For those thinking about leaving New York, or about why they've already left, there is Never Can Say Goodbye, a collection of essays by writers in the same shoes. Driving both the New York-born and those E.B. White famously called the "person who was born somewhere else and came to New York in quest of something," from the city these days is a special mix of the age-old Big Apple burnout and something new: surviving financially and spiritually in a city that now vies with Dubai for its rapid-fire construction and streetscape transformation, its untouchable repository of the world’s wealth, and its breathtaking costs of living.

New York City, always a place that’s thrived on being both loved and hated, is especially easy to love and hate these days. There is far less crime than in recent decades; food, along with coffee and cocktails, is of a new, giddying quality and variety; there are well-tended parks and accessible waterfronts to stroll along, even at night; there is an ever-increasingly heavy-handed police force, a near-fifty-percent relative poverty rate, and the city’s main export, a product referred to as culture, is said to be disappearing on a daily basis.

With projects like the globally beloved High Line drawing five million visitors a year by cashing in on the charm of a city that no longer exists due, in part, to its own presence, the 2014 rendition of NYC is a vertiginous mix of beautification, tourism, urban development, overworked citizens, and a three-layer gentrification made of billionaire homes atop skyscrapers, mall-style chain stores, and new small businesses based on old-timey American values from somewhere deep in the middle of the country. It’s a confusing time for many here, and that ambivalence is lovingly explored by this book’s contributors, authors both new and long-publishing, with details like the five excerpted below.

Roseanne Cash, singer/songwriter and essay writer

"I crave the knowledge of the old New Yorkers, the eighty- and ninety-year-olds who have been here their whole lives. I know a few. I know a woman who took the subway to the Pierre to get married during the record-breaking blizzard of 1947, carrying her wedding dress in a bag. There was no other way for her to get to her wedding in twenty-six inches of snow. [...] I like to imagine her in the train, holding her dress, on the way to her future, stepping out into a New York I can only dream of. [...] If I long to time-travel to the New York City of the distant past, to the weddings in the blizzard of '47, to the Bowery billiard salons and the homes of the great writers, do the recently arrived young New Yorkers dream of my New York?"

Anne Waldman, author of The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P.

"The New York that is dear to me, the one that took me ten years to find -- because I am slow and stubborn and prone to missteps -- has nothing to do with celebrity or wealth, or five-star restaurants or, for that matter, organic vegetables or artisinal anything. New York for me is a group of people who, in my early thirties, meant the world to me, a group of not-quite-struggling-but-not-quite-arrived writers who supported each other over endless cups of coffee and glasses of wine, who listened to one another's romantic travails, and learned about each other’s families and read and believed in one another's work."

Susan Orlean, author and staff writer for the New Yorker

"It was about this time that I began to get used to living here: I knew uptown from downtown, and I had finally figured out that the guys in my parking garage were denting my car because I hadn’t tipped them, and I had come to realize that there were certain things about the city that I would never understand. I wouldn’t say I gave up: I simply started taking things in stride. This was when Gray’s was selling its frankfurters for fifty cents [...] I still dropped in for a hot dog now and then, but I stopped pestering the countermen with questions about papayas."

Stephen Elliott, writer, filmmaker, and founding editor of The Rumpus

"I had a friend who lived in Williamsburg and another who lived in Park Slope, but that’s an entirely different story. My friend had come up to New York to be where things were “happening.” Later he got married and moved back to San Francisco, where years later, during a rolling blackout, I thought I noticed him bent over a table full of cocaine. But in 2004 he opened his apartment to me until his roommate could no longer stand it and changed the lock on the doors, at least emotionally."

Owen King, novelist and short-story writer

"Look, you know that New York CIty is tough [...] but at the heart of it is an idea that’s as American as it gets: If you can put up with this fucking town, then whatever else you are, you’re one of us. I treasure that bond. It’s frank and it’s decent and it speaks to the real bottom line, which is that our lives are so short, there’s no time for bullshit."