The Adult

Reading The Adult, by Bronwyn Fischer, I felt as if I were eighteen again.

Natalie is eighteen, too, just beginning her first year of college in Toronto. Accustomed to life at her parents’ rustic lodge at a remote lake in northern Canada, she’s self-conscious and awkward with her dorm-mates, clueless about boys and drinking and parties. Not long after her arrival, she’s sitting on a park bench, working on an assigned poem, and Nora sits down beside her.

She’s older. Probably not older than thirty, though, Natalie thinks. But while Natalie admits to being eighteen as they chat, Nora never says her age. Natalie feels just as awkward with Nora as she does with her classmates yet feels so drawn to her that when they meet again, randomly, she asks if she might call her. Nora says yes.

Natalie enters her world and the relationship that commences will for better or worse define her first year away from home, setting her on the path to her real life.

There are books you love because they’re good, true books.

There are books you love because they’re good, true books that speak to your own life.

I met my husband the first day of my freshman year at Indiana University. There he was, suddenly, unexpectedly, and I walked his world. Home felt far away, its problems those of the girl I used to be.

The Adult took me back to that time and made me see that a big part of why it had seemed like a miracle to me was in how simple my life had become, literally overnight.

Classes, study, parties. Love. I breathed differently in this whole new world.

Not that the problems I left behind didn’t still exist. My dad’s drinking, my mom’s exhaustion. Their struggle to make ends meet—worse than ever with my college expenses.

But I didn’t have to see them.

Walking into my girlhood home at Thanksgiving break, it was as if I were looking through the wrong end of a telescope. So shabby and small. I felt myself shrinking. Right now, typing, I feel exactly as I did that day.

I also feel the shape of my freshman year, big and floaty and full of marvels.

Which brings me back to why I loved The Adult.

I so felt the newness of Natalie’s world. Aside from her increasingly complicated relationship with Nora, she “does” college. She finds a friend in her dormmate Clara; tries to figure out how to rebuff the advances of Sam, a nice boy she’s not attracted to; puzzles over the competitive nature of Rachel, a classmate in her poetry class. She drinks too much. More than once.

When Clara suspects she’s got a boyfriend, Natalie lies and says yes. But her double life eventually catches up with her in the most surprising yet perfect way.

To say more would ruin the story for you.

And it’s a good, true story.

So I’ll just say, I loved this book. I highly recommend it