Washington - Almost two years ago, an aspiring actress and artist began writing pithy little four-line poems about the micro-struggles of 20-something life.
Illustrating them with whimsical drawings, Samantha Jayne Siegel posted them to Instagram and Tumblr under the title of Quarter Life Poetry.
She added many hashtags (#mastersdegree, #firstdate, #fail) Her friends tagged their friends. Those friends tagged their friends. Everyone, it seemed, could relate.
Soon enough, the 26-year-old had a steady following. Now, after posting barely more than 100 quatrains, Siegel’s collection of Instagrams has made her a published author. Her debut is called Quarter Life Poetry: Poems for the Young, Broke and Hangry.
Grand Central Publishing is betting 20-somethings will fork over $14.99 (about R200) to read brief poems about terrible Tinder dates, excessive wine drinking and unfulfilling jobs. Or perhaps their gift-buying moms, as the marketing pitch suggests, might find the book perfect for their “unwed daughters”.
Today, a book deal like this isn’t considered a risk. Quarter Life Poetry falls perfectly in line with a booming genre: the woe-is-us millennial struggle book. The publishing industry is awash in memoirs and comedy musings from 20-somethings, most of whom were discovered on blogs and social media.
“That post-grad life, grappling with going from the safety net of the academic environment to being thrust into a real world, with a humorous lens,” is how Kate Napolitano describes it. She’s an editor at Plume, a division of Penguin Random House churning out this kind of book. There’s You Deserve a Drink, Don’t Worry, It Gets Worse, Miss Fortune and How to Ruin Everything. From other publishers, Adulting: How to Become a Grown-up in 468 Easy(ish) Steps, F*ck! I’m in my Twenties, and My Boyfriend Wrote a Book About Me: And Other Stories I Shouldn’t Share.
The books promise to delight readers with their authors’ “misadventures” and read “as if your best friend is talking to you”. Some are laden with advice, but most aim simply to remind unhappy post-graduates they’re not the first person to have an existential crisis in a cubicle.
Siegel isn’t actually suffering in a cubicle these days, but she insists she truly did live through the minor miseries she’s managed to monetise. She graduated from New York’s Fashion Institute of Technology, then struggled to find a job in advertising. Once she had one, she was still despondent.
She tried moving to San Francisco, hoping a change of scenery would “cure everything”. She was basically the embodiment of every article about the millennial mindset: she wanted to create her own schedule, be creative and feel like she was contributing to the world.
So she quit her job. She’s now an actress and freelance art director, making enough to support a life in Los Angeles and regular trips to a donation-based yoga studio.
“I finally feel like I’m doing what I am meant to be doing,” Siegel said. “There were so many moments over the past years, like, ‘What am I doing and why? Ugh, God, I got into some really dark places mentally. I felt lost. I felt like, why did I get this degree? Oh my God, am I stuck in New York forever?”
Millennials, Siegel said, grew up with economic security and the notion they could be anything they wanted, only to find themselves graduating from university into a world that hadn’t recovered from the Great Recession. Poems like hers, and the slew of other books about the struggles of being her age, aim to be painfully honest about the difficulties.
Her Instagram followers love it, liking and following and tagging their friends in her posts. Whether that translates into actually buying books is unclear. Despite the recent slew of books similar to Quarter Life Poetry, none have really broken out as widely read bestsellers or launched their authors into fame. Coffee table-type books have better long-term prospects, but the large number of millennial-authored books doesn’t indicate books are all selling out.
“For a book like this, it’s not a straight path to the New York Times bestseller list,” said Libby Burton, Siegel’s editor at Grand Central Publishing.
The exception might be Not That Kind of Girl, the book millennial icon Lena Dunham published at 28. But Dunham was already nearly a household name from her HBO show Girls.
The popularity of the sitcom’s messy and confessional nature certainly paved the way for interest in books such as Quarter Life Poetry. Still, being dismayed in your twenties is not actually a new phenomenon.
Before Dunham, there was Emily Gould, the internet’s first queen of oversharing, who blended heavy doses of self-analysis into her takedowns of the New York elite for Gawker and landed a book deal; so did Joyce Maynard way back in 1972, after she spilled her jaded take on growing up in the 1960s for the New York Times. Most notably, perhaps, was Elizabeth Wurtzel, who published her memoir Prozac Nation in 1994, when she was just 26.
“When I wanted to write Prozac Nation, they thought it should be a novel because no one in their twenties wrote a memoir,” Wurtzel said. “You can’t imagine, it was a whole different world. Nobody thought it was a good idea.”
Her book triggered both raves for its sparkling prose and groans for its worldview: “self-absorbed” was a frequent accusation. And then it became a bestseller, inspiring a wave of little-known writers.
They’re still flooding her inbox to this day. Wurtzel said “you would not believe how many” requests she gets to write promotional blurbs for self-confessional memoirs, many from non-famous “20-nothings” like she once was.
Those years provide a lot of good material, Wurtzel said: being in your twenties sucks. She is now 48 and has breast cancer, but she wouldn’t trade it for being 26 again.
“When you’re in your twenties, you have no perspective and no ability to handle anything,” she said. “By this time, it’s like cancer, hmm, whatever. It’s no big deal. When I was in my twenties and my one-night stand went wrong, I thought it was the most devastating thing ever. And then a one-night stand went wrong the next night and then I had two one-night stands that went wrong and I was upset about both of them. And that’s your twenties.”
Washington Post