I’m pleased to announce that thanks to the glory of Robert Caro, this stage is basically behind me. Part of this might be generational if thirty is the new twenty, it’s no wonder that I get that Lost Boys feeling, and shrug confusedly when overnight company makes fun of my teddy bear. Maybe when I have children things will click into place, I’ve mused, listening to Talking Heads with one ear and sort of doubting it.

The first time I got a job with benefits and sat through a presentation explaining the HMO plan, life insurance, and “401K,” I did feel old in a certain kind of way, but there was a sense of the absurd to it, as if I were in drag as an adult, staggering around in my mother’s too-big high heels and smudgy lipstick in a silly effort to look like a grown woman.įor the past few years I’ve had the sense of wearing an oversized grownup life that wasn’t actually mine, while that magical rite of passage into adulthood continued to elude me. I had a brief thrilling moment of maturity when I voted for the first time at age eighteen, but election returns in the years since (in particular the 2004 presidential race) dulled the sophisticated glamour of the ballot box, forcing me to admit that an ability to vote does not indicate the presence of intellectual maturity. Getting drunk? Having sex? Driving a car? Going to college? None of these things did make me feel grownup in many instances, their effect was the opposite. Of course I had the usual teenaged hypotheses, and acted accordingly to test some of them out. Midway through adolescence, I began wondering a bit which life event would finally make me feel like an adult. This is definitely the greatest book that I have ever read.

The power broker by robert a caro