To be like Fran Lebowitz

"Everything in New York is an operatic thing ... so you realise that it's just so hard to live in New York, that when people say, 'Why do you live in New York?' you really can't answer them. Except you know that you have contempt for people who don't have the guts to do it. (They'll say): 'You live in a place where things are just easily done! Where people are nice to you! Where no one's trying to cheat you every five seconds! You call that grown-up life?'" - Fran Lebowitz

IT IS true, what she says. The New York subway will break your spirit, and crush your soul.

The memory of a 45-minute wait for the only train that would take me to the airport to pick up some family members on a rather chilly evening, still lingers like sharp ammonia. Coincidentally, that was how the subway smelled - of piss-stained railway tracks that make up a sturdy structure of the multi-generational family home of rats.

When a train finally comes tunnelling through, you hear a hollow laughter echo through the station. And that is the sound of a locomotive laughing at the slightest idea that you had hoped someone would care that it had been "delayed". (There was also no Internet signal. You couldn't even have doomscrolled.)

Fran Lebowitz will tell you what's wrong with the New York City subway: everything.

It's the ridiculous situation of having art of dogs made out of mosaic tiles adorn the station walls that are caked in dirt. The aesthetics remind you that the broken tiles and cement have not been fixed, as if some art is a suitable compensation to appreciate the tremendous disrepair.

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It is the closure of the L train for half a day because of a foul smell, which we know makes utterly no sense because the trains in New York always smell. The trains carry everyone from bankers to paupers to a copy of The New York Times from the 60s - they reek. ("No one in the subway system has any spirit left. They've beaten it out of us. It would take one subway ride for the Dalai Lama to turn into a lunatic.")

Strip out the hyperbole, and you'd know she is right because it isn't just a complaint about a transportation system.

It is a rightly raging commentary on how an island teeming with riches and tough talk can't seem to transport people adequately from point A to point B, without them feeling like they are about to lose their minds.

Fran Lebowitz, in fewer words, finds cutting wit to turn every situation observed into a well-spun narrative about her beloved city. This has been hers since she was 18 - that's 52 years of acerbic material.

So just so we're clear, she castigates other things on her docuseries, Pretend It's A City.

In just seven short episodes directed by Martin Scorsese, she hates on Times Square, with a lone symbol of calm being a book kiosk standing in that neon-light-polluted neighbourhood that nobody buys literature from. ("Do you think it's fair to bring a book into Times Square? It's not fair to the books!")

She quarrels with Spike Lee over the merits of fights as a sport, or sports in general. She may have watched Muhammad Ali at Madison Square Garden but found it "unfortunate" to have a fight in the middle of an otherwise "wonderful fashion and cultural event". ("I cannot believe that it is legal to watch human beings beat each other up as a sport. You know what's illegal? Cock-fighting. But so we eat chickens, but they can't fight with each other, because it's too brutal.")

But what all that prickliness reveals too is that she delights just as openly with progress. She didn't think the #MeToo movement would happen, but is proud to see it has.

For her misanthropic ways, the one-time-only children's book author likes speaking to kids for their unvarnished perspective on the world. ("I never met anyone who didn't have a very smart child. What happens to these children, you wonder, when they reach adulthood?")

She says and here, Singaporeans may agree - that people frequently complain about New York because something they love or care about has changed, presumably for the worse, in their minds.

And across five decades of being enraged at her city, she would say that while no one can truly afford to live in New York, eight million people still do. "How do we do this? We don't know. It's a mystery to us. We don't have a clue. We don't know but we're still here. So you can come here without knowing how you're going to live here and somehow you will do enough things to live here. It's as simple as that."

To love something honestly for so long can be infuriating, and to be able to find a deep-belly laugh at it all, is to persist. And with that, the hope is in resilience. In 2021, may we find all that sardonic wit we need to carry on.