Grown Ups

March 15, 2020
A 35-year-old woman obsesses over social media and her ex-boyfriend as her life implodes. Jenny McLaine is having a rough time. She and Art, her photographer boyfriend of seven years, just broke up. Her job at the Foof, a feminist online magazine, is on the rocks. Her roommates are moving out and her tarot card-loving medium mother is moving in. Her life doesn't seem as flawless as those of the women she idolizes on social media, but that doesn't mean she won't spend an alarming amount of time trying to make things look picture perfect. She even scrolls through her phone during sex--in her defense, it was "a slow bit." At one point, Jenny panics to the point of tears as she attempts to make an Instagram post about a croissant--should there be a hashtag? an exclamation point?--before throwing the croissant itself into the garbage (an apt metaphor for the amount of attention Jenny pays to her online life versus her real one). It's easy to sympathize with Jenny's put-upon single-mom friend, Kelly, who's annoyed with Jenny's self-obsessiveness and social media fixation. Through script dialogue, email drafts, and texts along with prose, Unsworth (who also writes for television) gives an up-close and personal view of Jenny's gradual breakdown as her life falls apart. Although Jenny's constant need to filter every life experience through social media often feels exhausting, there's no denying that her obsession will resonate with many millennials. Jenny's voice is strong, sharp, occasionally disgusting, and alternately charming and horrifying as she narrates every one of her stumbles through life. A bracing look at a breakdown that's sometimes difficult to read but always completely captivating.

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May 18, 2020
British writer Unsworth (Animals) delivers a blistering tragicomic send-up of a life documented on Instagram. For 30-something Jenny McLaine, social media doesn’t come as naturally as it does to her younger colleagues at feminist website The Foof. Perhaps that’s why she spends way too long at her East London coworking space agonizing over just the right filter, hashtag, and caption for a croissant post (“I’ve tweaked it so many times that I can’t work out whether it makes sense anymore”). Real life starts to intrude on Jenny’s online persona, however, when her romantic life, friendships, and financial footing all fall apart in quick succession—and that’s before Jenny’s clairvoyant, busybody mother shows up and moves in. The broad satire with which Unsworth opens her novel quickly gains both substance and shadow, as Jenny’s present-day predicaments alternate with scenes from the heady beginning and truly painful breakdown of a longtime romantic relationship. Emails, internet searches, online posts, and even a screenplay comprise the varied and playful forms through which Jenny’s surprisingly poignant drama unfolds. Though directed squarely at millennials, Jenny’s stumbling journey toward authenticity will resonate with anyone who’s taken the bold, hard step of assessing their life without any filters. Agent: Anna Stein, ICM Partners.

May 1, 2020
To her chagrin, 35-year-old writer Jenny lives with roommates in the London house she scrimped and saved for years to buy. When they get fed up with her writing about them in the column she writes for online magazine the Foof, the young twentysomethings move out just in time for Jenny's actress/psychic mom, with whom things are complicated, to move in. The reason for the roommates (and the uninvited mom) lies in Jenny's breakup with her longtime boyfriend, sexy photographer Art. Unsworth (Animals, 2015) deftly bounces readers through Jenny's story, which unfolds in snappily titled chapters, which often contain emails, texts, and tweets. This fun, chatty packaging adds to what is ultimately a journey of serious transformation and redemption. Jenny is grieving more than her relationship: another loss precipitated her current spiral into self-involved social-media obsession, and the online likes and comments are Band-Aids for her painful struggle to love herself. Unsworth's wise and invigorating novel captures something essential in the ways Jenny rules, and is ruled by, her digital self; readers will be hooked.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)