“I was never writing to become the voice of a generation and I was never writing thinking that I was an enfant terrible. I was just writing what I wanted to write and it was other people who decided that I was or wasn’t those things. I don’t identify with either one.” –Bret Easton Ellis

“I certainly never intended to speak for anyone other than myself.” –Sally Rooney

“I think I might be the voice of my generation…or at least, a voice of a generation.” –Lena Dunham (as Hannah in Girls)

Not long after I graduated from high school (class of 1990), I became a perfect mark for books backed by a specific marketing strategy. And by this I mean books that are shilled as generational touchstones.

You know the kind of books I mean. The Great Gatsby. The Catcher in the Rye. On the Road. Infinite Jest. Prozac Nation. Anything by Halle Butler or Sally Rooney. Anything by Lena Dunham. The Fire Next Time. The Sun Also Rises. Jonathan Livingston Seagull.

That last one might seem far-fetched, even to those who’ve heard of it. An earnest, nazel-gazing little novel about, yes, a seagull, it became a best-seller in the early 70s, a time when many Americans were on a similarly earnest journey of nazel-gazing self-discovery.

Have I read it? Please. It came out in 1970, two years before I was born. By the time the book was on my radar, as a pre-teen and teen of the 80s, such late-hippie affectations had become a ruthless punchline.

By the mid-80s, a book like Jonathan Livingston Seagull might as well have been written in the Victorian Era or the Stone Age for all it spoke to readers of the new crop of books coming out. Specifically, the new crop that was being marketed to a certain kind of reader.

I was about 13 years old when Bret Easton Ellis’s debut novel Less Than Zero came out, in 1985. I have no memory of it as a book until the widely panned movie version was released a couple years later. Which was rated R so I didn’t get a taste of that either in real time.

But Ellis, who was 20 years old when he published Less Than Zero, was already being anointed the “voice of a new generation.” And he was being lumped in with a bunch of other relatively young writers who were dubbed “the Literary Brat Pack.” Jay McInerney, who had just published Bright Lights, Big City in 1984, at age 29, was one of the pack. So was Tama Janowitz, who came out with Slaves of New York in 1986, when she was about 28. Depending on your sources, Michael Chabon was also part of the Literary Brat Pack, as were Meg Wolitzer, Jill Eisenstadt, and Donna Tartt.

Decades later, the truth would come out that some of these writers barely even knew each other. Never mind the photos in such rags as Vanity Fair of what appeared to be Janowitz and Elllis and McInerney all partying together at some glamourously boozy writers’ event in NYC. In a 2016 Harper’s Bazaar article about the Literary Brat Pack, Janowitz said of Ellis and McInerney, “I didn’t know those guys. We would bump into each other at various things we had been invited to, but it was like creating a movement, as if somehow we had been hanging out together beforehand.” Ellis concurred. “I really can count on one hand the number of dinners I actually had with her.”

But for lack of another name for this “movement,” the “Literary Brat Pack” it was for any writer under age 30 who had published a novel to decent reviews between the mid-80s and early 90s.

Soon, however, there would be another name for this bunch, and for those who followed them and those who read them.

In 1989, the year I entered my senior year of high school, Newsweek magazine came out with a special issue on “The New Teens,” featuring a cover of three spunky teens, I guess, and enticing headlines like “What Makes Them Different” and “Who Are Their Heroes?” and “Advice from Judy Blume, Grace Slick, John Waters.”

Unlike Less Than Zero, I vividly remember this issue. The cover, at least. I can’t recall what was on the inside, like, who “their”–meaning my and my friends’–heroes were supposed to be. Or what advice the woman who sang “Feed your head” in the 60s could have possibly had for me. (I probably appreciated John Waters’s words of wisdom though.) I know I talked on the phone with a friend about the issue. I remember he wanted to know what I thought of the kids who were interviewed. We might have made fun of it all. Or maybe we took it seriously.

The point is that even though Newsweek was the kind of magazine your parents or school libraries subscribed to, not the kind of rag that teens willingly sought out and purchased, it got our attention.

The following year I graduated from high school. I had no idea what to do with my life, and in fact I bucked the trend at my school and didn’t go to college right away. Not even a community college. I had a vague notion of wanting to travel. To go on the very same journey of self-discovery that was promoted by books like Jonathan Livingston Seagull.

Or On the Road. Now that book, Kerouac’s book, a “voice of a generation” book from an even earlier time, I had read. And I’d loved it.

I’d also read a few likeminded books recommended to me by friends. Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Tim Robbins’s Even Cowgirls Get the Blues. More books about journeys and discovery, about bucking society’s expectations in defiance of the fuddy duddies of yesterday. Only thing is, with the exception of Adams’s kooky novel, these books all belonged to yesterday, to a generation definitely not my own.

But that didn’t seem to matter to me.

Because by this time I’d also read a few of the Literary Brat Packers. McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City and Story of My Life. Janowitz’s Slaves of New York. I wasn’t sure what to make of them. As far as I could tell, they all seemed to be about cocaine. With a little bit of Wall Street, art, and fashion thrown in. I mean, as a recent high school grad from Illinois, I could relate to stories about people who just want to jump in a car or a spaceship or DayGlo-colored school bus and zip around the country or universe with friends. But snorting lines in a toilet stall in a gallery in SoHo was completely beyond my comprehension.

I kept at it with the Literary Brat Packers though, maybe with some hope that reading the writers “of the moment” would help me figure out what it meant, if anything, to be a freshly minted adult at the end of the millennium.

So when McInerney’s Brightness Falls came out in 1992, I gave it a read. Another novel of 80s excess set in NYC, it had something to do with a brilliant and successful couple’s downfall. I recall thinking that it was a more mature work, Gatsby-like in ambition. Definitely a “statement novel.” But also totally beyond the understanding of a 20-year-old retail and food-service worker from the Midwest.

Perhaps it’s no wonder, then, that when Donna Tartt’s much-heralded debut The Secret History came out that same year, I was becoming skeptical of works by hot young writers. To some degree, Tartt’s novel might have been a tad bit closer to home. Its main characters were college kids after all. People my age at the time. But…these were rich kids at some ritzy liberal arts college out East. (Tartt, like Ellis and Eisenstadt, was a Bennington alum.) One of the book’s characters, as an elderly woman I worked with at a local library scornfully remarked, is a guy named “Bunny.” So yeah, I passed.

In the end, it didn’t matter. The days of the Literary Brat Pack were numbered.

In 1991 a Canadian author named Douglas Coupland published a novel called Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture. Coupland was 29, but he wasn’t being put forth in any way as the voice of a new generation or the member of a pack. His “novel” wasn’t even that. Instead, Generation X was something of a quaint throwback to medieval works like The Canterbury Tales and The Decameron–a rather plotless collection of stories told by a group of disaffected 20s-somethings in California.

But if the premise was old, the delivery was new. For one, there was no standard 8.5 x 11 inch hardcover edition of Generation X or even a standard paperback edition. From the get-go, it was published as a rather oddly dimensioned 7.85 x 9 inch softcover book with a cloudscape stretched across the top half of the cover and a solid band of orange, green, yellow, or white across the bottom. It felt like a big floppy disk. On the inside, it resembled a zine. The margins were peppered with somewhat dispiriting facts about modern society, zeitgeisty graphics, and call-outs of terms invented by Coupland, like Successophobia and The Emperor’s New Mall and the soon-to-be-timeless McJob.

This was legitimately something new. Something that felt fresh and intriguing. Remember that Newsweek cover? What makes “the new teens” dfferent? However Newsweek answered that in 1989, the magazine probably didn’t see Coupland coming.

Nobody did. Because Coupland didn’t get the Vanity Fair treatment. Not at first. And the book was something of a word-of-mouth sensation, not the kind of novel to be featured in your local library’s book discussion group. Which was perfect for a book that came to represent a determinedly anti-brand and anti-consumerist generation.

As for the title, Coupland was inspired by a chapter in Paul Fussell’s 1983 nonfiction work, Class: A Guide Through the American Status System, a book I never even heard of. Thank the lord that someone else has. In the newsletter Culture: An Owner’s Manual, W. David Marx writes, “The final chapter of Class is called ‘The X Way Out’ where Fussell identifies an emerging group in society he calls ‘Category X’ — well-educated, Bohemian-like consumers who construct obscure lifestyles in order to transcend traditional status symbols.” Marx makes the argument that by titling his book Generation X, Coupland “decided to define his generation by its aesthetic choices — specifically, fighting the class hierarchy through the focus on cultural and subcultural capital over economic capital.”

In other words, Coupland was resisting the pigeonhole marketing of his generation, and his book, right there in the title.

Before you knew it, Ellis, Tartt, Coupland, Chabon, and even McInerney were being labeled Generation X writers. Or, at least, writers whose works and characters represented the experiences of Generation X. Never mind that the generation itself was soon defined as people born between 1965 and 1980, and several of these supposed “Gen X” writers went back to the 1950s.

It didn’t matter. There was no going back now. The term was out there, and no doubt marketing teams across the country breathed a sigh of relief. Now they could claim for their own purposes a catchy yet edgy name for the coveted youth demographic. Because just like it’s easier to communicate to a crowd contained in one area, instead of blaring from a loudspeaker pointed in all directions over open ground, it’s much easier to shill to people who’ve been wrapped up with a label.

Names are tricky things. They give things legitimacy and anchor them in meaning, but when applied to a large group of people, they reduce those people to a captive audience. And with a captive audience you can make people listen to or do almost anything.

As anyone who’s ever perused a catalog or read an astrology chart knows, the next step after labeling something is to describe it with a few punchy yet vague predictions and adjectives, the kind that can apply to anybody at any time. Ideally, the adjectives should be semi-flattering. They should hint at distinction and specialness, at some je ne sais quoi that sets this…thing…apart from all the other things before and after. You do want people to buy what you’re selling after all. If you really want to spice it up, you should also toss in some element of danger, a hint of caution, a touch of the forbidden. Not so much to set off any “buyer beware” alarm bells, but enough to stir the buyer’s curiosity.

So, if it’s a group of people you’re trying to sell and sell to–specifically, a group of people born between this year and that–you might flatter them by saying that they’re already much wiser than the people born before them. You also might tell them that nobody’s seen the troubles they’ve seen before, which is flattering in the sense that it validates their anxieties and fears, even if it is quite condescending and possibly even absurd (considering that humans have been dealing with all kinds of crap for centuries now).

To put an edgy spin on it–because young people love to walk the edge, I guess–you can rebrand their so-called preternatural wisdom as “cynicism” and their anxiety and fears as “apathy.” If that seems to lose ’em, reel ’em back in by telling them that they’re, say, “diverse,” so much more “diverse” than the people who came before them. In all the history of the world, no one has ever “diversed” as much as these “diverse” young folk have “diversed.” It’s really quite commendable.

If any of this sounds familiar to you, if it sums up you, your friends, and school chums, even for just 10 seconds of your life so far, congrats! You’ve got yourself a generation: Generation X!!!!!!

Or maybe this label is supposed to go with Millennials. Or Gen Z? Or the Lost Generation? Or Libras. Maybe Geminis. Yeah, that’s it: Gen Z Geminis with a diverse no-foam Greatest Generation moon. Maybe the label is b.s. Maybe we can make it mean whatever we want it to mean. If one generation rejects it, recycle it for the next. Young people, they like recycling.

But back to Coupland’s Generation X. It wasn’t long before Coupland found himself in the “voice of a generation” club alongside Ellis and Tartt. Meanwhile, McInerney and Janowitz kind of dropped out of the picture, while others filled the void. David Foster Wallace. Zadie Smith. Elizabeth Wurtzel. Dave Eggers. Colson Whitehead.

No surprise that Coupland rejected the label, even if he did keep writing about the pecularities of people under age 30 as if he, too, wanted to corral them into some kind of subclass. Case in point, his second novel, Shampoo Planet, came out in 1992 and centered on the younger sibling of one of the main characters in Generation X–a determinedly anti-Boomer Alex P. Keaton-style “global teen” named Tyler who at one point declares “My memories begin with Ronald Reagan.” Confusingly, Coupland defined “global teens” as “alien to X as X is to baby boomers.” Even though the “global teen” characters in Shampoo Planet belonged to the X years, as the generation would come to be defined.

That kind of confusion should have been a warning against taking generation labels too seriously. But as we stand now, in 2025, generational labeling (and bickering) has been dialed up to 11 since the days of Coupland et al.

When it came to the first books that got the Gen X label, I have to admit I drank the Kool-Aid. Generation X thrilled me when I first read it. Not that it resonated with me. Who needs resonance when you’ve got that cover! Those call-outs! That marginalia!

I remember I was especially eager to read Shampoo Planet, even if Coupland’s “global teens” comment did mystify me. His comment that the book was specifically about people under age 25 (which I was at the time) is what got me hooked.

But Shampoo Planet left me wanting. Just as with those coke-snorters in Slaves of New York, I didn’t relate to Tyler and his friends. The title, for example. It came from Tyler’s obsession with hair and grooming. That alone felt like b.s. to me. Still does, especially when you consider that this novel came out one year after grunge took over with Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” another so-called generation-definer. It also followed on the heels of Ellis’s American Psycho, a extremely violent novel about a serial killer that became a bit of a rallying cry for free speech–and also centered on a young charater obsessed with grooming. For the record, Ellis did it better, had more of a point with it, knew what his targets were.

But which was it? Were we preps or were we slobs? Achievers or slackers?

I couldn’t tell you. As a reader, I removed myself from the debate. I didn’t read Zadie Smith or Donna Tartt or Bret Easton Ellis or Dave Eggers–not until much later. Forget Elizabeth Wurtzel. I thought her book covers were a joke, an obvious ploy for “controversy”–maybe not engineered by her, but still. Twice I made an attempt at Infinite Jest. Interesting writer, but I didn’t get very far either time.

Instead, I just read what I wanted to, no matter when it was written and who the book was supposed to be aimed at. I read a lot of Irish literature, including some current folks (Roddy Doyle, Pat McCabe, Colm Toibin). I read Romantic poets and classic American texts and celebrity bios and African American fiction and books by women. I fell in love with the novels of Louise Erdrich, Tayari Jones, Emer Martin, Cormac McCarthy, and Toibin. I loved Frank O’Connor. I loved Lonesome Dove and Kristin Lavransdatter, two epic masterpieces that are worlds apart in setting and style. I read more poets. I adored Shelley and Keats, Yeats, Kevin Young, Frank O’Hara, and Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill. I liked random reads like Hector Tobar’s The Last Great Road Bum and Mike Tidwell’s Bayou Farewell and Richard Rodriguez’s Darling and Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet. The Creative Quest by Questlove. That book by Patti Smith where all she talks about is her favorite detective shows and coffee.

Sometime in my 40s I finally circled back to Generation X. By this time, people my age had long passed the expiration date on coolness and no one was putting us on magazine covers anymore asking what makes us different, partly because magazines had become about as relevant as a Richard Brautigan novel. Or Jonathan Livingston Seagull.

Gen Xers were already getting lumped in with Baby Boomers, our one-time enemies, who in turn were suddenly being burned at the stake for everything from hastening climate change to ruining Facebook. More often than not, Gen Xers were overlooked entirely. Skipped over from Boomers to Millennials. Like we weren’t there, hadn’t made so much as a dent in the culture.

Maybe all this societal change and generational name-calling stirred in me some sense of territoriality mixed with nostalgia. Because I started checking out some of the heavy hitters of my generation’s salad days. A collection of David Foster Wallace essays (pretty good…a mixed bag if anything). End of the Road. OK, that’s a movie, but a movie about Wallace. White Teeth. (Liked it.) The Goldfinch. (Started out decent then became a slog.) The Interestings. (Meh.) A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. (Ugh. Did. Not. Finish.) Less Than Zero. (I had no idea it was a Christmas story.)

Mixed in with these reads were some by the new kids. Normal People. (OK.) Beautiful World, Where Are You. (Ugh. Did. Not. Finish.) Eileen. (Not bad.) Self-Care. (Yeah, dumb.) My Year of Rest and Relaxation. (Also not bad.) The New Me. (Pretty good.) Banal Nightmare. (Also pretty good but the relentless nastiness starts to feel like “uh huh, uh huh, flips pages to move it along.” I can be convinced otherwise though.)

And yet, say I saw glimmers of myself in those books. My younger self, my current self, whatever. Say there were parts that resonated with me. Parts that made me laugh, made me feel wistful. Say there were characters who felt like people I knew. Places and scenes that felt so true I could picture them as if they were playing out right in front of me. Given that these are supposed to be “Millennial” books, and I’m no Millennial, is that a bug? Am I just imagining universality? Or is that a feature?

Maybe it’s what literature is supposed to be. And maybe it’s what humanness, no matter when you’re born and when you die and what years fall in between, is supposed to be.

In 2021 Bret Easton Ellis came out with The Shards. Ellis has become something of a cranky old man in recent years, but a cranky old man who is ride or die for his generation. No surprise then that The Shards is something of a love letter to the 1980s. Its music, its movies, its hedonism. Much like those coke-addled tomes of the Reagan era, The Shards is about people with whom I have nothing in common other than sharing the Earth around the same time in history. Much like Less Than Zero, its characters are all spoiled, amoral rich kids in Los Angeles who do a lot of drugs and have a lot of sex, always with a pool nearby. In The Shards, though, there’s a plot about a serial killer that somehow…makes you feel for these trashy teens. It’s a gripping read, but that’s not what surprised me. What surprised me is that it resonated with me. That it almost felt like, yeah, this was the 80s. This is Gen X.

It could be that nostalgia has finally primed me for the kind of marketing that accompanied Gen X novels of the 90s. That in the face of rapid change, I’m giving in to a Kool-Aid flashback and clinging to something familiar. Nodding along to the spiel, happily handing over all my money, buying the T-shirt and not even pretending anymore that I’m wearing it “ironically.”

It’s also possible that Ellis just wrote a good story. Did he write it for people like me? Or any and all takers?

Most likely the latter. It sounds dumb, after all, to propose that Fitzgerald wrote The Great Gatsby for flappers and bootleggers, with no eye on immortality. Kerouac originally modeled himself after Thomas Wolfe, a serious and conventional novelist. Then he wrote On the Road. That novel wasn’t him throwing in the towel, and it certainly wasn’t him trying to set a trend by catering to an as-yet undefined generation of rebels, beatniks, drop-outs, and seekers. The very idea is, again, dumb.

Instead, On the Road was a self-serving creative breakthrough–as all swing-for-the-fences literature should be. It’s why young people still fall in love with the book decades later. And why crabby old post-menopausal hags like me can admire and look forward to a new Halle Butler novel, as well as a new Louise Erdrich. Even a new Bret Easton Ellis.

Generations come and go. Good stories are for the ages.