How to Adult: Stephen Wildish

Product Information

This book had a phenomenal start and did some things very, very right. We follow Olivia Han, a therapist turned life coach to the stars who works to turn the lives of struggling stars around after the overdose death of her younger sister 13 years ago, and Chase London, a former child prodigy turned junkie actress who can't seem to stay out of jail or rehab. But it was hard not to like her. She smoked cigarettes and was a good hang, always up for some gossip. It’s just true that some people shine bright and also aren’t villains. I think it’s taken me the better part of the past decade to realize that, myself. I didn’t work with Kelly for very long, but I didn’t forget about her. In 2013, when Adulting came out with her face on its cover, I was not surprised. There was a lot of pressure, in the years following the 2008 housing crisis, to perform genuflections to the markers of neoliberal success: saving for a first home, dressing for the jobs we wanted, killing it at work before settling down to raise kids with the domestic partners with whom, in those halcyon days, we expected to equally and fairly divide our household labor. Now, if this were real, I'd call into question some of the ethics Olivia used in Chase's therapy. It's fictional, so I'll let it pass. But having taken so many courses and trainings on ethics, it's a little hard to ignore the fact that it's totally unacceptable for Olivia to be sleeping with someone or letting multiple people stay at the cabin when it's supposed to be Chase's time for healing, while Chase is there. I thought the truth or dare scene was actually pretty funny, but I can't imagine ever doing something like that with a client of my own. But again, it's not bothersome enough to make me dislike the book. This is a work of fiction, after all. And that's what makes this entertaining. For a more up-to-date take on the topic of adulting, I turned to my kids and their friends—then eighteen- and twenty-year-olds—for their definition. Sitting on the front patio of our house after feeding them brunch, here’s what I got out of them about #adulting:

Think bigger. Adulting can’t be boiled down to ten tips or even a thousand. Being an adult is a state of mind that ignites the “doing” that ends up forging your adult self. It’s part wanting to, part having to, and part learning how. The hardest part is that because it’s happening in your own mind you pretty much do it by yourself. Yet you have all the adult humans around you going through it, too. They get it. I kind of disappeared from everything. It was easier than trying to tell people what was happening. Divorce, Trump election, I broke my elbow and fractured my shoulder, my dad got cancer, my grandma died, my cat died, I fell into a deep depression. I quietly quit my job as the adulting girl.” It feels like this definition of adulthood is wearing thin under the pressures of our times. Adults can survive independently, but should they? I’m the latest person to try to tell this story. You’re the latest to listen. The reason we keep telling these stories is that all of us have to learn it to survive. Nobody before you knew how to do this, either. We’re all winging it, full of shit and fear. Sometimes I am still terrified, too. Cue the baby animal video. Write your goals down in a notebook or design a vision board. Keep your goals somewhere where you can look at them daily and be reminded that you are heading for great things!As this book opens Chase, who has been a Hollywood actress most of her life, is in a precarious spot and it only gets worse. An addict who has been through rehab numerous times and still on probation with an ankle monitor with a dead battery Chase realizes she’s on thin ice. She comes to realize just how thin when her mother calls her probation officer to take her in. Up until now, you might have had someone else call the shots. But guess what? It’s your time to shine now! While it’s freeing to finally be considered an adult, having all of the responsibility can sometimes be scary. Goal-setting is one of the first items you need to do, and to set goals, you need to have some idea what you want to do, what you’re good at, and where you want to end up. What I liked: the overall thesis of the book, that we all have agency and the ability to take care of ourselves if we apply ourselves. Further, life can be a crap sandwich and it is important to learn to manage disappointment. Plus, there was a solid ‘Karate Kid’ reference. Brown does not plan to have kids, and she’s interested in the formation of meaningful relationships with kids and young people. “That’s something that’s brought me a lot of joy,” she said. This topic is coming up a lot lately. For her newsletter Culture Study, Anne Helen Petersen wrote about caring for others and allowing oneself to be cared for. The cookbook author Samin Nosrat described the “anti-nuclear family” she eats with every Tuesday. “Chosen families” are lifelines for queer communities, and the concept is becoming more widely discussed. She wasn’t an expert, but she’d long been a mentor. She was going to talk to her readers as if they were her former students, who still ask for her advice over coffee. She was going to be open and honest with her own hard-won lessons and the experiences she’d gleaned from others. “I am not smarter than you. I am not wiser than you. I’m just going to tell you what I know,” she says. “It’s meant to be this very close narrative that ultimately feels like a companion walking this journey with the reader.”

But demographic pressures, labor-market conditions, and social norms have evolved a lot in the past decade, and the concerns of people in their 20s and 30s are not what they were in 2013. Yes, you should have fun,” she writes. “But at the same time, you’re supposed to be figuring out who you are and what you’re good at, how you’re going to make a living, who you want in your life, and how you’re going to make things better in the world, so you need to get going on that.” All of these are choices, and they’re all valid and up to you, and your choices along these lines do not make you any more or less an adult. Except you must have a way to support yourself. That’s not negotiable. But it’s hardly all there is to adulting. Going through this book has been the perfect balance of uncomfortable and loving,” says Michelle Goldring, ’10, MA, ’11, who is part of a group of alumni who began discussing advance copies of Your Turn on Zoom this winter. A corporate attorney who recently shifted into the HR side of law, Goldring didn’t personally know “Dean Julie” at Stanford—they embraced once in White Plaza when Goldring was giving out “free hugs”—but the voice in the book feels intensely familiar to her. “Reading this book sounds like sitting down in her office or sitting with my favorite people who I knew at Stanford who kind of set me straight.”

More From This Series

Sometimes you might long to be a kid again. (Not to be the actual diapered or play-dating child, but at least to feel taken care of.) Is it scary out there in the wide-open landscape of life where you fend for yourself and where anything is possible? Yeah. It was a combination of unapologetically being yourself – the “authenticity” that’s such a buzzword now, especially if you’re Prince Harry - and faking it ’til you make it. Basically, what a generation that had been thirsty for relatable role models wanted to hear. This was the moment when being a millennial became cultural catnip. Lena Dunham’s Girls had recently launched and, like Brown’s book, was for millennials by a millennial and showed a group of millennials taking their first confusing steps into adulthood and working out who they were in the world (albeit an overwhelmingly white world). It was also the year of Frances Ha, starring Greta Gerwig as a 20-something mess, trying to navigate her professional dreams and crumbling friendships, and edge a little closer to adulthood while doing it. Also, we’d just found out that Dan Humphries was Gossip Girl. The result has come with tremendous upsides and a host of challenges, Lythcott-Haims says. In an era when things like COVID-19 and economic hardship are forcing more people to try multigenerational living, she and her mother want to offer an account of why they did it, what was hard and what they learned. In her book, Lythcott-Haims fleshes out many situations that young adults will face — getting along with coworkers, showing up for people when you say you will, seeking therapy and doing your research before making a big decision.