Today, a book deal like this isn’t considered a risk. “Quarter Life Poetry” falls perfectly in line with a booming genre: the woe-is-us millennial struggle book. The publishing industry is awash in memoirs and comedy musings from 20-somethings, most of whom were discovered on blogs and social media.
Millennials, Siegel said, grew up with economic security and the notion that they could be anything they wanted, only to find themselves graduating from college into a world that hadn’t recovered from the Great Recession. Poems like hers, and the slew of other books about the struggles of being her age, aim to be painfully honest about the difficulties.
The exception might be “Not That Kind of Girl,” the book millennial icon Lena Dunham published at age 28. But Dunham was already nearly a household name from her HBO show “Girls.”
The popularity of the sitcom’s messy and self-confessional nature certainly paved the way for interest in books such as “Quarter Life Poetry.” Still, being dismayed in your 20s is not actually a new phenomenon. Before Dunham, there was Emily Gould, the Internet’s first queen of oversharing, who blended heavy doses of self-analysis into her takedowns of the New York elite for Gawker and landed a book deal; so did Joyce Maynard way back in 1972, after she spilled her jaded take on growing up in the 1960s for the New York Times. Most notably, perhaps, was Elizabeth Wurtzel, who published her memoir “Prozac Nation” in 1994, when she was just 26.
“When I wanted to write ‘Prozac Nation,’ they thought it should be a novel because no one in their 20s wrote a memoir,” Wurtzel said. “You can’t imagine, it was a whole different world. Nobody thought it was a good idea.”
The Average 29 year old: living with a partner in the suburbs without a bachelor’s degree
Instead, the average 29-year-old did not graduate from a four-year university, but she did start college; held several jobs, including more than two in the last three years; is not as likely to be married as her parents at this age, but is still likely to be living with somebody; is less likely to own a home than 15 years ago, but despite the story of urban renewal, is more likely to live outside of a dense urban area like Brooklyn or Washington, D.C.
Leadingchurch.com 