This wasn't the only element of the book that was hard for me to connect to. I had this sense (one I've had before when reading contemporary novels) that I was looking in on contemporary culture from a real remove. Both the protagonist and her boss (the mom) have these tight groups of girlfriends, something that feels to me, from observation — this is maybe going to sound a bit weird — to be a feature of modern life for people younger than me. I do have women friends and some active group texts, but the tight-knit groups described in this book feel like something I only know about from social media. (The mom in the book is 12 years or so younger than I am now, and the protagonist another 7 years younger than her.) Or maybe if I were a mother myself I would have a group of mom friends — who knows.
To be fair to Such a Fun Age — which I actually found engaging, smart, and nuanced — it's about a lot more than the problematic white mom. What it's really about is the protagonist, Emira, finding her own agency. She's surrounded by people — some of them older, richer, white people — who think they know better than her what's best for her, and no one is really paying attention to what Emira wants for herself. She doesn't seem to know herself, so in the end she still ends up acting at someone else's direction, but in this case it's one of her girlfriends, who does have her best interests in mind, and isn't acting out of some white guilt/white savior complex. But I guess what I'm saying is that she really doesn't find her own agency.
*The irony is not lost on me that when I read Death and the Dervish — my favorite book from last year — I was like, "Wow, I can really relate to this 18th century Bosnian dervish who is having an existential crisis," but books about white women who are my contemporaries and from my own social class leave me feeling bemused. (This isn't uniformly true: see, for instance Outline.)
