Now We Are 40

by Tiffanie Darke

2017. First Edition. 280 pages. Signed by the author. Dust jacket over black cloth. Flatsigned by the author to title page. Pages are bright and clear with no visible markings. Binding throughout remains firm. Boards have light edge wear with minor corner bumping. Mild crushing to spine, with occasional markings overall. Unclipped jacket has light edgewear with tears and creasing. Notable rubbing and marking all over. Sticker to front panel.

Genres: Nonfiction, British Literature

288 pages, Hardcover

First published February 23, 2017

Reviews

[Daisy · Rating 1 out of 5]

What a crap book for such a great generation. Despite being a big fan of the Xers Tiffanie has managed to make them appear insufferable. There is no insight here, there is nothing knew and her book has all the trappings of the things she says Xers are not interested in.
Ms Darke is horribly superficial – I suppose one cannot blame her, after all she has spent her career writing on fashion and food both, ironically in the case of food, being big on the style over substance mantra (whatever nonsense she might spout about how we all desire more wholesome less fussy food there is still a style element to that, buying your organic meat in the butcher on the well heeled high street is as much an indicator of your cachet and wealth as certain handbags).
Her book is written in an annoyingly ‘I’m your chum and we ‘re having a chat’ style which grates and covers the same ground in a multitude of chapters. Chapters on Kate Moss, flat white coffee, Alexander McQueen and the same few talking heads saying the same thing does the generation she venerates a disservice and makes me think she doesn’t really get it at all. At no point does she attempt to look beneath the surface, the driving forces behind the behaviour.
Generation X might be driven to do everything, to work hard, be present parents, good friends and have a cultural life that means we have things to talk about but she never asks why. She never looks at the effects the parenting we received had on our collective preferring to stick to the safe and incontestable grievances such as housing and final salary pensions that are levelled at the boomers. She never looks at their selfish parenting – dads who spent weekends in the pub watching sport rather than spending quality time, parents relinquishing their power and handing us responsibility for big decision making we weren’t equipped to make, feeding us a diet of junk – crispy pancakes on our plates and a parade of paedophiles on our tvs. Xers grew hard and self-sufficient because they had to.
Darke is incapable of seeing beyond her privileged life. She talks a lot of Generation X levelling things but then is not against university fees. She talks of the Boomers pulling up their ladder of opportunity but seems blind to the fact that she had free education and is ok with the youth now needing a degree to do anything (you now have to do a degree to become a vetinary nurse and come out of unit with 30+K debts to earn 18k) and accrue debts approaching 50k. But then her experience growing up as part of this generation is not the norm, she is the daughter of a doctor who went to Oxford and now works in the media a career path that hasn’t seen much levelling over the years to include everyone. Although, bless her, she does think that her father as a public worker doctor is on the same salary as firemen and nurses so we should perhaps forgive her lack of awareness. Class barriers did not come crashing down in the 90’s.
The Xers I see are the overlooked generation, ignored by self-obsessed boomers in our formative years and overlooked by the millennials who, unimpressed by our cynicism our lack of a utopian dream, have formed an alliance with the boomers sharing their idealistic visions and self-obsessiveness. So left to our own devices again the Xers have rolled up our sleeves and got on with the dirty job of clearing the boomers’ mess and clearing the way for the Zers. They have done it without fanfare or endless documentation that is the style of their bridging generations.
A waste of paper, ink and time, you’d be better off watching one of those cheap channel 4 ‘I love the 90’s’ shows and reading some quality Gen X writing.

[Lewis Woolston · Rating 1 out of 5]

Self indulgent bollocks.

[Tatiana Shorokhova · Rating 3 out of 5]

Главредша Harrods Magazine пытается описать эпоху - и у нее почти получается. «Почти» — потому что она судит с точки зрения привилегированной британской белой женщины, работающей в фэшн-индустрии (глава про Кейт Мосс особенно ужасна - авторка облизывает ее со всех сторон). У нее есть несколько занятных наблюдений, но если честно, если вам за 40, у вас они тоже будут.

[Keen Reader · Rating 2 out of 5]

GEN X FOR THE METROPOLITAN ELITE

“We were crowned Cool Britannia, because right then and there, there was no nowhere else in the world culturally more exciting.” Darke insists at one point, though this isn’t strictly true, it was a media manufactured construct, created in part by Toby Young who was struggling for a story at the time and was picked up by the English media and so began the myth. Trading heavily on nostalgia, this covers so much of the same territory as Caitlin Moran’s fine “How to Be A Woman” with memories of 80s TV and pop music aplenty. This also explores much of what Miranda Sawyer’s excellent “Out of Time” did last year, but without the same substance or consistency.

Darke talks with a number of interesting and inspirational people, but she also chats to a fair share of dullards and at times this takes on the feel of an episode of “I Love The 90s” with bland talking heads spouting all sorts of nonsense like, “There was a time when everyone you met was either going to work for an internet company or was setting one up themselves.”. I am apparently part of Gen X and I can’t think of one single instance of this happening to me. This has the depth of the very “Style” magazine that she wrote for and is clearly aimed at that very same audience, which is fair enough. There is a fairly strong emphasis on fashion, with chapters dedicated to Kate Moss and Alexander McQueen. She says at the end for the need for “authenticity”, yet she dedicates a chapter to her infatuation with a world renowned model, insisting at one point, “The day Kate Moss picks up a vaper is the day vaping will become okay.” Is this what she means by “authenticity”?

There are many interesting stories in here like the phone call between Andrew Neil and Mr Armani. The account from a journalist who only got paid £150 for a piece he did for “The Guardian” or the op-ed piece he wrote for the prestigious “New York Times” that made him only $100 which I found fairly startling. Though referring to Gordon Ramsey as “an ex-footballer” would surely be like calling Tony Blair a former rock star because he once played in a band at uni.

She is prone to getting a little carried away at times, apparently “Blair hit cool paydirt when he got the photograph of the decade – chortling over a glass of champagne with Noel.” Really?..How many people really would think that Tony Blair standing with Noel Gallagher was the photo of the 90s?...She goes onto criticize David Cameron for being posh, but claims that Blair came from “a relatively affluent background and even gone to public school, but Blair was socially much harder to place.” This maybe had something to do with the phenomenal PR engine behind him and not least Rupert Murdoch (who once paid her salary). Blair came from a very wealthy background and is just as removed from the realities of working class people as Cameron, he just had better PR and was better at hiding it.

She touches on the familiar story of the commodification and monetisation of various movements and underground cultures, which were then repackaged and resold as overpriced versions, which has been going on for decades. Though strangely enough many of the people she speaks to here exploited and profited greatly in doing exactly that. There is almost no reference to any people working in the service, manufacturing or customer service sectors, instead she appears to focus on people above a certain pay grade, even though the very book she uses in the title of this one, was actually about people in these very jobs?...It doesn't make any sense.

I’m not really sure what Darke's overall point is?...The book is titled “Whatever Happened to Generation X?” and it doesn’t really seem to tell us in any clear or meaningful way. There were plenty of enjoyable and interesting pieces and Darke is a decent enough writer, I’m just not sure it was very coherent or structured tightly enough and I came away more confused about who or what Generation X is supposed to be? On the strength of this book it seems to be largely (there are some exceptions) made up of a cosy, self promoting, self absorbed, self satisfied group of Apple obsessed, entrepreneurial minded, middle/upper class English people with strong connections to London, which come to think about it is very much like the magazine she once edited.

[Kevinjwoods · Rating 2 out of 5]

This should really come with a caveat that it is not actually about the Generation X that the majority of people lived through and had to make choices of Grunge or Britpop, this is about the Generation X that had to make choices about which country they had to visit to be seen in or how much champagne and caviar become tasteless in a club, in short this is about the experience of growing old with more than enough money in the bank, with its tales of the struggles of millionaire dotcom entrepreneurs and cultural leaders most people have never heard of you get the impression that she has never really dealt with the generations she is talking about, where is the experience of being stuck in a McJob for a decade, or struggling to raise children without the help of a nanny, and expensive childcare.
An interesting idea about how Generation X grew up and got old is squandered on discussions of how her friends gossip websites lost out to Twitter, or how selling their business for £50 million gave them the freedom to get their life back. One suspects that she has never been to the real world and it comes across as The View From An Ivory Tower at a private beach party of only the most exclusive guests darling, with a minimum bribe to the concierge of a thousand pounds just to wait in line for someone to leave.
A vanity project in all but name.

[Ketan Shah · Rating 3 out of 5]

A quick read. Fairly pleasant but sometimes comes across as the author and her friends casually name dropping and humblebragging more than anything else. THere are some interesting insights burried in it though,especially about the nature of wealth and its distribution

[Sue M · Rating 1 out of 5]

What a load of shallow, pretentious, repetitive, self obsessed drivel. Generalisations are made on little or no evidence and opinion is constantly presented as fact. Boomers are blamed for parenting millennials: most boomers were born in the immediate post war era and had children in the 1970s….Gen Xers, with the tail end of boomers parenting millennials. I think Darke’s editor failed miserably to knock these ramblings into shape. We really need a Did Not Finish button on Good Reads for books like this.

[Katey Lovell · Rating 4 out of 5]

Part anecdotal memoir, part sociological/cultural/political reflection, Now We Are 40 examines what it meant to be part of Generation X in the 80s and 90s and how as a collective we (for I just about fit into this age bracket myself) have shaped the world as we know it.

Covering everything from drug-fuelled raves in fields to ethical conscience, Tiffanie Darke (supported by a number of fellow Generation X-ers including Pearl Lowe, Alex James and June Sarpong) dissects how those of us who are neither baby boomers nor millennials have been influenced by, and as a result are now influencing, the world at large.

Sometimes humorous, sometimes poignant, so much of this book resonates. A highly readable look at the final generation who grew up before the full-on technological boom.

[Adele · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well I thought this book was just about raving and mis-spent youth, but it is so much more. It has a distinctly feminist vibe to it, which I really was not expecting. Do not be fooled by the title, you do not have to be over 40 to read this

[Gina · Rating 2 out of 5]

More memoir than social science. The book focuses on British Gen X culture so American readers may not enjoy it as much.

[Jennifer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant... If you are gen x that is

[Alison · Rating 3 out of 5]

Although maybe a little 'too much talk', being a gen X and just over 40, I can say that there was a lot of truth, laughs, cringes and 'crunch' in this book. Although British (better than perhaps being written by a yankie, no offense) I clicked with a lot that Tiffanie talked about. Best read bit by bit, and she does waffle on a bit, Tif talks a lot about the history of our 'lives' looking at how we have been shaped and how we have shaped our lives. Now at the mid life crisis point many of us are asking 'now what' and 'what the hell happened?' I know I am.
"We have not wanted to grow up, we are childlike in our approach, we nurtured nerd culture, nostalgia, school disco – what is rave if it’s not a grown-up version of a children’s birthday party with everyone dressed up in bright colours running round high on sugar, going a bit mad? We held on to our youth for as long as we could, till the Millennials took it back. Whereas Boomers wanted to grow up quickly – the world of their parents was not a nice one, they wanted to get on and set things right, and they knew just how to do it. … Sometimes our struggle feels like a war of attrition. The two-working-parent family is now the norm and has spawned a culture of frantic childcare arrangements, a loss of freedom (that quality we all fought so hard for) and a life of ridiculous micro-moments where you are simultaneously worrying about a spelling test, a presentation at work, the last time you saw your husband and whether you have run out of laundry powder." Doesn't that say it all?