Writer and actor Pamela Adlon’s comedy series Better Things is one of the most accurate depictions of Gen X midlife I’ve ever seen. In one episode, the fifty-something main character’s daughters keep dismissively referring to her as a Boomer, to which she replies, “For the last time, I’m Gen X! We’re the best generation because we were the last ones to use paper!”
This line stayed in my head throughout this year’s reading, which was usually done on my e-reader or through audiobooks. This is mostly an issue of convenience and adaptability, as issues with my eyes have made it harder to read for long periods of time. But the irony is not lost that this year I also read several books about the decline of print media, monoculture, and other things my generation will apparently be the last to have experienced. I did not expect being Gen X to ever feel so culturally irrelevant, but that is the fate of every generation.
A guilty reading pleasure throughout grad school was heading to the newsstand and using my paltry teaching-assistant pay to buy a copy of Vanity Fair every month. My own journalism career began in the world of zines and alt weeklies, those relics of the 1980s and ’90s, when snarky culture critics could help us understand why the characters in Jim Jarmusch films always mumbled, or scrappy reporters could launch deep-dive investigations into local utility companies. With the slow decline of local media, this kind of reporting and culture writing is now nearly extinct, or it has mutated into endlessly forking streams of Substack newsletters, vlogs, and podcasts.
But like many people who grew up in a low-income family, I have always had a secret interest in the lives of the rich, and would often snoop through friends’ parents’ closets to feel what silk and leather were like as opposed to the sticky polyester of my school uniforms and the dank finds my mother brought home from thrift shops. There is a reason that the “poor kid gets obsessed with rich people” plot gets recycled over and over again in everything from Great Expectations to Saltburn. Gen Xers remember a television show titled Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, an hour of real-estate and vacation porn with a voiceover of a bellicose British man named Robin Leach shouting about glamour. Glossy magazines were an affordable way to keep up with the lives of the bourgeoisie before social media exposed those lives as not much more than a shallow consumerist bacchanal.
