Review / Such a Fun Age by Kiley Reid

Emira Tucker is an aimless twenty-five-year-old on the brink of losing her health insurance and Alix Chamberlain is the woman she babysits for. After Emira is accosted by a grocery store security guard in a racially aggravated incident, Alix feels she must go above and beyond to prove her wokest loyalty. In her quest to win Emira’s affection, Alix, with immense irony, transforms Emira into a mere prop for her more performative agendas. Ultimately, this try-hard pursuit bars Alix’s ability to genuinely connect. Emira’s love cannot be bought (but her benefits sure can). In Such a Fun Age, Kiley Reid balances empathy, subtlety and emotional rationalisation with clear-cut moments where characters cross the line.

Such a Fun Age is commercial fiction at its most subversive—lampooning the very audience that (statistically: college-educated white women) would be lining up to buy the book. The novel met with a splashy launch as the pick of the month for Reese Witherspoon’s Book Group in January, and by the height of this summer’s #BlackLivesMatter movement, it was on every well-meaning white woman’s anti-racist book list. Which begs the question: to what extent were readers doing the same thing with Such a Fun Age as Alix are doing to Emira? White people openly coveted this book in the same way that Alix coveted Emira; it was deemed essential literature for white women insistent on making a public exercise of examining their privilege. Do not get me wrong: I am in no way saying that a) white women should not read this book or b) that examination is not essential—in fact, Alix’s failure to self-examine is key evidence in the case for her relegation to the pantheon of well-intentioned villains. Merely that if the book is used as a prop rather than a cautionary tale, well… the lesson has been lost.

The book is peppered with great characters, like “Uncle Tom Tamra,” Alix’s token Black Friend who—of any character in the book—applies the most pressure to Emira, explicitly indicating that there is a right way to be black, there is a right way to be a young woman, and there is especially a right way to be a young black woman (“I’m guessing you’re afraid to go natural”). This dynamic echoes the dissonance between second and third wave feminists; as Tamra embodies and indeed enforces a set of oppressive rules and assumptions, blending into the power structures that Emira ultimately refutes. And then there is Briar, Alix’s disarmingly lovable toddler, whose unselfconscious curiosity and vulnerability are mark her as an innocent within this system. For this generation, Reid reserves a note of caution, lest they grow up to repeat the errors of their mothers.

I can’t wait for Lena Waithe’s take on this, and hope she brings her characteristically unconventional attitude towards the conventional spaces of this book, which both sits alongside top commercial fiction and disrupts the shelf.