2022 in books: #3, Such a Fun Age by Kiley Reid
Hello! Feel free to skip this italicised section if you’ve read any of my other 2022 wrap up blogs!
A little bit of background: since the 6th grade (14 years ago!) I have had a personal mission I call “The Million Page Project.” This has taken the shape of paper logs, excel sheets, blogs, websites and most recently — an increasingly active twitter handle that talks sporadically about books and incessantly about all my other random thoughts.
The goal is to read a million pages before I die. Why? Because my 6th grade teacher set a challenge to the school to collectively read a million pages in a year and I — knowing nothing about scale — was like hmm, I could probably do that alone?
The number I’ve gotten to so far is 163,480 pages or 454 books (as of Dec 22) for anyone who’s wondering. But to be more honest, it’s not about the number — it’s just a way for me to do something I love and catalogue it. As I read, I try to review the books in my own sprawling way to capture how it made me feel, and that’s what I’ll be sharing here. It’ll have spoilers, no coherent summary of plot and often the character names will be missing. But what it will have is a whole lot of heart!
My third recommendation, in no particular order: Such a Fun Age by Kiley Reid which I read in January.
Great book. I really am in a Rom-com era with my reading and I picked this up expecting the same but unlike other books I’ve tried outside the genre recently, it did not bore! Somehow with this book, although you are given access to these characters in intimate moments and with their internal monologues, they remain elusive. There’s just something so real about their incompleteness, how you never fully get a grip on them and their actions never fully make sense.
Reminds me of Rooney’s “Normal People” quote: ‘You need to imagine people to love them.’ The implication being they’ll always be incomplete, regardless of how much you love; how much you try.
There are some real moments of second hand embarrassment in this book but not in a cringey way — just because the characters deal with race and their own drama in the most real way — which is spectacularly awkwardly.
I love that the main character isn’t omnipresent, all knowing and wise or anything, she’s just living her life the best way she can. And usually if you don’t want a character who is perfect and always morally upstanding the author will make them do some bad stuff to make them more real, but in this book she doesn’t do that. The main character never really does anything wrong but she also doesn’t have an internal monologue that catalogues all the wrongs around her/passes perfect judgement/is our moral vision. We kind of see what she sees and she moves on and we’re like — wait, that was not okay! And she knows it’s not okay but it’s almost like a habit of shrugging off and moving on. In that sense I felt kind of like the white mom after the grocery store scene — the main character just wanted to move on but there’s an alarm in me that was like “Racism! Racism! Wait shouldn’t we be outraged? Why aren’t you reacting more!”
And I think that’s the point. That all the white people in her orbit want to make her story about race. And in a way it is a little about race. But not ALL about it you know? And she can move out of that space if she wants, even if we are tempted to act out our solidarity by raising all these loud alarms.
My favourite, favourite part of this book is what the main character chooses to focus on instead: which is the kid she babysits. She just loves this kid so so much and it is so palpable in their every interaction. When the kid reveals that she knows her mom doesn’t like her as much as the other baby? BROKE MY HEART. I literally had to stop and cry for a second. It was just so quiet and yet heartbreaking.
I think that’s another thing the author did so spectacularly well — she made you see the slight neglect and the preference for one kid over the other over and over again. I think a lot of fictional bad parents are super over the top bad — like abuse, physical neglect etc. But the white mom isn’t overtly bad in those ways — she’s just always carrying the younger baby. And always pushing her first child onto others or correcting her or ignoring her. And acting like she’s so enormously difficult to understand when she really isn’t! And yet, you see how this behaviour is noticeable to a child, how it can hurt her. The dinner table scene? When only only only the main character is asking — wait, is she okay? In the midst of all the drama and tension, being the only one who sees that this kid has a stomach ache? That’s love.
And their farewell! I think it was the most painful thing to read. How often do you read about relationships of care like this and done so masterfully? I loved it.
