bildungsroman for a burning world

rethinking what a coming of age novel is in 2025

this is a picture of me coming of age at basically 30 years old

About a month ago, I told my mom that this year felt like the end of my adolescence. I’m 29. Most transitions in life aren’t marked dramatically this way, but in this case, I viscerally felt a door closing on my younger self.

If you’ve been following the news, you know the context.

Amid sweeping layoffs across the federal workforce ripping through the fabric of my city, the investigations into several news organizations—including NPR—it seemed clear to me how I lived my life in my mid-twenties couldn’t hold anymore.

In many ways, the end of adolescence is personal if not murky, less about a numerical age than a string of (or one defining) events. Religious ceremonies like Bat Mitzvahs and Quinceañeras symbolically mark the end of childhood. But for some, adolescence extends well into adulthood (I’m looking at you 30-something manchildren!!). While others are never afforded the luxury of an adolescence at all.

My point is, if the age at which you’re an “adult” isn’t really 18 anymore, what does that mean for how we define the parameters of coming-of-age novels today?

My friend Kat (hiiiii!!!) recently wrote about the challenges she faced trying to sell her novel in the adult market:

There are a lot of reasons why it took five years to sell my debut novel, Good People, but one of the biggest hurdles to overcome was the book’s age category. Jo—the protagonist—is twenty-years-old and in the no man’s land between YA and adult fiction. I had written the novel as an adult book, but it explored coming-of-age themes that are commonly associated with YA.

Something that stuck out to me in Kat’s essay is how her old professor distinguishes between an adult novel and a young adult one:

YA stories are about a protagonist leaving home whereas adult stories are about a protagonist returning home. Throughout my novel, Jo—as a college student—is constantly leaving and returning home.

Kat’s point about her protagonist leaving home then coming back, leaving home, coming back, to me, gets at how much things like the ongoing housing crisis, the pandemic, and now, the economic, social, human fallout of Trump’s second term complicate the makers of adulthood.

I’m not going to take you through the long tradition of coming-of-age novels because A) I’m not a literature scholar and B) I don’t feel like it rn. But! I am going to share my thoughts as someone whose debut is about a twenty-something protagonist coming-of-age in 2025 aka a hell of time to become an adult (take it from someone who just became an adult three weeks ago).

I’m sure Kat’s professor’s comments contained more nuance. But I also think by now many people know that the beginning of adulthood is no longer attached to moving out of your parent’s house. (This is also very American. In other cultures it’s typical to stay home and live in a multigenerational household).

Like Kat’s protagonist, Jo, I’m thinking about the college students who moved on campus, then back home during the pandemic, then back to campus, then back home after graduation.

My protagonist, Catherine, is a 24-year-old who graduated college at the start of the pandemic, just as classes were going online. But since then, she’s lived at home. And she doesn’t move out of her parent’s house at the end. In fact, it’s clear that the she won’t be moving out anytime soon in part because of everything happening in the world (It’s 2025, she lives in D.C, there’s a lot going on).

And even though she’s 24, an age which theoretically puts her outside the “no man’s land between YA and adult fiction,” she’s childish as fuck!! She dicks around with her best friend at her restaurant job. She bickers with her academic rival in her graduate program in the middle of class. Her mom comes into her room and is like, you need to change these sheets. She even thinks at one point, “I feel like the opposite of an adult, like I just fell out of my mom’s uterus an hour ago and landed in this random apartment.”¹ In other words, she’s 24.

Although Catherine doesn’t achieve economic independence by the end of the novel, she does solidify her political identity. This to me feels like part of the transition from young adulthood to adulthood: seeing yourself not simply as someone the world acts upon, but as someone who also acts upon the world.

The 20-year-olds who protested the war in Gaza on their college campuses may not be paying their own phone bills, but when they are expelled from their universities or detained by I.C.E, they are moving through the world as adults.²

I should note that Y.A and Adult are legitimate market categories that, like any other category or genre, have certain expectations. So I’m not really here to talk about what should or shouldn’t be considered Y.A because, well, I don’t read or write Y.A (though I do watch a ton if it <3).

But the coming-of-age piece is interesting to me. I think that defies age categories.

Maybe one way of thinking about it is in buckets: there’s the concrete symbols of adulthood—turning 18, getting a driver’s license, moving out. The emotional—falling in love, first heartbreak, first loss. The cognitive maturation—oh fuck, I’m actually responsible to people other than myself!!

But all of these (save for turning 18) can happen at any age.

There’s also how an individual absorbs and responds to these events rather than the events themselves. If losing your virginity was fine and smooth and went exactly as you expected and you forgot about it the next day, maybe it isn’t part of your coming-of-age story.

We can’t forget the Gen-Z/Alpha of it all either—a demographic plagued with anxiety and other mental health challenges, who’ve lost crucial developmental and educational years to the pandemic. We’re still learning what social media does to the developing brain, but surprise!! it’s probably not that great.

I’m wondering how all this will change what it means to become an adult, especially in a time as turbulent as this. When abortion access is being corroded but childcare costs are higher than some people’s rent. When American democracy as we’ve understood it is being radically tested, the world order since WWII reorganized virtually overnight.

As far as the heartbreak, awkwardness, fumbling desire, I’m not sure that coming-of-age stories will feel so different from a decade ago—but they’ll certainly look it.

---

A big thanks to Kat for sharing her story and inspiring this post! You should ABSOLUTELY CHECK OUT HER SHIT!!!

1. I’m paraphrasing even though they’re literally my words loll

2. This of course also gets at the adultification of people of color, which is its own conversation. It makes me think of this submission story I read on SubStories about a Black YA writer who kept getting passes from editors who said her protagonist felt “too adult/too mature.”