The Last Days of Books: ageism and the literary millennial in Younger

In Younger (2015-2021), the world of publishing is built on puns and parodies. Characters drink Bridget Jones Daiquiris, Margarita Atwoods, and Bloody Mary Shelleys. Stand-ins for Karl Ove Knausgård and John Green publish titles like Kaleidoscope of Life and Hashtag, I'm Dying.

Edward L. L. Moore, a dead ringer for George R. R. Martin, dominates his publishers' income with the bestselling fantasy series Crown of Kings, beloved by Seth Meyers, Misty Copeland, Terry Gross, and Ice T. Even Sex and the City (1997), another book-turned-Darren Star production, gets a loving send up with the evocative trilogy, Man-Hattan, She-Donism, and Goldman Sex.

Puns, like parodies, rely on pre-existing knowledge. You can watch Younger without knowing that P is for Pigeon might also be Helen MacDonald's H is for Hawk (2014), a memoir about falconry, sexual repression, and grief, but when a marketing executive yells "It's a metaphor!!" in reference to the pigeon, the full absurdity won't hit.1 It's not just that shows as glossy as Younger usually avoid Norwegian life-writers, grief memoirs, and YA sick lit: Younger also perfectly skewers the hierarchies and marketization of contemporary literary culture. Whether asking an assistant to add Jane Austen to Tinder and Christian Mingle, Googling the extremely cursed phrase "Selling Joyce Carol Oates to Millennials," or optioning the movie tie-in for Chinua Achebe's African Trilogy, the publishers in Younger talk earnestly about the writers they love, all while thirstily dining off the "Last Days of Books" in couture, at award shows, and through multi-million dollar sponsorship deals.2

Looking at the representation of publishing in Younger, I'm interested in the show's engagement with millennial readers of literary fiction, its construction and parody of a feminine literary whiteness, and its conceptualization of literary cultures through generational referencing, reading, and riffing. In seven wildly uneven seasons, Younger skewers the corporatization of identity politics and supposed generational divides in literary workplaces in funny and genuinely effective ways. As Sheri-Marie Harrison argues elsewhere in this cluster of I May Destroy You (2020), Younger is profoundly and seriously interested in "the economy of cultural prestige", even when its methods lack the rigor, precision, and genius of Coel's currently peerless text.3 Yet, as I've argued elsewhere about contemporary melodramas like The Good Wife (2009-16), Younger critiques the exclusionary world of publishing only to perpetuate the fantasy of a lucrative and glamourous career for wealthy white women with preexisting knowledge and networks.4 It bases its storylines and occasionally tone-deaf humor in the entirely believable premise that a slim, wealthy woman could look somehow "younger".5 While the show also complicates the perception of millennials as non-readers and so-called "digital natives," Younger is a loving, bitchy, but often frustrating portrait of a bloated and precariously funded industry that says more about contemporary literary culture than almost anything else on TV.6

"The Old Ma'am and the C"

Younger focuses on a forty-year-old, newly-divorced single mother who pretends to be twenty-six to get an entry level job in publishing. 7 Liza Miller (Sutton Foster) tells a lie essentially to bypass the ageism and sexism ingrained in the industry. Once she's hired by the fictional Empirical publishing, she works as an assistant for head of marketing Diana Trout (Miriam Shor), who is around Liza's real age. Torn between her affinity for the "old guard" of publishing, represented by Diana and the company's handsome but very dull owner Charles (Peter Hermann), and the twenty-something colleagues she claims to be one of, Liza proves her credentials in conversations with her superiors about Achebe and Austen, helps Empirical find the next big literary novel for suburban book clubs, and fakes a literacy with social media as commissioning editor for an imprint literally called "Millennial."

In its puns, parodies, and age-related plotlines, early seasons of Younger are what Jia Tolentino refers to as a "Funfetti cake full of millennial jokes".8 Torn between her suburban New Jersey community and the Brooklyn apartment she shares with her best friend and queer artist, Maggie (Debi Mazar), Liza has visible whiplash as she moves rapidly between supposedly binary generational categories: at once a publishing outsider and insider, a party girl and suburban book-club attendee, a low-paid assistant and middle-class parent, a connoisseur of celebrity Instagrams and sophisticated reader of literary fiction. Most significantly, Liza must pretend to be both Generation X and millennial; a part of what Douglas Coupland famously referred to as the skeptical and individualistic generation who witnessed the "triumph" of liberal capitalism and the more technologically literate, less financially stable, and infamously coddled "'Babies on Board' of the early Reagan years, the 'Have You Hugged Your Child Today?' sixth graders of the early Clinton years."9

Accepting the absurdity of the show's premise, and without asking too many questions about what it means to "look" either twenty-six or forty, the main barrier to Liza's employment is language. In the pilot, she is seen interviewing for a job as an editorial assistant when a panel of twenty-something editors reel off a list of book-adjacent tech, some real and one fake, as evidence of the obstacles posed by a fifteen-year career break:

Here, at least for Liza, it's not a knowledge of contemporary literature or trends that exclude her from the workplace ("I'm a terrific reader!" she innocently replies), but technology, etiquette, and slang. It doesn't help that she encounters the twenty-first century like a latter-day Rip Van Winkle. Claiming not to know about hook ups, nudes, Taylor Swift, and forms of contraception like the diaphragm that are centuries old, she also lacks the fluency in social media typically associate with the millennial, regularly forgetting what a meme is and asking colleagues how to "slip" into someone's DMs.11

As warranted and likely accurate as Younger's focus on ageism is, the show gives millennials more power than they typically hold in their famously stunted careers.12 It also forgets that they, too, could stand to be a little younger. When the show first aired, the oldest millennials were seven years younger than Liza; when the show ended in 2021, the elder millennials were turning forty, which is her age in the pilot. Emphasizing a shared ignorance of cultural references is also an easy way for relatively privileged groups to conceive of their own disadvantages. In an updated analysis of Generation X (1991), published on the novel's thirtieth anniversary, Coupland suggests that age groups, if they ever existed, find cohesion through "sentimental markers" rather than dates, adding that "there's nothing quite so micro-humiliating as making a Brady Bunch reference and the room going silent."13 Portraying the cultural references of millennials as a form of ageist gatekeeping, Younger fixates on how language codifies and excludes, shaping generational experiences of culture and technology and creating a potentially discriminatory workplace, without similarly interrogating the exclusionary dialects that have structured publishing for generations.

"She Walks Like a Lyric Poem"

Gradually, Younger's reliance on literary puns and references become part of its commentary on age and access. 14 Liza is portrayed as the show's "Trojan horse," a fish out of water and a layperson's entry point to the world of books.15 Yet she's hardly an outsider: Liza is incredibly well-read in canonical literatures, went to Dartmouth, and claims to have been "one of the youngest people ever to make editor [at Random House]. I was twenty-five."16 It follows that Liza's lie and the power she quickly gains at Empirical are karmically justified by the fact that she is returning to publishing after years of assumed selflessness as a wife and mother. Perhaps realistically, given the well-documented and extreme lack of diversity in publishing, the show's feminism is limited to this one note: the right to work is undisputedly central to all women's emancipation and forms of discrimination beyond ageism, including the lack of non-white authors or publishers at Empirical, are rarely mentioned.17

In this and many other ways, Younger is similar to creator Darren Star's most famous show, Sex and the City (1998-2003). Both are adaptations of books depicting aspirational pockets of the New York elite who create and sell works of art. In Sex and the City, we have Carrie's writing, Samantha Jones's PR company, and Charlotte's job as a curator; in Younger, we have the equally and fictionally glamourous world of publishing. The premise of each show, the freelance sex columnist navigating a fairly vanilla world of dating in her thirties or the forty-year-old New Jersey divorcee who lies in order to reenter publishing, also centers the career of a middle-class white women in ostensibly marginal positions, facing obstacles that don't inhibit the fantasy elements of the program. Famously, through six seasons of Sex and the City, Carrie earns enough to live in Manhattan by writing one column per week, getting catastrophically "drunk at Vogue" the one time she receives edits.18 Critics similarly note that Younger's version of publishing is glossily unrealistic, what Darcie Wilder calls "a bedtime story" that makes working in media look like a dreamscape.19

To its credit, the work of publishing is much more central to Younger than writing ever is to Sex and the City. The show's filled with the real-world lexicon of slush piles, industry awards, and low-to-no paid internships, while assistants and publishers spend most of their time in the office. Although they do so in couture, as Rachel Syme notes, the publishing to Younger pipeline is clear: "If you hear a good tidbit of gossip, you can almost guarantee it will appear in subtly fictionalized form on the next season".20 The result is incredibly literary TV. Characters whisper the name of former New York Times reviewer Michiko Kakutani and brag, incomprehensibly, about threesomes with Jay McInerney. They create GoodReads accounts for unpublished monographs to generate buzz, unironically tell a first-time author that she might have written a bestseller "like The Help," and make jokes about Amazon, Vulture, and The New Yorker: "They shouted and murmured the crap out of it."21

Despite its sensitivity to generational references, however, Younger never acknowledges how coded and self-referential the language required to enter publishing is. Well-versed in literary fiction and with an only slightly outdated history in publishing, Liza talks like she belongs at Empirical, a company whose name perhaps ironically references the value of knowledge gained through experience. While her actually twenty-six-year-old co-worker Kelsey (Hillary Duff) fights with bosses to take risks on new authors, it often seems that Liza can pretend to be twenty-six because she has the references of a middle-class white women in her early forties and because her presence, despite the fraud she commits to get the job, demands fewer changes from the workplace and its literary product.

The premise of the show reiterates this point. Although later seasons explore some of the moral quandaries of doctoring legal documents as well as the psychic weight of lying to almost everyone you know, Liza embodies a model of neoliberal motherhood that poses only minor challenges to the workplace. When Younger begins, her daughter is a senior in college and already travelling the world. Liza never has to account for her child's presence or absence; despite her ex-husband's money problems, she doesn't require child support, child care, or, as she repeatedly points out, future maternity leave.22 With her supposedly unlikely ease with children further endearing her to her bosses, Liza reflects back to her superiors what they wish to see in the literary millennial: she is hard-working, well-read in the same literatures they are, and relatively conservative in her ideas about what contemporary literary fiction should be.

"You really have no idea what a meme is."

Ultimately, Younger doesn't trash the literary millennial, so much as it privileges the so-called "thinning out" of older staff in publishing.23 The millennials Liza meets are consummate professionals. Contrary to their popular conception as lazy, pin-headed, and, if you're Brett Easton Ellis, the ruination of literary culture, Liza's colleagues work hard, staying up late reading manuscripts and diligently scrolling social media to find the newest authors and trends.24 As the show develops, ageist discriminations multiply in both directions. If Liza was once one of the youngest editors at Random House, similar levels of privilege make Kelsey the head of her own imprint before thirty. Yet, the connections and knowledge of social media that make Kelsey so valuable to Empirical eventually force her out of the company when a group of "old-school" investors disapprove of an Instagram post she accidentally shares.25 In later seasons, Liza and Kelsey are portrayed as similarly precarious: the former at risk because of her lie and the latter unmoored by the industry's attempt to replicate past success: the next Jonathan Franzen, John Updike, or J. K. Rowling.

The show's contradictions finally manifest in its best character, Diana Trout. Introduced as Liza's demanding boss, Diana is the only woman who is openly over forty at Empirical and its only marketing executive. Hers is a character that the show grows to love, but initially doesn't know what to do with. Intentionally childfree, unmarried, and horny for tall, dark, and handsome rich men, Younger mocks Diana for the nakedness of her desires, which chafe against Liza's heroic deceptions. This, too, has a literary applications. It's Diana who champions P is for Pigeon when her colleagues don't think it can sell; she's also routinely mocked because her job is more financially minded than editorial. Take, for example, this conversation between Charles and Diana, which Liza interrupts:

Putting aside the awkwardness of the dialogue, and the audacity of describing colonization as being "caught between two worlds," Diana is shown to be flailing, her engagement with literature embarrassingly thin against Liza's purer and supposedly more youthful enthusiasm. Although it is Liza who actually and literally commits fraud, her literary knowledge is depicted as heartfelt ("I read the entire trilogy, I couldn't put it down"), while Diana, who is well-read and sophisticated in other areas, is awkwardly inauthentic.

Despite its premise, then, and as shown by its treatment of Diana and other secondary characters, Younger can be uncharitable to women with ambition.27 The show is strongest when its parodies of publishing critique the industry's obsession with both youth and tradition, but when the show forgets its own position, and particularly when it places the old guard on too high of a pedestal, it risks replicating the adversarial and hyper-privileged relationships that dominate the literary world, forgetting that neither the old nor the new can assure publishing's survival and that neither Gen X or millennials know much about Gen Z.

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Rachel Sykes is Senior Lecturer in Contemporary American Literature at the University of Birmingham, where she also directs the Centre for Contemporary Literature and Culture. Rachel is the author of The Quiet Contemporary American Novel (Manchester University Press, 2017) and co-editor of the forthcoming collection Marilynne Robinson (Manchester University Press, 2022).

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