Other people’s words about … becoming an adult

When he got his first office job, he got dressed each morning with a certain ironic remove. It was a game that everyone had to play to make a living. To be an adult is to sell out, but as long as there’s someone to recognise the irony you bring to this game it’s easier to maintain a sense of self-respect. These days there’s nobody in his life who would understand that irony, and he suspects that he’s transmitting his signal on a wavelength only he can hear. He knows that the outside observer will think of him as at one with his blazer and button-down shirt; there’s no crack for the irony to push through and unhitch the image of an indifferent, middle-aged man. When [his] students look at him, what do they see? A hypocrite? [His old friends] Thora and August would have laughed about it.

from ‘The Trio‘
by Johanna Herman (translated by Kira Josefsson)

I ran into an acquaintance the other day whose daughter had told me many years ago, when she was around twenty years, that she wanted to be a writer, like me. To that end, she’d enrolled in a Creative Writing degree. She wasn’t going to compromise, she said. Why do a vocational degree when what she wanted to be was a writer?

I hemmed and hawed and said quietly, ‘It’s useful to have a vocational skill as a back-up, though.’

I haven’t seen this man or his daughter for many years, and so when I ran into him the other day, I asked after him and his wife and then after his daughter.

‘What’s she doing now?’ I asked.

‘Oh,’ he said, ‘she got her creative writing degree and now she’s working in the tax office.’

And then we shrugged at each other.

So it is.

Largs Bay Jetty, March 2024.

I still feel, when I’m getting ready for work, getting changed into my office clothes, that I’m taking on an identity that doesn’t match the ‘real’ me, though I’m not sure that I see the irony in this, as Johanna Hedman’s protagonist Hugo does. It feels more like a charade to me, a performance that isn’t very convincing. I doubt that I’m alone in this, though. As Hugo himself says: To be an adult is to sell out.

Indeed. Perhaps it’s unavoidable. In any case, here we all are.

Under the jetty, March 2024.

Lately I’ve been reading …

• • Every dog is a rescue dog: Sara Bader on losing a pet.
  
  
  • Reading near-perfectly executed shorter books is naturally making me wonder ever more so, as both reader and writer, if less is, perhaps, more: Call me biased as the author of a novella, but I loved this article by Paul Daley, which came out late last year, in praise of short novels. (Full disclosure: Paul Daley later wrote some very favourable comments about my novella Ravenous Girls, which you can read here.)
  
  
  • I have fallen in front of people. I have fallen in front of so many people: Devin Kelly on learning (how to live). People often link adulthood and maturity, adulthood and strength, adulthood and something resembling confidence, Kelly writes. Personally, I have nearly always associated adulthood with fear and shame. I have learned, as an adult, less about what I am capable of and more about the opposite. I have learned about my capacity for cruelty and the sense of safety I find in shame, how I have sometimes used the shame I feel about myself to excuse myself for what I’ve done wrong, little self-deprecating jokester I can be, little not worth it kind of boy. Lots to think about here.