lung cancer and given six months to live. I didn’t think things could get any worse. Then I started to hear reports of a terrible virus spreading through Wuhan, China.
Meanwhile, at every stop on my winter book tour—Chicago, L.A., San Antonio, Miami—I was meeting auditoriums full of women who made me feel less alone. They told me that this book had given them permission to discuss their lives more openly and that it made them feel validated and seen. Many of these women would come to the signing table with multiple copies—for their sisters and friends, who they thought would relate, and for other people in their lives, who they thought would understand them better after reading it.
The book spent three weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. I was interviewed by dozens of reporters and podcasters and radio hosts, and I went on several morning shows. In the dressing room of Tamron Hall’s show, she’d left me a handwritten note that read, “Your book is a powerful reminder of what’s at stake—our lives!” Kelly Ripa talked about it on air. Busy Philipps did a series of Instagram stories about it. Sarah Michelle Geller posed reading the book while wearing a sexy oversized white shirt, drinking a glass of red wine, and reclining in an empty bathtub—the ultimate Gen-X pinup girl.
Then Covid-19 hit the U.S. The rest of my tour was canceled. In quarantine, I started hearing from one woman after another who saw the pandemic as almost an inevitable next chapter for this generation. We’d been waiting for the other shoe to drop since childhood. Here it was, the other shoe. Everything that was bad suddenly got much, much worse: more caregiving, less job stability, more isolation, less financial security. Readers told me that they now saw the book as a kind of prequel to the pandemic horror—an explanation not just of why midlife can be rough for us but also for why our generation was at once so logistically vulnerable to and yet also so psychologically prepared for the devastation.
Just like always, the crisis found us caught between Boomers and the younger generations. Our parents were right in the disease’s crosshairs; our Gen Z children were sent home for us to educate. Many seniors weren’t being as careful as we wanted them to be. A lot of younger people were still partying over spring break.
But Generation X was almost trained for this emergency. Unlike many of our parents, we already knew how to use Zoom. Unlike many of our children, we already knew how to entertain ourselves without video games. We are a group of people that does not need to be told twice to prepare for the worst, to stay home, to watch a lot of TV.
I asked a friend if when all this was over she thought we’d be considered the (at least a?) greatest generation.
Her response: “Sure. Gather round, kids! I’ll tell you about the heroic year we snacked and watched Tiger King.”
Touché.
As I conducted book events virtually through the spring and summer of 2020, a surprising number of women told me that in the midst of the misery, there were some bright spots. One said that her older, by-the-book boss had finally realized that everyone didn’t have to be in the office all the time—and now that everyone had to do meetings with a dog barking or a baby on their lap, having a personal life became normalized. A woman who was laid off from a job she hated found that, thanks to the abundant, unexpected free time and extra unemployment assistance, she could finally stop for a second and figure out what she wanted to do with the rest of her life.
At the national level, many women told me they saw the country having a long-overdue reckoning with racism and felt called to action. For as cynical as Generation Xers have been about politics, we had to admit that something felt different this time.
When I was doing the research for this book, two and three years before any of us had heard about Covid, a lot of women told me they were at a breaking point. Some of them said they wished they could hit a reset button and rearrange everything in their lives: a common refrain was, “I wish I could just blow it all up and start over.” In a way, that’s what happened in 2020.
“Build back stronger” became an invitation not just for governments, but for each of us. This book lays out a case that the old American dream—the fantasy of eternal upward mobility and of “having it all” effortlessly—was never truly on the table for our generation. The pandemic has erased any lingering doubts about that. Maybe now that the traditional dream of picket fences and endless prosperity is over, we will find a way to dream new and even better dreams.
1 There are many opinions about what counts as Generation X. The Harvard Center’s years are 1965–1984. So, from the year Doctor Zhivago came out to the year Ghostbusters did. George Masnick Fellow, “Defining the Generations,” Housing Perspectives, Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies, November 28, 2012. I’ve also heard 1961 as a starting year—though in my experience people born in the early 1960s tend to identify more strongly with the Baby Boom—and either 1981 or 1985 as the Gen X end year. I tend to put most stock in the Pew Research Center: Silent Generation 1928–1945, Boomers 1946–1964, Gen X 1965–1980, Millennials 1981–1996, Generation Z 1997–2012. Michael Dimock, “Defining Generations: Where Millennials End and Generation X Begins,” Pew Research Center, January 17, 2019. I’m also well aware of the fact that plenty of people think the whole business of describing a generational experience or ethos is a fool’s errand. For this argument see, for example: David Costanza, “Can We Please Stop Talking About Generations as If They Are a Thing?” Slate.com, April 13, 2018. No, we can’t. Next question.
2 Neil Howe and William Strauss, 13th Gen: Abort, Retry, Ignore, Fail? (New York: Vintage, 1993). And in their 1991 book Generations, the same authors called us “Gen 13ers.”
3 Paul Taylor and George Gao, “Generation X: America’s Neglected ‘Middle Child,’” Pew Research Center, June 5, 2014.
4 You can run these numbers a few different ways. By another measure, the breakdown is: Generation X at 66 million, Boomers at 74 million, and Millennials at 71 million. Kimberly Lankford, “Generation X: Time Is on Your Side for Retirement,” Kiplinger’s Personal Finance, January 3, 2019.
5 Richard Fry, “Millennials Projected to Overtake Baby Boomers as America’s Largest Generation,” Pew Research Center, March 1, 2018. (Also, note: some people count Gen X as just 1965–1977, in which case we’re 45 million versus 75 million Millennials and 78 million Boomers.) Some demographers push for another category: Generation Y, which is generally thought to overlap a bit with both Gen X and Millennials. When people go with the Gen X years 1965 to 1979, the Gen Y birth years are typically given as 1980 to 1994. This category has always felt extra forced to me, though, so in this book I just stick with the bigger umbrellas of Boomer, Gen X, and Millennial.
6 Ed Mazza, “Generation Xers Have the Most Gen X Response to Being Left Off the List,” Huffington Post, January 21, 2019.
7 Faith Popcorn, interview with the author, August 30, 2017.
8 Jennifer Szalai, “The Complicated Origins of ‘Having It All,” New York Times Magazine, January 2, 2015.
9 It’s worth noting that Helen Gurley Brown, who popularized
