Such a Fun Age
Kiley Reid (2019)
“A razor-sharp novel about who gets to be comfortable in America, and who has to perform gratitude for the privilege of proximity to whiteness.”
At a Glance
Twenty-five-year-old Emira Tucker babysits for Alix Chamberlain, a wealthy white woman who runs a feminist brand. When Emira is racially profiled at a grocery store while watching Alix's toddler Briar, the incident sets off a chain of events that exposes the transactional nature of their relationship. Alix becomes obsessed with proving herself Emira's ally, while a secret connection between Emira's boyfriend Kelley and Alix's past threatens to detonate everything. At a disastrous Thanksgiving dinner, Alix weaponizes a video of the grocery store incident to discredit Kelley, forcing Emira to see how thoroughly she has been instrumentalized by the people who claim to care about her.
Read full summary →Why This Book Matters
Such a Fun Age is the first major novel to anatomize performative allyship as a distinct form of racial harm. Published in December 2019, it arrived weeks before the pandemic and months before the 2020 racial reckoning, giving it an uncanny prescience. The novel's dissection of how white liberal women instrumentalize Black people in service of their own progressive self-image became a reference point for the national conversation that followed. It demonstrated that literary fiction could engage with social media-era racial dynamics without sacrificing nuance or complexity.
Diction Profile
Informal with satirical precision — millennial vernacular in dialogue, controlled irony in narration
Low