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A highly topical and wryly humorous inquiry into the millennial generation, Doyle looks at how we respond when our cultural clock starts ticking, and asks: what is an adult, and how do you become one?
About the author
Briohny Doyle is a writer and academic, and an inaugural winner of the Scribe Nonfiction Prize for Young Writers. In 2017, she was a recipient of an Endeavour Fellowship for research based at Yale and the University of California, Santa Cruz, and was nominated for the Matt Richell Award for New Writer of the Year. Her debut novel, The Island Will Sink, was published to acclaim in 2016.
Summary
‘I pictured myself a wine-dark streak in a TV desert, ears too full of the summer wind to hear that ominous ticking in the sky: the sound of a cultural clock counting me out of youth.’
Briohny Doyle turned thirty without a clear idea of what her adult life should look like. The world she lived in — with its global economic uncertainty, political conservatism, and precarious employment conditions — didn’t match the one her parents grew up in. She read article after article about the reluctance of millennials to embrace the traditional markers of adulthood: a stable job, a house in the suburbs, a nuclear family. But do these emblems of maturity mean the same thing today as they did thirty years ago?
In this smart, spirited enquiry, Doyle examines whether millennials are redefining what it means to be an adult now. Blending personal essay and cultural critique, she ventures into the big claims of philosophy and the neon buzz of pop culture to ask: in a rapidly changing world, do the so-called adult milestones distract us from other measures of maturity?
Foreword
A wry and topical inquiry into how we respond when our cultural clock starts ticking.
Additional text
'Briohny Doyle brings a sobering and deeply insightful perspective to the intergenerational war over what it means to be an adult.'
