Denise: There are too many novels about New York City. Hundreds and hundreds of books take place in the Big Apple, almost all of which radiate a deep love for this iconic city. It makes sense in a way: New York is seen as the literary capital, and whether or not this is true, this idea brings thousands of would-be authors to flock to the city, hoping to find their big break, and said authors tend to write about where they live, i.e. New York City, and so the idea of New York as the city of dreams has become a self-fulfilling prophecy. 

Now I wrote one, too. 

I never imagined I would write a novel about New York City. Yet it somehow was never a question for me that The Unmapping, a novel about a city rearranging, would be based there. Only after I finished the first draft did I wonder if I made a mistake. That train of thought lasted about ten minutes. In fact, the book became more New York-centric as it went through revisions. An initial draft of the book had more perspectives from around the country, but in later versions, I moved most of them to New York, like it was sucking me in. Setting The Unmapping in New York felt inevitable.

Because this is a story about a city rearranging. From the very first page, everything is different. To make this understandable, the reader needs to know: how exactly is this different? 

Where else but New York? 

Where else do so many people in the country and around the world know the differences between uptown, downtown, Brooklyn, Queens, and the much-bemoaned Staten Island? Where else have we all, through books and movies and TV shows, rode the Subway and eaten the giant pizza slices and stepped carefully over piles of garbage as we held cups of cold coffee while gazing up at the Empire State Building? New York City has a geographical vocabulary that is simply unmatched. The tropes exist because people keep visiting there and moving there and being swept away by the majesty of the city, the harshness of the city, and everything in between. Stories and songs about the city are part of our culture, and even if those stories don’t match reality, they provide a framework to hold onto as everything else falls apart.

New York City has long held a complicated position in my heart. I grew up in Madison, Wisconsin, a two-hour drive from Chicago, which I’d visit on the occasional weekend trip, and that was all the city I needed. When I was accepted to college in upstate New York, I assumed I’d be taking trips to the city often. Alas. Only about once a year did I end up taking the long, dusty bus ride to the Concrete Jungle. And I enjoyed it each time, but concluded that I could never live there. I’m not sure exactly why, other than that about half of my graduating class planned to move there (at least it seemed to me) and I’ve always had an aversion to following the crowd (when I was a kid, I’d always root for the other team at hockey games because “no one else was cheering for them.” Luckily I was young and cute enough to not anger any Badger fans). So it felt like a rebellious stance to say: Nope. Not me. New York City is not for me. 

Unfortunately, one of the cityphiles was my college boyfriend Andrew, which led to our breakup senior year. He knew he wanted to move to New York City; I knew that I didn’t. There was no ill will: we simply didn’t want to hold each other back from our diverging life paths. But maybe there wasn’t enough ill will? Because the breakup didn’t exactly hold. We kept seeing each other off and on, even after we graduated, when I moved to Washington, DC to work in climate advocacy while he moved to New York City to work in real estate development. We continued to visit each other, he coming down to DC in his car, me up to New York on a different smelly bus. But finally, we had to break things off for good. There was no long-term answer for us; visiting every month or so was not enough. So, full of caring for each other, we said goodbye for the last time in Times Square as I waited for the bus that would take me home.

Andrew died a week later, hit by a car while crossing the West Side Highway. 

For a long time after that, I felt deep anger towards New York City. I was angry at the city itself, but also at all the stories that made it seem like the most important city, the only city. The city that’s full of trash bags on the sidewalks and pigeons in your hair. The city that smells of urine even when there’s nowhere to pee. The city where bus drivers will release the contents of their toilet onto the street, right into the gutter (this happened three feet away from me). The city that took my boyfriend from me and killed him less than a year out of college. 

Yet I continued to visit New York at least once a year, if nothing else for the anniversary of Andrew’s death, when I would visit his friends and commemorate the site of the accident with flowers. Over time, my relationship to the city changed. I healed and I learned to love it. It really is unexplainable, and it probably is a cliche. But I love the intensity of crowds swarming into and somehow through each other, like schools of fish, graceful and elegant. I love the two a.m. subway energy and the four p.m. rooftop energy. I love the pizza, yes, the kind you pay two dollars for, and the kind you wait three hours for. I love how close to water you are all the time, be it strolling alongside one of the many rivers or taking the train to the ocean shore at Coney Island. I love being able to throw apple cores in the grass because there are millions of squirrels who will think it’s their lucky day. And I love walking. I love being able to walk for miles and always see something new. I love feeling like one in a million—unseen, reckless. At one point, I even thought I might move there! (It was Covid, my now-husband and I were getting kicked out of our rented DC house, and thought, if we’re going to move, why not move to NYC? Well, there were many reasons why not, notably, our desire for quiet and nature, but it was a fun brief dream). It really feels like the city is a living entity—perhaps a monster, but one that can be tamed if you understand and respect it. 

So it feels right that The Unmapping—which is really about personal transformation more than anything else—should take place here. The city is a catalyst. Things move quickly and people bump into each other. It’s a giant chemistry experiment: what happens when you put hundreds of thousands of people on the same block? Visiting New York is not simply visiting New York. It’s confronting your own self and the stories you’ve told and been told about what a “city of dreams” might be. As I continued to visit over the years, I’ve changed and the city has changed, but there is a core of truth that has remained the same within both of us. 

Andrew died thirteen years ago, and I’ve still never been able to write about my grief in a specific or direct way. I wrote one short story about an old man who captures the souls of the dying, and now, I’ve written a book about a city unraveling. But The Unmapping is not a book about grief, and, in my view, it’s not even a book about New York City, but city-ness in general, cities as the vanguard of society, of climate impacts and technological progress and ideas and growth and art and life. Still, this book would not have been possible without my years-long process of trying to understand why people love this city in particular and falling in love with it myself. 

A year ago, my husband and I moved from DC to my hometown of Madison, Wisconsin. So trips to New York City are not so easy anymore. But I can still explore the city with my heart when I review the first pages of The Unmapping or when I read NK Jemisin’s The City We Became or Lincoln Michel’s Metallic Realms or K. Chess’s Famous Men Who Never Lived or Hank Green’s An Absolutely Remarkable Thing or Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay or Jonathan Lethem’s Chronic City or Hernan Diaz’s Trust or or…any of the many, many books sure to come. 

For now, please step into my particular dream of New York. Read The Unmapping, a story of chaos and transformation. I hope it will be a catalyst for something. For what, I don’t know. I don’t need to know.

The Unmapping by Denise S. Robbins is out June 3, 2025, and is available for pre-order in paperback, ebook, audiobook, and special edition hardback.