What the hell does it mean to be a twentysomething in 2006? If you watch Zach Braff films, it means you are a commitment scaredy-cat who adores the Shins and makes out in airports. Believe American Apparel, and you’re the sort of person who lazes around the house in terrycloth headbands and striped knee socks. But read the Random House anthology Twentysomething Essays by Twentysomething Writers and you might be surprised to learn that your peers are 1) remarkably self-aware, 2) still feeling like this part of life is a dress rehearsal, and 3) habitual procrastinators.
Those are just a few of the characteristics Random House editorial assistants Matt Kellogg and Jillian Quint discovered last year when they helped stage a twentysomething essay competition in which writers vied for both publication and a $20,000 grand prize. For one, the editors received the bulk of their submissions in the last hour and 59 minutes of the six-month-long contest. For another, there’s an unmistakable tension of quarter-life crises running through the 29 personal, occasionally solipsistic, pieces chosen for the final collection: how living with your parents after college is still considered a failure, how it’s terrifically easy to lose your starry-eyed idealism after college, how technology like Instant Messenger and Dodgeball have supplanted actual human interaction, how New York can be soul-crushing.
More or less, the anthology shows that being in your 20s means you’re still figuring out what comes next. “We’re all still really, really searching,” says Marisa McCarthy, a Boston College graduate whose writing appears in Twentysomething Essays by Twentysomething Writers. “Twenty-five now is probably a lot younger than it was ten, 15 years ago — I’m certainly hoping that it is.”
McCarthy’s second-person essay is called “Cliché Rape Story” and it’s a harrowing piece based on her own off-campus rape during her freshman year at BC. She wrote the piece while studying English in Chestnut Hill. “In the classroom, I’m sure people were a little more gentle with it than they were with other pieces,” she admits. “But when I workshopped this piece, there was one guy who just ripped it apart and wrote things on it like, ‘Did this even really happen? It sounds like it’s out of a TV show.’ And I think that’s kind of what compelled me to name it what I named it, because some of the things, although true, just felt kind of cliché.”
McCarthy is also aware that most people think BC kids are too self-absorbed, homogeneous, and materialistic to become the sort of writers who grapple publicly with tough emotional issues. But contrary to the stereotype, she’s one of two BC grads with solemn pieces included in the collection. “BC’s so preppy and mainstream that I’m sure that goes against some idea of what an artist should be,” says McCarthy, who just left USA Today to work in advertising at Radar magazine. “But beneath our Lacoste shirts, some of us are tortured, I guess?”
