Five Novels About Coming Of Age When You’re Old Enough To Know Better

I used to think of the coming-of-age story as a predominantly teenaged genre: first loves, failed friendships, big mistakes, the mean girls and bad boys of high school hallways and college campuses. But in recent years, many of the best new novels are about finding yourself and a trajectory that feels right in your twenties, or even thirties, with much mess along the way. Maybe it’s not surprising; we’re all making the Millennial Shift, settling down later and later, delaying the firm establishment of the traditional markers of “growing up” a decade or two later than our parents did. Mucking through the morass of early adulthood isn’t a new subject but I suspect it feels more timely now, or more worthy as a topic of investigation.

I notice too—now that I’ve put together the below list of five favorite novels exploring this later-in-life coming of age—that they all explore issues of money and class and economic stability. There’s a necessary intersection between financial instability and self-actualization, and it goes far beyond just a useful plot point, a good source of tension for a struggling character (though it is always that, too).

When I was coming of age myself, barely making ends meet as an SAT prep teacher in unaffordable London, I thought that hopes and dreams were only for the class of people I worked for—the wealthy students I taught in posh boarding schools and tutored in million-pound homes. Those people could afford to think deeply about the lives they wanted to lead, the values they wanted to embody in their choices, their professions, and their relationships. I was saving my deep thinking for new revenue sources and a monthly in-and-out calendar of paychecks and bills to avoid overdrawing my bank account.

But of course, that’s not how life works; you are making choices, every day, about how you’re going to live, how you’re going to treat the people around you, and, hopefully, how you’re going to move incrementally closer, each morning, to a life that you can be happy to settle down in, even if it is a little late in arriving. I was lucky—toward the end of my lean years in London, I earned enough from one particularly lucrative student to pay for my first creative writing class. Certainly a poor financial investment, but a small commitment I could make to live more than a paycheck-to-paycheck life, someday.

Two weeks ago, my debut novel All That Life Can Afford was published. Unsurprisingly, it deals with many of these questions—what it means to come-of-age in your tricky, tender twenties, to push through the instabilities of class, money, grief, and loss, to try to find a right place for yourself in the world. Writing it let me play with the tropes and expectations of the coming-of-age genre, and also the classic literary tradition of plucky young female protagonists getting into trouble abroad, which Henry James, Edith Wharton, and E.M. Forster (to name a few) have done so well. Some of those young women find their happy endings, and some find ruin; for most of us, the answer lies somewhere in the middle.

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Louise Kennedy, Trespasses

Like its setting in 1975 Belfast, during the worst of The Troubles, Trespasses feels unsettled all the way through, like anything might happen at any time. Cushla is 24, a teacher who worries over her students, her alcoholic mother, her family’s struggling pub, and the daily indignities and dangers of living in what is, quietly, a warzone. She begins a secret romance with an older Protestant barrister (his marriage is not even very high up on the list of things that make this a bad idea), who chooses to defend IRA members, and it’s rich soil—not just for the heady things, sex and desire and power struggles, but also for issues of class and culture, morality, even language. It’s a beautiful, careful, moving novel that might have more to say about the world Cushla’s growing up in than the way she’s choosing to grow.

Raven Leilani, Luster

One of my favorite subsets of coming-of-age drama is the plot that drops its protagonist into unfamiliar surroundings or a jarring social set. Luster does both, as we follow Edie, a 23-year-old Black woman, from a shabby New York City apartment to her white boyfriend’s pale New Jersey subdivision, where neighbors watch her suspiciously through the blinds. Add to that house the boyfriend’s white wife and Black adopted daughter, and you have enough tension to fill a novel twice the size. But Leilani keeps it slim and pared-back; where some coming-of-age novels can feel instructive to a fault—this is how you should learn to live—Leilani’s feels more like an exploration of how you might continue to live in a racist society, and keep yourself intact, and still have room to make mistakes and art and real relationships.

Rowan Beaird, The Divorcées

After her nitpicky, nightmare husband throws out her diaphragm, twenty-something Lois leaves him, terrified she’ll be chained to him for life. But it’s the fifties—she can only run as far as her father’s house, and he might be worse. To win her freedom, Lois must go to a Reno divorce ranch, which is as fun a setting as it sounds. She stays for six weeks to establish residency in Nevada, and the other women she encounters there offer a privileged cross-section of unhappy marriages and big, perhaps foolish, hopes for the future. One in particular draws Lois out of her shell and into increasingly questionable territory, but you’re so glad she’s out you’re happy to go along. The ending reminds us that coming of age is often about learning what you can and can’t live with—and how you’ll make that space for yourself—since you probably won’t get to have it all.

Kat Tang, Five-Star Stranger

Called only “Stranger,” the narrator of this clever novel is a top-rated man for hire on Rental Stranger, an app you might download if you need to book a funeral mourner, wedding date, pretend friend/sibling/lover, or just someone to make your ex jealous. Stranger’s longest-running role is once-a-week father to a young girl, Lily, who’s just starting to realize she’s not getting what she needs from her mother or her fake-father. It’s a big premise that Tang executes so smartly and successfully, you barely even question it—thought you do begin to wonder when Stranger’s carefully controlled personal and professional life will crumble, and what he’ll find at the root of it, once the dust settles. The ending feels like an opening-up instead of a closing-down—uncertainty, but possibility, too—in a way I associate with the best coming-of-age novels.

Lily King, Writers & Lovers

Casey is 31, living in a potting shed, grieving her mother, waitressing miserably, and, of course, writing an interminable novel in the early morning hours. It’s a testament to King’s skill, humor, and wit that a novel so packed with struggle, failure, and anxiety can feel so warm, encouraging, and pleasurable to read (a friend pitched it to me as Ted Lasso for writers, and I can’t disagree). It’s oversimplifying to call it a love-triangle, but two men and their very different lives give Casey the chance to make the classic coming-of-age choice—the safe life, or the romantic, literary, unsettled, risky one. And it’s done so well you’d almost be happy with either ending, as long as Casey finally gets a win.

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All That Life Can Afford by Emily Everett is available from Putnam, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC.