25th Anniversary of Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture

This year marks the 25th anniversary of Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture by Douglas Coupland. Shouldn’t I have written about this before August? Probably.

I bought Generation X back in 1991. When I showed the book to my dad, he talked to me about the importance of connecting with my generation. This conversation, along with the book, gave me a strange sense of belonging in the world. I was so relieved to learn I was not a Baby Boomer because I did not want to be called a baby for the rest of my life.

I was so relieved to learn I was not a Baby Boomer because I did not want to be called a baby for the rest of my life.

Tales For An Accelerated Culture

I was also excited to learn that I belonged to a generation that was not my older sisters’ generation. I did not want to identify with Baby Boomer hallmarks. I’d had no hand in creating any of them and did not want to have them put upon me. I did not want to live in the shadow of Boomer memories, experiences, and future nostalgia. I spent my first seven years running up and down streets of my neighborhood in Hacienda Heights, California. I saw lots of hippies dragging on cigarettes and hanging out of creepy vans. Although my older sisters were fresh-faced, other teenage girls I came across at church, in the neighborhood or at the high school across the street from my elementary, unsettled me. I was just a little kid, but you know what they say about children. They’re wet cement. Whatever falls on them makes an impression.

…You know what they say about children. They’re wet cement. Whatever falls on them makes an impression.

Baby boomer teenagers with their stringy hair, sticky, caked-on makeup, bell-bottoms, and cigarettes basically sicked out my five-year-old self. I did not want to identify with them or their peace signs or mod fashion or Monkeys and Beatles.

Besides, to a little kid, monkeys belonged in zoos. Also, phonetically, I heard “beetles” and ewww. Why couldn’t they come up with a better name for themselves and how come nobody ever talks about this?

Years later, I connected with bands with names I understood: Journey, Foreigner, R.E.M., the Bangles, Alabama.

All this to say, I was so thrilled to discover Coupland’s book. I read about it somewhere and couldn’t wait to buy it. I wanted to learn everything I could about Generation X. I didn’t realize at the time that I already knew quite a bit because I had lived it.  But, I had not lived long enough in 1991, to fully understand it. I could not articulate my observations in the context of history, society, or even generations.

For example, growing up, there were so many latchkey kids. We were all latchkey with few exceptions. So many of the kids who floated in and out of the classroom came from very messed up, divorced families. Sometimes, I was the one floating. I saw the unprotected childhood up close and personal. Sadly, I have forgotten many of those classmates’ names, but I remember them.

I remember you, wherever you are.

I followed her home one day after school. She was embarrassed by the sheetless mattress flung in the middle of the bedroom in her split-level rent house. Southboro Addition, Colorado Springs. There were no pictures on the walls, no food in the fridge. I remember her as she was that day in 1976. A lonely girl levitating above the fire of her parent’s hellish divorce.  In the corner of her room was a Park Manor Doll House.

“Where are the dolls?” I inquired.

“It’s not supposed to have any,” she answered.

It was cold and empty, just like her life.

A few years ago, I found a similar dollhouse at a local flea market. I bought it for my little girl, but you know, it was really a memorial to the levitating girl. I can still see her thin face, her stringy blonde hair, her disheveled life. Our encounter was brief but has remained fixed in my memory for 40 years.

I remember you as you were in 1976. A lonely girl levitating above the fire of her parent’s hellish divorce…Our encounter was brief, but has remained fixed in my memory for 40 years.

I would be an adult with children of my own before I could dispense even to myself the full-frontal reality of latchkey consequences.

What did they call my generation?

Until Coupland’s book came out, I didn’t know what they called my generation. From day one, the name Generation X did not bother me. Actually, I loved it. I liked that it included the word generation. To me, it embodied the collective persona that was still unfolding: edgy, alternative, ironic.

And then I read the book.

Ugh. The book. Except for the part about McJobs and McMansions, I didn’t like it. When I bought it, I thought it was a piece of nonfiction that would tell me all about Gen-Xers. This was an easy mistake to make because the book was not formatted like a traditional novel. It was a bendy paperback, but at 7.5 x 9 inches, not like any paperback, I’d ever seen. As a work of fiction, the characters had names that were unfamiliar to me. Only Andy was a Gen X name. I did not go to school with a single Dag, Tyler, Claire, Elvissa, or Tobias. Who were these people, anyway? Still, elements of their “tales” resonated with me to some degree. Also, the setting of Southern California made me wonder what I had missed out on in having left that region of the country in the Summer of 1974.

But, the book didn’t tell me what I really wanted to know: Who were we and what exciting things were we going to do?

But, the book didn’t tell me what I really wanted to know: Who were we and what exciting things were we going to do?

So, I put it down and never picked it up again, and sadly, I sold it in a garage sale or threw it away or gave it to Goodwill a long time ago.

Quite a few people have written about the 25th anniversary of Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture. I’ve provided links below to some of those articles. One I really enjoyed is from a Colorado blogger who writes A Teacher’s View. Here is an excerpt:

Twenty-five years ago today, St. Martin’s Press released a small, quirky, unassuming, oddly-shaped novel by Douglas Coupland called Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture. It launched a career and a marketing buzz, and it ultimately named (some might say stigmatized) an entire demographic of people. It wasn’t even supposed to be a novel – Coupland had been contracted to write an updated “Yuppie Handbook for the 90s” – but in typical Xer fashion he went another route, moving to the desert of Palm Springs and crafting a novel about a trio of twenty-somethings who have fled the traditional career path of college/work/career/family to live on the fringes and work “McJobs” while telling each other stories as a way to find meaning in their lives.

Ironically, most members of what became known as Generation X have never even heard of, much less read, Coupland’s seminal work of Xer identity – and that’s a quality that makes the book and the generation all the more poetic. Coupland never intended to become the “spokesman for a generation,” and he was so annoyed by the title that in 1995 he declared a moratorium on the use of the term, and he effectively declared the “death of Generation X.” In fact, Coupland did not mean for the term to apply to an entire group of people born between 1961 – 1981 (which is what generational sociologists Strauss & Howe determine is Gen X). Coupland drew the title from a book by Paul Fussell called Class, in which Fussell referred to an “X-class” of people who live outside the traditional norms. Coupland was simply reflecting the collective feelings of ennui among his group of friends in the late 80s and early 90s.

All in all, I’m grateful for Coupland’s book. It catapulted Gen-Xers into consciousness and people have been talking about us off and on ever since. And, besides, without it, the name “Baby Buster” might have stuck, in which case, I would have still been called a baby for the rest of my life.

Have you read Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture?