ADULT FANTASY

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. Every day she read editorials about how her millennial cohort — dubbed the ‘Peter Pan generation' — were reluctant 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 a smart and spirited enquiry, Doyle examines whether millennials are redefining what it means to be an adult today. 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?

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.