Novel Neighborhoods - NYTimes.com Two years ago, when a magazine named me one of five Brooklyn writers to look out for, I was thrilled and gratified, but troubled by just one thing: I didn't live in Brooklyn, and never had. These days if you are a writer, especially a youngish writer, people generally assume you live in one of four or five Brooklyn neighborhoods. And I did spend a lot of time in the borough, visiting friends and co-hosting a reading series in Park Slope. But I had never meant to mislead anyone! I wondered how quickly I could move out of Manhattan before anyone learned the truth. I told a friend about my predicament, and he laughed, pointing out what a reversal it was from the contempt Manhattanites used to have for the unfortunates who lived elsewhere. I was new to all this interborough politicking, having learned only recently that some people didn't consider the outer boroughs part of "the city," that they'd once looked down their noses at Brooklyn, and still turned them up at Queens. I was new to these conversations because I was new to New York. I'd moved here the year before to be a writer, in that dazed way that I imagine aspiring actors and actresses go to Hollywood - without a plan or an idea of what exactly I was looking for. James Baldwin and Edna St. Vincent Millay had lived here, and I would live here, too, walk the same streets, and hope some of the magic would rub off on me. And if it didn't, well - at least I'd be among like-minded people. Except I'd miscalculated: I'd taken a sublet uptown in Morningside Heights, and even before I'd finished unpacking, well-meaning New Yorkers began telling me I'd established myself in the wrong place. I'd arrived in Manhattan too many blocks north, and decades too late. I'd missed the heyday of the literati - had missed the West Village, the Upper West Side, the East Village, the Lower East Side. I'd missed the dirty '80s, and the glamorous '90s - the yachts, the salons, the outlaw parties. "Manhattan," a friend declared, "is dead." All the writers had long since left the island for Brooklyn, in search of cheaper rents. The longer I lived here - listening to New Yorkers tell me about New York - the more I began to understand. Nearly every reading, book party or gallery opening I attended happened in Brooklyn. So it makes sense that my first big New York break came to me in Brooklyn, too - in Williamsburg, at a reading I gave to a group of 20-somethings in an overheated gallery after hours. In the audience was a sweet stranger who e-mailed me the next day asking for the story, and who later sneaked a copy of it onto the desk of a magazine editor who worked in his building. The editor published the story, and then someone else - who would soon become the editor of my first novel - wrote to me, asking if I had anything in the works. That's the kind of story that can happen only in New York - the kind of story I moved here to find. It was rumored that Park Slope had the highest number of writers per capita of anywhere else in the country, and inevitably, I became one of them. After moving to the neighborhood, I found the perfect cafe, and worked there nearly every day, surrounded by other writers. One day I wandered down the street and into the Community Bookstore, and found the bookshop of my dreams. In the evenings I sat on my stoop, eating frozen yogurt. I got to know the babies in our building. I got to know the dogs. I signed a lease. I was finally throwing down roots. And then I moved again. Even before my lease was up, I was back in Manhattan, on the border of the West Village and Chelsea. I hadn't planned it, wasn't looking, but when a rent-stabilized one-bedroom apartment came up, I pounced. I agonized a little, but ultimately I made the decision New Yorkers have always had to make, the reason Brooklyn has become what it is: I chose the place I could both live in and afford, that could fit my books, that could make my life as a writer in New York sustainable. So in another comic reversal, I found myself explaining to my horrified Brooklyn friends - who couldn't understand how I could ever choose to move away from the action - that I actually loved Manhattan. There were plenty of bookstores, a lot of great food, and it would take me less time to get to many parts of Brooklyn than when I actually lived in the borough. Finally, I reminded them of what the editor of the "five Brooklyn writers" article said back in 2010, when I sent word that while I loved being included, the truth was I lived in Manhattan. He responded that it was all right, that my "corporeal presence" when running the reading series in Park Slope was enough. Besides, he knew I'd live in Brooklyn one day soon. He was right then, and who knows - someday I may prove him right, again. But in the meantime, I'm happy where I am. Besides, I heard a rumor last week that all the fancy young writers are now moving to a new neighborhood: Morningside Heights. Catherine Chung is the author of the novel "Forgotten Country."