Tiffanie Darke

The book is an easy read, as it does not go into too much theorising, and uses a straightforward narrative style. The author has a firm mandate to talk about the subject, as she was editor in leading living and style magazines. The book starts off on a rather unpromising note, however, as it seems to dwell mainly on the parties, the raves, and the excesses of the generation X, without a thought for the future, something which would strike a Boomer like me as incongruous. One striking character of her prose is the obscure terminology (slang?), and the profuse references to people and places that were apparently the greatest for a mainly UK-based cohort, but which mean nothing to the rest of the world: I think I recognise hardly a handful of them, like Jennifer Aniston and the Beckhams. The book however progresses (as probably the protagonists' lives as well) to a more mature, responsible, plane, as career, marriage, kids, house hunting, and other mundane things take over; it seems that wild GenX then becomes a little more like the Boomer.

Incidentally, there seems to be a perpetual disagreement about who belongs to each of the so-called generations; one source of confusion is that people speak of the period in which they were in university and thus discovering their relation to the wider world and society, rather than when they were born. For myself, I have no doubt that I belong to (the tail end of) the Boomers, the post-war (World War II) generation: I was in undergrad college in the turbulent late-60s and early 70s, and took active part in the student movement and anti-apartheid protests of the time. GenX seems to have 'come of age' in the end of the century ("I was Eight in the Eighties"), but then who are GenY, and the Millenials (my daughter assures me they're the same thing), GenZ, the Zoomers? The author claims for GenX the credit for the Feminist movement, the growing awareness of discrimination against women and minorities and action to set that right, the liberation in life style choices, and other such things. Her characterisation of the key differences of the Boomers is apt: we guys tended to focus on job (rather than career), saving for our pensions, and collecting stuff. The Xers, from what I can gather, were more into living for the moment, living perpetually in their youth. I wonder, however, how growing older will hit GenX, if they find themselves adrift without a job and without a retirement fund. But never mind, we Boomer parents anticipate that, and are saving (a compulsive habit with us) for our offspring's eventual decline and dotage as well as ours.… (meer)