Cheery Angst

This wasn’t her grandparents’ angst, but Emma Koenig, author of the book F*ck! I’m in My Twenties has accomplished what novelists and poets have done for generations: use existential angst to make a living and improve their love lives.

Based on her hugely popular Tumblr blog of the same title, a compilation of scribbles and notes about her life, the book has done what the fictional memoirist Hannah Horvath of the television series Girls claimed to do and that is be the voice (or at least a voice) of her generation. By doing so, she and Lena Dunham, the creator of Girls, may have transformed the way we think about existentialist angst as being a purely male phenomenon.

It’s about time. After a century of being dominated by male voices, with the possible exception of Simone de Beauvoir, these young ladies have finally shared a little bit of the load and lent it their feminine touch. Unlike Lelaina Pierce, the female protagonist in the quintessential Gen-X film Reality Bites, who despaired of not fulfilling her goal to “be somebody by 24”, the voices of millennials like Koenig and Dunham (whose work also includes the indie film Tiny Furniture centred around the same theme) do not necessarily despair as much as make light humour of their predicament.

It is what necessarily happens when giving authorial control to women. Rather than rely on a philosopher-slacker in the person of Troy Dyer to tell her character that “the only person you need to be at 24 is yourself,” before taking her in his arms and comforting her, what these ladies do is allow their characters to stumble through life, from mishap to mishap and from lover to lover in the process of becoming who they are (as Hannah Horvath would say), the same as what you would expect from a Hemingway, a Kerouac or a Bukowski.

This is angst with a dash of whimsy.