I was a college sophomore when The Big Chill came out in 1983. That iconic film about post-grads reuniting years later for a funeral made me nostalgic for the future I imagined with my tight group of friends. For a long time after we graduated and moved to New York City, we navigated entry-level jobs, drunken hook-ups, shifting alliances, outside agitators, weddings, babies, moves across the country, drifting apart. Some of us are grandparents now. Some of us haven’t spoken in over twenty years. Some of us are getting together next month to drink too much wine, smoke a little weed, and laugh so hard we might pee because we’re that old. I’m assigning us Grant Ginder’s new novel, the millennial version of The Big Chill—but more daring, more kaleidoscopic, more intimate—for our boomer reunion book club.
The structure of So Old, So Young follows five core friends and a few more peripheral characters from 2007 to 2024 at five formative events beginning with a New Year’s Eve party and ending with a funeral. Rather than coddle us, Ginder drops us smack in the middle of these events with music, outfits, and the occasional news item to orient us: there are recurring extras and those we never see again; there are missed opportunities and bad choices, casual cruelties, hilarious set pieces, and the hallmarks of passing time. Mia, insecure and stubborn; Adam, self-reliant and kind; Marco, both ambivalent and passionate; Sasha, both reckless and traditional; and Richie, introspective and self-destructive, interweave romantically and platonically as the years go by. Ginder is brilliant at juggling the characters’ growing responsibilities with their resistance to maturity. His ear for witty, revealing dialogue and eye for specific cultural detail make these people immediately knowable, frustrating, and profoundly sympathetic.
No one here is curing cancer or living a glamorous life: they are well-educated, white, and interested in mostly conventional trajectories, whether straight or gay, parents or childfree. The point isn’t their jobs, their couplings, their misunderstandings, their privilege. Ginder is interested in the series of decisions—some researched, some spontaneous, some cataclysmic, some unremarkable—that build a life. He’s interested in how we grow and change, and how even the most mundane memories become precious because they are ours. Do those who knew us when we were nascent adults know us best? Were we most ourselves in those formative relationships?
Ginder illuminates a universal truth, made poignantly clear when Mia examines a photo of herself and Sasha all those years ago: “She wanted to tell them: before you know it, everything will change. They were never going to stop growing up. Why was that so hard to accept? They were never going to stop growing up, and there was nothing they could do to change that…There was no other option, nothing else to do. Because staying young forever wasn’t just impossible—it was exhausting. No one was meant to shoulder that amount of possibility for very long.” Reader, I cried.
At the end of the book, there is hope that love makes the relentless march of time bearable. There is humor in the face of heartbreaking loss. And in my case, I am grateful for forty-plus years of friendship with those who have loaned Laura Ashley skirts, danced with abandon in dive bars, argued in taxis, wept in public bathrooms, started the subtext in the text thread, asked me to read at their weddings, invited me to their children’s weddings, allowed me to massage their lymphedema-swollen hands, annoyed the living fuck out of me, remembered the name of that guy that time, gave me a book party, reminded me that I once sported an offensively preppy raincoat and a Dorothy Hamill haircut that made me look like a chubby boy, believed in denim on denim, almost died together on a tiny boat in Jamaica piloted by an extremely high 12-year-old, and who are traveling soon to reconnect, to discuss So Old, So Young, and to take a little break from growing up.
