Lythcott-Haims has plenty of experience to draw from. She’s a mother to two young adults and advised young people for years when she was the dean of freshmen at Stanford University. And, of course, she once faced the journey herself. Her proactive advice shines “a very warm light” on young people who may be looking into the future with fear in their eyes, she says. She wants to show them there isn’t one path to becoming an adult, but rather “a wide-open landscape” to take advantage of, she says. There are other markers—the somewhat incongruous, age-based adulting stuff we’ve enacted into law and policy in this country. A brief snapshot: Leave home. Even if you want to, you may not be able to leave home anytime soon, because macroeconomic forces have made it impossible for you to afford to live independently in the town in which you grew up. Multigenerational living works perfectly well in many cultures as long as everyone is doing their fair share. And that’s the key. It may not be realistic to expect you’ll leave home; being an adult is about behaving responsibly and accountably and having freedom and independence in whatever dwelling you call your home.

Parents have been marooned without child care, and child-free people have been wondering how they can offer help when young parents seem so unaccustomed to asking for it. Step 254 in Adulting is “Hang up or fold things, as they prefer.” Okay, but allow me to propose Step 536 for the 2023 edition: Don’t worry about the mess. Every person is unique in what their goals might be, but here are some considerations and tips to ensure you get started on the right foot:All around me, people are talking about crumbling care infrastructures and the loneliness that accompanies family care work. For the “sandwich generation,” adulthood has been marked by figuring out how to juggle the competing needs of their children and aging parents. Mutual aid became a practice not just for activist communities but for neighborhoods struggling with exploding housing and food prices, which acutely impacts younger adults. I first met Brown in 2006, about six years before she would publish her breakthrough. She was an intern at a weekly business newspaper called New Orleans CityBusiness, where I was doing a pretty bad job of assembling an annual “Book of Lists.” Brown was the kind of intern who strikes fear into the heart of incompetent employees like myself: She was charming, hardworking, and ambitious. She was good at what she did even when she thought she wasn’t. She made me look bad.

I’m the latest person to try to tell this story. You’re the latest to listen. The reason we keep telling these stories is that all of us have to learn it to survive. Nobody before you knew how to do this, either. We’re all winging it, full of shit and fear. Sometimes I am still terrified, too. Cue the baby animal video. Paying bills on time and writing thank you letters, funnily enough, didn’t turn out to be the blueprint for growing up that we’d hoped it might be (although I still do both). There wasn’t much room for making mistakes in this version of adulting – which is, of course, the only way to become truly adult. Plus, in highlighting our extended adolescence, did it compound the millennial stereotype of a generation of fragile, self-obsessed snowflakes who can’t get a mortgage because we eat too much brunch? I very much believe in the power of our personal stories to help others feel less alone and more seen and supported.’Julie Lythcott-Haims has long been one of America’s finest minds and fiercest voices. Now, with this remarkable book, she establishes herself as something else: the mentor our young people deserve. Your Turn is simultaneously electrifying and reassuring —a jaw-dropping, spine-tingling work that will change many lives.” The word adulting has jumped the shark (Bill Maher’s latest show on HBO is called #Adulting, goddess help us), but in 2013 a lot of people found it cute. Recall, this was the era of Parks and Recreation, of “put a bird on it” — less curdled times. Brown does not claim to have invented the verb form of the noun, but she did single-handedly popularize it. “I knew it was annoying the first time I said it,” she told me. “And then I consigned myself to say it 17 million more times.” I very much believe in the power of our personal stories to help others feel less alone and more seen and supported,” she says. “This isn’t an explication on adulting. This is like, ‘Hey reader, I’ve been there, you’re there now, let’s talk.’ ” Not everyone experiences helicopter parenting. There are plenty of remarkable people who have had nothing handed to them by parents as she details in her book. She says the stories of resilience from those individuals who grew up confronting tough circumstances alone can be a lesson for those who may have had it easy. In the wake of the book’s success, Brown had, as she put it, a doozy of a time. The book’s premise didn’t help. “When bad things happened, which they did, it became something more — if I ask for help and tell people I’m not okay, am I undermining the central point of my whole career?”

Her breakthrough came with an assist from a handwritten letter sent by a Washington University student named Kristine. Lythcott-Haims’s first book, Kristine wrote, had helped her see how her parents’ heavy-handedness had left her a little “underbaked.” Just that day she’d had to push her mom to let her 16-year-old brother slice his own salami. Kristine didn’t want to obsess on blame; she wanted to claim her agency—and to foster it in her brother. How could she? The result has come with tremendous upsides and a host of challenges, Lythcott-Haims says. In an era when things like COVID-19 and economic hardship are forcing more people to try multigenerational living, she and her mother want to offer an account of why they did it, what was hard and what they learned.Key to the book is that “adulting”—dear grammar traditionalist, she goes there—isn’t reaching a milestone, it’s reaching and sustaining a mindset. Lythcott-Haims was 25, married and armed with degrees from two of the world’s most prestigious universities before she ever felt like she was doing more than playacting as a grown-up. Yes, you should have fun,” she writes. “But at the same time, you’re supposed to be figuring out who you are and what you’re good at, how you’re going to make a living, who you want in your life, and how you’re going to make things better in the world, so you need to get going on that.” If all you’ve been taught is don’t talk to strangers, you’re going to be terribly bewildered and ill-equipped when you leave your parents’ home and go out into the workplace or the military or college and discover that your life is full of strangers,” she says. There shouldn’t be a blanket rule about talking to strangers, she suggests. Parents can instead teach kids the skills to discern “the one creepy stranger out of the vast majority of humans who are perfectly fine” and how to “connect respectfully with a stranger,” she says.

I've read several other books by Liz Talley and always loved them, especially her Morning Glory series, but I loved Adulting in a different way. In fact I reached out via FB to tell her I was enjoying the book immensely and that Neve had just arrived. I never message an author to fangirl while I'm still barely into the book! While the romances between Olivia/Spencer/Conrad and Chase/Zeke weren't actually annoying, glamorized, or obnoxious, they also didn't do much for me. I would have liked even more of an emphasis on Chase and Olivia's relationship and how they help each other out, as opposed to the male love interests being a primary source of their healing. It's true that Olivia needed to take risks and open herself up more, and that does include taking risks in relationships. And her history with Conrad added another dimension to the Marley plotline. But as far as Chase goes, I would have liked to see less of an emphasis on Zeke. I feel that the self-discoveries Chase made could have easily been made with Olivia, making Zeke a bit unnecessary in my eyes. Though to be honest, between Zeke, Conrad, and Spencer...they all felt a little too...goody goody? Just a little too perfect at times, apart from maybe Conrad, whose true colors shined darkly in the end. To you’re struggling to find fulfillment, deeply reflect on what you’re skilled at and what you love, she says. She suggests also asking yourself where you feel safe, connected and belonged. This book had a phenomenal start and did some things very, very right. We follow Olivia Han, a therapist turned life coach to the stars who works to turn the lives of struggling stars around after the overdose death of her younger sister 13 years ago, and Chase London, a former child prodigy turned junkie actress who can't seem to stay out of jail or rehab.In her book, Lythcott-Haims fleshes out many situations that young adults will face — getting along with coworkers, showing up for people when you say you will, seeking therapy and doing your research before making a big decision.