Briohny Doyle has been a wedding celebrant, an academic, a casual greengrocer and a novelist. But when she hit 30, she panicked: life did not look like the adulthood she’d always envisioned. She became obsessed with weddings, spent “three weeks’ pay” on hiring a vintage car, and drove to Las Vegas.
“I didn’t have any sense of where my life was going,” Doyle explains. “At 30, you are legitimately an adult. People no longer say, ‘Oh, you’re young, you’ve got plenty of time.’ You’re supposed to have become something.”
In Adult Fantasy – her first book after last year’s thrilling cli-fi, The Island Will Sink – the Melbourne writer combines personal essay and cultural criticism to explore what it means to be grown up. Situated firmly within the battle between millennials and baby boomers (whose fault is it, exactly, that no one can afford a bloody house?), the book explores economic disparity, social trends and the real-life impact of romantic comedies upon our imagination.
It is a consolation to any underachiever, bursting with wry humour and sharp insight, while unearthing the contradictions of western cultural narratives.
Guardian Australia: How do we define adulthood?
Briohny Doyle: The markers that we immediately think of are leaving home, getting married, having kids, buying a house, having a career. People are increasingly not hitting them by the time they are meant to. Either they are choosing not to, or they feel locked out of it.
Adult Fantasy fits within the intergenerational wars that play out in op-eds and tabloid headlines. Can you tell me why millennials are often accused of not growing up?
It’s not a new thing to blame a younger generation for not being adults in the way they are supposed to be. In my book, I cite articles that go back to the early 1900s that blame younger people for bad things.
Even my dad is always telling me the story about like, the five houses he’s owned. But we are reacting to a different economic reality. It’s a shame to consider that baby boomers got the opportunities they got because they are charismatic enough, or go-getters. They weren’t. It’s actually much more structural than that.
For instance, heaps more people have university degrees than they used to, and we still buy degrees with the idea that we will become something at the end of it. But while psychology students aren’t capped, the number of practicing psychologists are.
We are encouraged to see our future as something to invest in, but we often don’t get what we think we’re buying.
Can we talk about smashed avocado?
I personally don’t like going out for breakfast. It’s really stressful to spend that much money early in the morning!
But this is an example of a simplified, clickbaity article that lays the blame on the individual, when really it’s a lot more structural than that: we have an ageing population. We have an unchecked housing market. And buying a house is also about class consolidation. People who have made money off property just can’t see why other people can’t do that.
And in Australia if you’re poor and you’re vulnerable, you’re allowed to be constantly assessed whether you deserve property or not.
Why do you think this is such an emotion-fuelled argument between the generations?
We have a cultural narrative that owning a house is the most important thing you can do.
Instead of buying a house, you got a dog. You found her when you were travelling around Australia, and your relationship with her was very important.
Cassady was an excellent brown dog, a ridgeback cross staffy. She and I lived most of her first year in my van. She grew from an incorrigible pup into an undignified, single-minded, fiercely loyal companion who was with me from age 19 to 30.
All through my 20s I was responsible for someone. I was bound to her – but she was also a place of home, of security and stability for me. I am thankful to her, it really helped me grow up.
When she passed away, I felt incredibly lost. I couldn’t work out what was meaningful to me in my life. I’ve come to think maturity is about looking at the things that give my life meaning and standing behind them. And through this I realised I want to be a caretaker but not a mother; now I foster dogs.
Perhaps someone arrives at adulthood when they start taking responsibility for someone other than themselves.
I worry about the characterisation of being young as being selfish. In your early 20s you feel out of control – it can take a while to grow and learn enough about yourself in order to help other people.
But I do believe in our relationships and our connections to each other, and the degree to which we can be ethical in the world. If that’s not a marker of adulthood, it should be.
