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New York Times bestselling author Julie Lythcott-Haims is back with a groundbreakingly frank guide to being a grown-up, Your Turn.What does it mean to be an adult? In the twentieth century, psychologists came up with five markers of adulthood: finish your education, get a job, leave home, marry, and have children. Since then, every generation has been held to those same markers. Yet so much has changed about the world and living in it since that sequence was formulated. All of those markers are choices, and they're all valid, but any one person's choices along those lines do not make them more or less an adult.
A former Stanford dean of freshman and undergraduate advising and author of the perennial bestseller
How to Raise an Adult and the lauded memoir
Real American, Julie Lythcott-Haims has encountered hundreds of twentysomethings (and thirtysomethings, too), who, faced with those markers, feel they're just playing the part of "adult," while struggling with anxiety, stress, and general unease. In
Your Turn, Julie offers compassion, personal experience, and practical strategies for living a more authentic adulthood, as well as inspiration through interviews with dozens of voices from the rich diversity of the human population who have successfully launched their adult lives.
Being an adult, it turns out, is not about any particular checklist; it is instead a process, one you can get progressively better at over time, becoming more comfortable with uncertainty and gaining the knowhow to keep going. Once you begin to practice it, being an adult becomes the most complicated yet also the most abundantly rewarding and natural thing. And Julie Lythcott-Haims is here to help readers take their turn.
List of contents
Introduction
1. Adulting (What Exactly Is It?)
2. Tag, You're It (The Terror and Joy of Fending for Yourself)
3. You're Not Perfect (You're Here to Learn and Grow)
4. Be Good (Unlock a Major Achievement)
5. Stop Pleasing Others (They Have No Idea Who You Are)
6. Get Out of Neutral (The Tragedy of Unused Potions)
7. Start Talking to Strangers (Humans Are Key to Your Survival)
8. Money Matters (How to Make It, Keep It, and Make It Work for You)
9. Take Good Care (of Yourself)
10. How to Cope (When the Shit Hits the Fan)
11. Make Things Better (From Your Town to the World Beyond, Why You Should Try)
12. Unleash Your Superpowers (Mindfulness, Kindness, and Gratitude)
13. Above All Else, Keep Going
Appendix: Resources
Commitment to Inclusion
Acknowledgments
Index
About the author
Julie Lythcott-Haims is the
New York Times bestselling author of
How to Raise an Adult and
Real American. She holds a BA from Stanford, a JD from Harvard Law School, and an MFA from California College of the Arts. She resides in the Bay Area with her partner, their two itinerant young adults, and her mother.
