Why I Write About Cities
On distance, attention, and the quiet autobiography hidden inside a city’s streets
“It’s a hell of a responsibility to be yourself. It’s much easier to be somebody else or nobody at all.” — Sylvia Plath
People occasionally ask whether Letters from Paulistas is autobiographical.
My instinctive answer has always been no.
After all, the essays are about São Paulo — cafés, museums, neighborhoods, architecture, immigration, food, history, business, memory, and the countless invisible threads that make a city recognizable to those who live there and mysterious to those who don’t. The protagonist is the city.
I’ve never found writing about myself particularly easy. Not because there is anything extraordinary to tell, but because writing honestly about oneself carries a peculiar responsibility. It requires choosing what to reveal, what to leave unsaid, and how to avoid confusing confession with understanding.
Writing about a city feels different. A city offers distance. It allows observation before explanation, curiosity before certainty, hospitality before exposure. For years, I assumed those were two separate kinds of writing. Lately, I’ve begun to wonder whether they are.
Looking back, I realize that much of my professional life has revolved around helping people enter worlds that were unfamiliar to them. Sometimes that world was a language. Sometimes it was an organization. Sometimes it was a profession. Sometimes it was São Paulo itself.
When expatriates arrive here, they rarely need vocabulary alone. They need context. They need to understand why meetings unfold the way they do, why certain expressions carry unexpected weight, why history still shapes today’s conversations, why neighborhoods tell different stories, and why a city of twelve million people can still feel surprisingly intimate. Language is part of that journey. But language has never been the whole journey.
There is a particular kind of listening required to understand a place like São Paulo — a city that resists easy categorization, that holds four and a half centuries of memory inside its avenues and side streets, that speaks in overlapping tongues and unfinished sentences. To write about it honestly is to practice a discipline of attention: noticing before naming, sitting with contradiction before resolving it into a tidy conclusion. This, I have come to believe, is not so different from the discipline required to understand oneself.
Perhaps that is why Letters exists. Not to explain São Paulo — no city can ever be fully explained — but to introduce it the way one introduces a person they deeply respect: patiently, historically, and with genuine curiosity. Introductions of this kind take time. They resist the shortcuts of summary. They ask the writer to hold back conclusions long enough to let the subject reveal itself on its own terms.
Only recently have I realized that every attempt to understand a place is also an attempt to understand how people learn to inhabit places they did not originally know.
Maybe that is true of cities. Maybe it is true of organizations. Maybe it is true of cultures. And perhaps it is true of ourselves — that we, too, are places we inhabit gradually, learning our own streets and silences the way a newcomer learns a foreign one.
There is a version of this idea that has quietly organized my working life. Helping someone learn a language, or navigate a new profession, or find their footing in an unfamiliar city, has always been less about transmitting information and more about building the conditions for genuine encounter.
The vocabulary matters. The grammar matters.
But what matters more is the capacity to listen without imposing assumptions, to notice the unspoken rules before rushing to respond. Cities teach this the same way cultures do — through patient, repeated exposure to what does not immediately make sense.
I still don’t think Letters is autobiographical in the conventional sense. Yet I have come to suspect that every letter reveals something about the person who wrote it.
Not because it speaks about the author. But because it reveals what the author chose to notice — which street caught the light, which conversation lingered, which silence felt meaningful enough to record.
Perhaps, in the end, attention is the most honest form of self-portrait. We rarely choose what moves us. We only choose whether to write it down.
Works Cited
Plath, Sylvia. The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath. Edited by Karen V. Kukil, Anchor Books, 2000.
Didion, Joan. Slouching Towards Bethlehem. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1968.
Tuan, Yi-Fu. Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience. University of Minnesota Press, 1977.owl.purdue
Said, Edward W. Reflections on Exile and Other Essays. Harvard University Press, 2000.
Content Authenticity Statement
This piece developed through an extended dialogue with AI. The retrieval, the scaffolding, the drafts — those are the machine’s contribution. The intellectual architecture, the named gaps, and the synthesis are mine. The human remains the constitutional authority.