Such a Fun Age

Kiley Reid's debut novel Such a Fun Age begins with a phone call at 11pm. Alix Chamberlain — a successful influencer and entrepreneur whose online brand is about confident, authentic womanhood — needs a babysitter. Now. There's been an incident at home and she needs Emira Tucker, her 25-year-old babysitter, to take Briar, Alix's three-year-old daughter, to a nearby grocery store for a couple of hours. Emira goes. She takes Briar to the Market Depot. She's wearing a party outfit because she just came from a friend's birthday gathering. And a security guard approaches her, assumes she's kidnapping the white toddler she's pushing through the store, and demands she prove the child is hers.

Someone films the incident on their phone. That video, and what various people do — and don't do — with it, is the detonator for everything that follows.

Such a Fun Age was published by Bloomsbury in 2019 and became a New York Times bestseller and Sunday Times bestseller simultaneously. It was longlisted for the 2020 Booker Prize. It was cited as a best debut novel by nearly every major literary review that covered it, and Kiley Reid was described by The Times as "a new literary star." None of that praise is inflated. The novel is doing something genuinely difficult — writing a sharp political satire about race and class in contemporary America while keeping both its lead characters simultaneously sympathetic and implicated — and it does it with a lightness of touch that makes the whole thing read faster than a thriller.

The book is structured around two alternating viewpoints. Emira is Black, 25, living in Philadelphia, working as a part-time babysitter because she doesn't have health insurance and the cash helps while she figures out what to do with her linguistics degree. She loves Briar in the uncomplicated way of someone who gets to be the fun person in a child's life without bearing responsibility for it. She's also deeply ambivalent about her own future, resistant to pressure from her friends to "do something better" with herself, and dating a man named Kelley who is, in ways that take a while to fully register, not quite what he presents himself to be.

Alix is Emira's employer. She has built her brand on authenticity and directness, on telling women to stop apologizing and ask for what they want. She is a proud progressive. She is the kind of person who, after the grocery store incident, feels genuine guilt about what happened to Emira in the store — and also can't quite stop herself from making that guilt about her own goodness, her own desire to be seen as the kind of white woman who does things right. The novel's central tension is the creeping, then accelerating, sense that Alix's desire to "help" Emira — to become close to her, to know her, to fix her trajectory — is not actually about Emira at all.

Reid's handling of the employer-employee dynamic in domestic work is precise and uncomfortable in the way good satire should be. Alix's belief that she and Emira are friends — or could be — is not simple hypocrisy. It's something more interesting and more disturbing: a genuine desire for closeness that is fundamentally structured by the asymmetry of who is in whose kitchen, who is getting paid, and who gets to leave at the end of the day. The novel is also careful about the specific generational and cultural weight of performative allyship — the gap between what progressive white Americans believe about themselves and what their actual behavior communicates to the people they believe they're helping.

What makes Such a Fun Age remarkable as a debut is that it is genuinely funny. The satirical observations land not as lectures but as moments of recognition — for readers who've been Emira, and uncomfortably also for readers who've been more like Alix than they'd prefer to admit. The characters make real mistakes and have real warmth and are neither heroes nor villains. The plot holds together with the tightness of a well-constructed thriller. And the ending, which refuses easy resolution, is the only ending that the novel's argument would allow.

Kiley Reid holds an MFA from the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop. Such a Fun Age (ISBN 9781526612151) is her debut novel. It is published by Bloomsbury and runs 310 pages. Available in hardcover, paperback, Kindle, and Audible.