Book Review: The View from Apartment Four

Happy Friday! This was one of those weeks where I’m not sure if it went by fast or slow. It was also one of those weeks that I couldn’t remember what day of the week it was.

During my lunch breaks while working form home I’ve been getting a lot of my reading done. My most recent read has been on my tbr list for months, The View from Apartment Four: On Loving and Leaving New York by Skip Rozin.

In this book, Skip Rozin tells of his life experiences, professional and personal, from the 1960s to the 2010s all while his apartment on the Upper West Side of New York City serves as a home base of sorts. Originally from Ohio, Rozin talks about all the ups and downs of his professional writing career, his aspirations to become a successful, published fiction writer, his journalism career, and all the other cool writing jobs he got through connections he could only have made in New York City. In all the advances and setbacks he faced in his professional career and his personal life, the small rent-controlled apartment he held for more than half of his life was the one constant in his life. It was there that he wrote short stories and mailed out submission after submission to magazines. It was there that he would travel back to after traveling abroad for articles. It’s where he brought his wife and kids on trips to the city.

I found the book to be really interesting and how no matter what was going on in Rozin’s life or the changes going on in the world, this apartment was something he could always rely on and go back to. I found the book especially interesting as I’m an aspiring writer myself and it’s interesting to read about his experiences trying to get published back when the Internet wasn’t around and he was writing on his typewriter.

While the book is about Rozin’s life, it’s also a love letter to New York City of sorts, which I really love. You probably don’t know this, but I was born in New York City. I’ve never lived there, I was raised and still live in New Jersey, but I was born in the city. Living my whole life 45 minutes away from the city, I have gone in countless times throughout my life. There is one thing that Rozin says in his book about the magic of New York City and how it’s got this way of making you believe you can do whatever you want to do and be whoever you want to be,

“…they all come to New York and feel at home because that is the one city certain to have others similar to them. And for those few who see yourselves as unique, unlike anybody else and therefor alien, that’s OK too; New York welcomes you. And probably more important, it will not harass you, because in New York nobody cares what you are.”

I love that quote. Overall, I really enjoyed this book and found it so easy to read as well as captivating to read about Rozin’s life and experiences.