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Kate Kennedy is a woman who finds herself at a crossroads. Growing up under fourth wave feminism, she still felt the undeniable siren song of quintessential womanhood past: join a sorority, get married, have a kid. “[There are] the traditional values we held growing up versus the opportunities that greeted us once we did,” she writes in One in a Millennial, her 2024 collection of essays.
Alive with quippy pop culture references and early aughts flashbacks—remember when your entire wardrobe was from Limited Too?—Kennedy’s book shows us that she understands that as young, or young-ish, women especially, we spend so much of our lives trying to fit ourselves into easy boxes, yet paradoxically, feeling terrific anguish if we can’t. In her introduction, Kennedy describes herself as “a young, impressionable woman who was easily influenced by the toxicity of her time.” Yet how contradictory, she analyzes throughout the book, to now be able to understand the systems in place but not feel like she can fight against them. Why can’t we like the color pink, for example, without having to explain ourselves?
Kennedy is certainly not the first woman to pen a book of critical essays about the paradox of modern womanhood. I love collections of essays that show me something new about the world I’d never thought about before, and I’d hoped to gain different insights or perspectives about being a young woman in the twenty-first century. But in Kennedy’s most effective sections, she is analyzing less and emoting more—she’s at her best when she’s vulnerable. My favorite essay in the collection is “Serotonin, Plain and Tall,” where Kennedy speaks to her mental health struggles as well as the Virginia Tech shooting in 2007 that occurred when she was a student. “I think I learned you move forward differently after the worst thing you can ever imagine happening actually happens,” Kennedy writes, effectively giving us wisdom and breadth of experience.
Though the book’s aim appears to be to subvert the classic woes of womanhood, her analysis isn’t nearly as compelling as her vulnerability; Kennedy doesn’t reveal many new or original takes about the tricky nature of being female in the twenty-first century. When she writes “I was conditioned to believe my value was in being likable” in an essay about feeling anxious to like “basic” cultural touchstones (i.e. a Pumpkin Spiced Latte), or “…it felt like the rest of the world worked overtime to remind us that girlish things were inherently unserious,” in her piece about sleepovers and slumber parties, I felt she wasn’t telling me anything I didn’t already know. It was only through her dips into more emotional sections that was able to give me a fuller picture of who Kennedy is and why this subversion is so important to her.
As a podcast host, Kennedy is able to transfer her voice from audio to print in a way that drips off the page as if we were at one of her slumber parties. The essays sometimes read more like transcriptions, bursting the form in a way as if we are talking to Kennedy. And maybe, too, its essays, like Kennedy and so many women, might know the box they’re told they belong in, but are trying to find a way out.
NONFICTION
One In a Millennial
by Kate Kennedy
St. Martin’s Press
Published January 23rd, 2024
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