The future is cancelled
The millennial mindset is explained by a talkback radio survivor.
Melbourne-based Briohny Doyle’s first job as an undergraduate was at a talkback radio station. Later, she was an “online content producer”, whose task was to package up “the most inflammatory audio from each polemic” with a stock image and an incendiary headline, then slap the lot online.
The experience sent her slightly mad. She drank too much, began to “talk back to the talkback”, and smuggled her beloved dog into the office. She went on to work in a cattery and a produce market, then a “fiercely casual” teaching position at a university, before landing this book deal and with it the Scribe nonfiction prize for young writers.
The talkback stint clearly set her up well for Adult Fantasy. The book is a wholesale, redoubtable response to the sort of sour intergenerational bluster she was once paid to sift through. Why do millennials hop from job to job? Why are they not buying houses and popping out sprogs? In short: why can’t they be more like us?
Doyle blends data with anecdote, and analysis that has evidently been percolating away for years, to explore what’s driving such decisions. Education, career, property, marriage, kids: all those traditional markers of adulthood get a healthy going-over.
Unlike those talkbackers, Doyle doesn’t rant. She doesn’t need to, so compelling are her statistics and her stories. She observes – and writes – with extraordinary clarity and intellect.
A few pages in, I started picturing Doyle as the Lorax: a beautiful mind, alone on a platform above the fray, bitter and wise and weary. It wasn’t a surprise to learn she has a PhD in apocalyptic fiction and that her debut novel, released to acclaim last year, is called The Island Will Sink.
There’s a sense throughout Adult Fantasy that Doyle is having to damp down what she calls an “unshakeable feeling that things cannot continue as they are”, to enable herself to care about such trivia as house prices, wedding dresses and career trajectories.
“Whenever someone proclaims that we need to think about the future of our children, I’m a little taken aback,” she writes. “No spoilers, but it’s not looking great.”
And that, surely, is the quintessential millennial experience.
ADULT FANTASY, by Briohny Doyle (Scribe, $34.20)