Content Warning: This book includes strong language, themes of grief, aging, LGBTQ+ identity, and the struggles of a changing city. While it handles these topics with care, some content may be emotionally intense.

What Do We Owe to the Places That Made Us?

A famous Japanese philosophy, mono no aware, describes the bittersweet awareness of impermanence—the understanding that all things, no matter how beloved, will eventually fade. C.O. Moed’s It Was Her New York is a book steeped in this truth. It is about a city that is disappearing, a mother who is slipping away, and a daughter grasping at memories before they vanish completely.

But unlike most memoirs, this is not a quiet reflection. It is loud, brash, and unapologetic—much like the New York it honors.

A City That Fights Back

New York has always been a city of reinvention. Immigrants arrived and built homes, industries grew and collapsed, neighborhoods shifted and reshaped themselves. The Lower East Side, once a working-class stronghold, is now a playground for the wealthy. What happens to those who are left behind in the wake of “progress”?

Moed refuses to romanticize this change. She doesn’t just mourn what is lost; she calls it out. Through her eyes, we see not just the physical erasure of familiar storefronts, but the slow erasure of identity, culture, and history. This memoir doesn’t just remember—it fights to keep the past alive.

A Daughter’s War Against Time

At the heart of the book is Florence, a Juilliard-trained pianist, a woman who commands grammar even when confined to bed, and a mother whose presence is as formidable as the city itself.

Moed does not sugarcoat the difficulties of watching a parent decline. She captures the humor, the frustration, the love, and the loss in raw, striking prose. The conversations between mother and daughter are sometimes sharp, sometimes tender, but always real. They read like battle strategies—negotiations with time itself.

One of the most powerful sections details Moed’s fight to keep her mother from being admitted to the hospital. It is not just about medical decisions—it is about dignity, autonomy, and the desperate attempt to hold onto control when everything else is slipping away.

Who Should Read This?

This book is not for those who seek nostalgia without discomfort. It is for those who know that love is often complicated, that cities do not owe us permanence, and that sometimes, survival is an act of defiance.

It will resonate deeply with readers who have watched a loved one fade and those who have witnessed their childhood streets become unrecognizable. It belongs on the shelf next to works like Patti Smith’s Just Kids or Vivian Gornick’s The Odd Woman and the City—memoirs that do not just tell a story but live within them.

Final Thoughts

There is a moment in the book where Moed recalls Florence diving into the ocean, swimming out so far she becomes a speck on the horizon. It is a perfect metaphor for the book itself—an act of movement, of resistance, of refusing to stay put.

Some books fade into memory. This one refuses to.

Spotlyts Story Award

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