Grown Ups

Wr. Marie Aubert

Pub. Pushkin Press

Age Range - Adult

Ida is a forty-year-old architect, single and starting to panic. She's navigating Tinder and contemplating freezing her eggs, but forces these worries to the back of her mind as she sets off to the family cabin for her mother's sixty-fifth birthday. But family ties old and new begin to wear thin, out in the idyllic Norwegian countryside. Ida is fighting with her sister Marthe, flirting with Marhte's husband and winning the favour of Marthe's stepdaughter. Some supposedly wonderful news from her sister sets tensions simmering even further, building to an almighty clash between Ida and her sister, her mother, her whole family.

"...not waving, but drowning."

What I liked most about Grownups is the way Aubert paints a picture of what it is to be an adult - dragging with you the ghosts of your childhood and seeming to have a handle on things when in truth you have anything but. Our narrator, Ida, is haunted by societal expectations that a woman of her age should have settled down and had kids - even though she doesn't really want that for herself. Meanwhile, her sister, Marthe flaunts the image of the perfect family, but the reality is riddled with tensions.

Ida conjures memories of coming of age moments, all overshadowed by the monolithic separation of her parents and subsequent loss of her father. We're afforded an insight into the impact these events had on Ida and her sister, and on all the relationships they've since had. Ida has unresolved issues which have doomed her to flitting between being desperately lonely and coolly independent, happily single and helplessly in pursuit of unavailable men. Her sister Marthe, on the other hand, seems to find relationships easy and things just seem to fall into her lap. The real drama comes from the revelation that, actually, they don't. Nobody in this story is as contented as they would have you believe.

The novel is about grownups, with grownup problems, living grownup lives, acting like grownups, which of course means that almost everyone behaves like children. That is the real heart of the novel: appearances. Everyone is pretending to be happy, pretending to be living the life they want for themselves. Everyone is trapped on a self-destructive path. Everyone acts like they know what they want and they know what they're doing. In truth, nobody has a clue. They're not waving, but drowning. And that, perhaps, is what being a grownup is all about.

This comparatively short novel is a quick and enjoyable read, and one which is filled with humour and agony, and characters in whom most 40-somethings will recognise a little of themselves (whether they will want to admit it or not).