, “Leaving My Groovy Lifestyle.”

In putting it so, Ms. Caldwell echoed Ms. Didion’s description of how she rationalized the move that she and her husband made to Los Angeles (they returned to New York in the 1980s): “I talk about how difficult it would be for us to ‘afford’ to live in New York right now, about how much ‘space’ we need. All I mean is that I was very young in New York, and that at some point the golden rhythm was broken, and I am not that young anymore.”

For Ms. Didion, in other words, money was simply an excuse. The reality was, in the relatively cheap New York of the 1960s, even a Vogue junior staff member like her — making $70 a week — could secure a centrally located Manhattan apartment with a view of, she thought, the Brooklyn Bridge (“It turned out the bridge was the Triborough,” she dryly amended) and pay for taxis to parties where she might see “new faces.” Sure, the early days were tough — “some weeks I had to charge food at Bloomingdale’s gourmet shop in order to eat,” she wrote. But in general, she could afford to hang around long enough to determine when she had stayed “too long at the Fair.” In sum, she could afford to fall out of love with the city slowly.