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A review by bookshelfmystic
One in a Millennial: On Friendship, Feelings, Fangirls, and Fitting In by Kate Kennedy
funny
lighthearted
medium-paced
3.0
Kate Kennedy self-consciously claims that she’s not sure she has a right to write about her life because she has had, overall, a pretty good one. In the sections where she airs this fear, especially when she discusses her very valid reactions to her miscarriage/fertility challenges and the Virginia Tech shooting , I wanted to reassure her. Surely anyone has a right to write whatever they want, and I’m it’s useful for people with similar experiences to find someone to relate to.
However… I also reserve the right to think that in the last third, this book started to veer into a mediocre-at-best memoir that felt more like the author working out her own personal feelings about her career and her life than a cohesive message for her readers. I got the sense Kennedy was using the writing process as a journaling exercise. A charitable interpretation is that she could have used a better editor: we very much did not need the final chapter to be a reflection on all of the chapters she already wrote.
I also found her feminism-101-level takes to be a bit, well, obvious. Yes, it is unfair that girls are held to certain beauty standards and expected to do emotional labor for boys. But when she started talking about abortion and how being pro-choice can include wanting women to be able to end life-threatening pregnancies, I realized something: The feminist thought in this book was not written for me. As someone who’s pretty informed about abortion and women’s issues in general, I didn’t need them spelled out. But I can imagine there are some readers that may be getting exposed to these ideas for the first time, and that Kennedy geared her writing more toward them.
Critiques aside, I did enjoy listening to this book, especially the 90s and 2000s sections with their fun hits of nostalgia. I particularly liked the sleepover chapter, which made me feel warm and fuzzy about similar core memories formed with my friends. Kennedy stays pretty surface-level, focusing more on behavior trends and pop culture references than on the political (9/11 is not mentioned, for example, which I did find a bit weird given that it was such a formative world event for all American millennials). This is not necessarily a bad thing – I read enough political takes as it is, and a fluffy book is a good change of pace.
It was also nice to hear a perspective from someone whose childhood ambitions and interests were different from my own. I suffered from gifted-kid arrogance and nerd superiority for a long time, and I valued learning about the childhood of a B student who liked pop culture instead of fantasy novels. I appreciated that we still had enough shared experiences for the nostalgia to ring true for me. (Though I admit that almost all of the TV references were over my head. I know this is a me problem.)
However… I also reserve the right to think that in the last third, this book started to veer into a mediocre-at-best memoir that felt more like the author working out her own personal feelings about her career and her life than a cohesive message for her readers. I got the sense Kennedy was using the writing process as a journaling exercise. A charitable interpretation is that she could have used a better editor: we very much did not need the final chapter to be a reflection on all of the chapters she already wrote.
I also found her feminism-101-level takes to be a bit, well, obvious. Yes, it is unfair that girls are held to certain beauty standards and expected to do emotional labor for boys. But when she started talking about abortion and how being pro-choice can include wanting women to be able to end life-threatening pregnancies, I realized something: The feminist thought in this book was not written for me. As someone who’s pretty informed about abortion and women’s issues in general, I didn’t need them spelled out. But I can imagine there are some readers that may be getting exposed to these ideas for the first time, and that Kennedy geared her writing more toward them.
Critiques aside, I did enjoy listening to this book, especially the 90s and 2000s sections with their fun hits of nostalgia. I particularly liked the sleepover chapter, which made me feel warm and fuzzy about similar core memories formed with my friends. Kennedy stays pretty surface-level, focusing more on behavior trends and pop culture references than on the political (9/11 is not mentioned, for example, which I did find a bit weird given that it was such a formative world event for all American millennials). This is not necessarily a bad thing – I read enough political takes as it is, and a fluffy book is a good change of pace.
It was also nice to hear a perspective from someone whose childhood ambitions and interests were different from my own. I suffered from gifted-kid arrogance and nerd superiority for a long time, and I valued learning about the childhood of a B student who liked pop culture instead of fantasy novels. I appreciated that we still had enough shared experiences for the nostalgia to ring true for me. (Though I admit that almost all of the TV references were over my head. I know this is a me problem.)
Content Warnings
Moderate: Miscarriage and Mass/school shootings