On Birthdays

I turned 27 on Tuesday. I didn’t feel sad or weird about it, but I did remember something my mom said when I was a child: that birthdays are fun until you’re about 27, and then you start to feel like you actually don’t want to get any older. At the time 27 was unimaginably far away but I guess I’m at that turning point now. Definitely late 20s, definitively an adult. Young enough for almost anything but also old enough for almost anything—if I pulled an Anna Weyant and started dating a man in his 70s, the response from everyone but the most maladjusted and fragile people alive would be, “eh, whatever, she’s an adult.” Which is such a silly example (I’m quite happy with my age-appropriate boyfriend) but also feels like a turning point. I’m no longer young enough to be scandalous.

27 also feels like an age where it’s time to get serious. I’m done with my juvenilia. The work I produce is the work I produce. It’s for real, and it matters, and it needs to be good. As a fiction writer I don’t have to worry about youth as much as my friends who are trying to be actors or musicians or other things in the entertainment industry, but there's still a strong fixation on youth in the literary world (it just lasts longer, until you’re about 35, although a female novelist in her twenties remains the chicest thing you can be). People love a wunderkind, and I probably won’t be one.

In college I said I wanted to have a book out by 30. Really I wanted to have a book out by 27, like Sally Rooney, but that is simply not going to happen, even if I sold my 42,000-word still-unfinished short story collection literally tomorrow. But that’s fine. There are so many ways of being 27. My mom, at 27, had a baby. She had just celebrated her fifth wedding anniversary. I know people who are 27 and in law school or 27 and making mid-six-figures at a hedge fund or 27 and underemployed at a coffee shop while stringing artist residencies together and trying to freelance or 27 and smoking weed every day and living on $13,000 a year which coincidentally is, I think, about how much money my parents were living on when they first had me, because that was how much a graduate student stipend was in the 90s. 27 is an age that means nothing. People around you start to be truly, actually successful, but you can also still be “figuring it all out” and that’s okay, at least for now, but the period over which it will continue to be okay has shrunk rapidly. (Like my parents, I am living off a graduate stipend. Unlike them, my graduate degree will not confer any particular job opportunities. Eek!)

For class this week my assignment was to read the screenplay of Frances Ha. Frances Ha is perhaps the movie my mother and I disagree on the most. I love it; she hates it, because the protagonist is “useless.” As I turn 27, a still-nascent artist whose career is a huge question mark, I’ll try not to think about that too hard. (Thank god I’m not trying to be a dancer.)

But on the whole I think being 27 suits me. I always found it vaguely embarrassing to be in my early 20s. Some people are born to be children and some are born to be adults, and as a proud member of the latter category (I always find it a bit pathetic when people are too nostalgic about their childhoods) I think my ideal age will end up being 32 or 33.

The thing I miss most about being a child is the vibrancy with which I could imagine being an adult. When I was a child I knew there were so many things in the world I did not yet understand, and I longed for them immensely—things as simple as the chance to walk alone, to choose what I ate, to peer into rooms that contained strangers, to pass by glittering city windows at night. Cities were beautiful to me in the same way fireworks were beautiful to me, and, to a child of the suburbs, they seemed similarly far away—I felt no closer to living in a city than I felt to living in a firework.

I still remember the first time I encountered such a thing as dense walkable urbanism. I was in preschool, and my class took a field trip to the Princeton Art Museum, riding the small train known as the Dinky, and I remember feeling such a wild and absurd sense of bliss. You could just step into a tube of rooms? Without your parents? And the tube would take you somewhere else? And the place it took me was full of things to look at; there was nothing to look at where I lived. The place it took me had an art museum, and it also had sidewalks you could walk on that did not stop suddenly. It had windows clustered densely together, full of people doing things like buying artisanal socks and stringing beads together and drinking coffee and eating avgolemono soup, and you could see all of these activities in the space of a thirty-second walk, and you could pop in and participate in any of these activities if you so chose. I had never seen anything so wonderful. I wanted it. But I could only have it when adults took me there.

Now I am 27 and I live in New York. And while my current reality is not quite the wildest dream I ever had for myself, it also isn’t so far off. I say this not to brag but to remember: there was a time in my life when the things I have seemed impossible.