Guest post written by The Best We Could Hope For author Nicola Kraus
Nicola Kraus has coauthored, with Emma McLaughlin, ten novels, including the international #1 bestseller The Nanny Diaries, Citizen Girl, Dedication, and The Real Real. Nicola has contributed to the Times (of London), the New York Times, Redbook, Cosmopolitan,
About The Best We Could Hope For: From a #1 New York Times bestselling author comes a powerful novel about family, the weight of secrets, the choices we make, and the repercussions of the decisions made for us.
“It’s ten pm, do you know where your children are?” Sure, we laugh about that ad now but when I was a kid in the 80s, parents had to be routinely reminded that they had children, that it was getting close to bedtime, and that maybe they should do something about that.
I didn’t grow up in a neighborhood where parents had to work two jobs and neglect was born of socioeconomic necessity. I grew up on Park Avenue, in the same zip code I would go onto become a nanny. And yet I knew a kid who watched TV by himself every night until Johnny Carson finished his opening monologue. He hit upon that as a good cue for putting himself to bed.
There was more than one family where the parents up and left the city, either because the husband was ready to retire (school-aged children be damned) or to follow a new stepfather to greener pastures. Either way, they left behind teenagers with a sporadically attentive cleaning lady and pizza money. What could go wrong?
There were girls who rolled into school drunk, high, or simply out of the limo of the professional athlete they’d slept with the night before. There were run-ins with the law. There were kids whose coping strategies became bad habits and then addictions.
When I was young, I thought this was unique to New York City. As I got older, I thrilled to come upon novels and memoirs that chronicled other Gen-Xers experiences of doing things too dangerous, too young, or choosing an insane situation that would recreate the one they’d only barely outgrown. All in the name of just trying to survive—or outrun–their childhoods.
In my novel, The Best We Could Hope For, I follow siblings and half-siblings from a sprawling family of divorce over multiple decades as they try to understand the forces that shaped their childhoods. Because none of us can move forward, get better, do better, be better, until we map and name where we’ve come from:
The land where people forgot they had children.
You All Go Away and Leave Me by Piper Weiss
Weiss navigates surviving and years later investigating a headline-grabbing pedophile with no help from the adults around her. In her thirties, Weiss learned that her tennis coach famously tried to abduct her teammate, an incident she has no memory of. The quest for answers leads her into tough territory with her mother, which she handles with surgical deftness. A tour de force.
How To Build a Girl by Caitlin Moran
Inspired by her own life story, Moran’s novel centers on a girl who moves to London at fifteen years-old to make her fortune as a music critic. Sex, drugs, rock-and-roll and one very memorable UTI ensue. And while the book is hilarious, Moran also has some scathing insights about being “home-schooled” with seven siblings her parents could neither afford to clothe nor feed. Unsurprisingly, Moran grew up to be a vocal birth control advocate.
Running With Scissors by Augusten Burroughs
Sometimes you read about a Gen-X childhood and think, “Oh my God, where were the grown-ups?” In Burroughs’ case you think, “Oh shit, these were the grown-ups?” Burroughs chronicles the years after his mother left his abusive father and moved them in with her psychiatrist’s family. Utterly bonkers insanity ensues. When I say that Gen X is the first conscious generation people will often say to me, “But Boomers were trying to find themselves.” Yes, yes, they were. And that worked out great for everyone.
Happens Every Day by Isabel Gilles
Gilles opens her brilliant memoir depicting the wall of family photos her husband lovingly installed the week they moved into their new home for his new job at Oberlin. Within months, he left her and their two infant sons for a French professor. You spend much of the novel wondering why Gilles was attracted to her husband with the borderline personality disorder in the first place. But Gilles is deliciously and admirably restrained. You only meet her mother once, but all the answers are laid bare.
Are You My Mother? by Alison Bechdel
Ok, technically she may be a squeak older than Gen-X but this graphic novel about trying to forge any kind of connection with her mother through the 70s and 80s is a perfect portrait of the women in this generation who were there in body but wholly absent in spirit. Oh, and smoking. So. Much. Smoking.
Oh the Glory of It All by Sean Wilsey
In the 80s, Wilsey’s wealthy dad left his mom for her best friend, Dede. Dede was then bent on annihilating her husband’s ex and children from the narrative of her new life. In this hilarious and heartbreaking memoir, Wilsey chronicles a childhood sacrificed to the bloodsport of the narcissistic adults around him.
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers
If you have never read this book, drop everything and start. Unlike the other authors on this list, Eggers became a literal orphan in his early twenties, tasked with raising his eight-year-old brother. Which he does! Because Gen-X are superheroes capable of not only self-actualizing against enormous odds but bringing everyone we love along with us.
