Kiley Reid

Biography

Kiley Reid (born 1987) grew up in Irvine, California, attended the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and worked as a babysitter throughout her twenties. Such a Fun Age is her debut novel, written partly from the experience of being a Black woman working in the domestic spaces of wealthy white families. She has spoken about the novel's origins in real observations of how white liberal employers interact with their Black employees — the gap between intention and impact, generosity and control. The novel was published in 2019, at a cultural moment when conversations about performative allyship, white fragility, and racial capitalism had entered mainstream discourse but had not yet produced structural change.

Kiley Reid at a glance