Get It Together : Surviving Your Quarterlife Crisis

by Damian Barr

This is a constructive and down-to-earth guide to all the milestones you face in your twenties - first job, debt, considering pensions, redundancy, buying a place or renting, moving in together - and how to deal with them. Get It Together is structured in four parts - Work, Money, Housing and Relationships - and examines the problems they raise as well as providing lists of resources, helpful advice, and answers to the some of the questions most affecting people in their twenties - and How do you negotiate pay in your first job? Do you have to have a pension or should you just sell a kidney to buy a flat? How much debt is too much? and is it possible to be terminally single? After surviving his own quarterlife crisis, and interviewing hundreds of others in the same situation, Damian Barr has written a practical, reassuring and funny guide to sorting yourself out in your wilderness years.

Genres: Nonfiction

272 pages, Paperback

First published May 10, 2004

About the author

I'm a writer and broadcaster. My books are 'The Two Roberts', 'You Will Be Safe Here' and 'Maggie & Me'.

'The Two Roberts' is my second novel. Meet Robert MacBryde and Robert Colquhoun: artists, lovers, outsiders. From 1930s Glasgow to wartime London and the Fifties, this is the fictional story of two truly wild lives.

They were charismatic art celebrities - collected by major institutions, photographed by Vogue, filmed by Ken Russell for the BBC. But they lived as hard as they worked, dying young and penniless yet on the verge of a comeback.

Tender, bold and deeply personal, 'The Two Roberts' is a timely love-letter to these queer Scottish pioneers, exploring what it means to discover your voice as an artist, to find love when it’s forbidden and to change the way the world sees. Prepare to fall in love with Bobby and Robert…

'The Two Roberts' will be published by Canongate in September 2025.

'You Will Be Safe Here' is my first novel. It's set in South Africa in 1901 and now. It explores legacies of abuse, redemption and the strength of the human spirit - there is always, light even in our very darkest moments. I didn't imagine it would feel so urgent when it was published.

'South Africa, 1901, the height of the second Boer War. Sarah van der Watt and her son are taken from their farm by force to Bloemfontein Concentration Camp where, the English promise: they will be safe.

Johannesburg, 2010. Sixteen-year-old outsider Willem just wants to be left alone with his books and his dog. Worried he's not turning out right, his ma and her boyfriend send him to New Dawn Safari Training Camp. Here they 'make men out of boys'. Guaranteed.'

Inspired by real events, You Will Be Safe Here uncovers a hidden colonial history and present-day darkness while exploring our capacity for cruelty and kindness. Here's what two writers I admire say:

'Devastating and formally ingenious, it traces the paths by which historical grief engenders present violence . A vitally brave and luminously compassionate book.'
Garth Greenwell.

'Damian Barr has written a novel concerned with single strain of human history, of how a people are made and unmade and how they go on to make and unmake others, of the stories they tell themselves to allow such things to pass.' Aminatta Forna.

'Maggie & Me' is my memoir of surviving small-town Scotland in the Thatcher years. It won Sunday Times Memoir of the Year: "Full to the brim with poignancy, humour, brutality and energetic and sometimes shimmering prose, the book confounds one's assumptions about those years and drenches the whole era in an emotionally charged comic grandeur. It is hugely affecting."

BBC Radio 4 made it a Book of the Week. Stonewall named me Writer of the Year 2013. In 2024 I helped turn in into a play for the National Theatre of Scotland.

I've also co-written two plays for Radio 4 and written a short after play for their Fact to Fiction slot.

From 2008-2023, I ran my own Literary Salon - interviewing fellow writers, profiling indie bookshops and share all kinds of bookish content. Guests included: Jojo Moyes, John Waters, Mary Beard, Yaa Gyasi, David Nicholls, Colm Tóibín, Taiye Selasi, David Mitchell and Rose McGowan. www.theliterarysalon.co.uk

My life is books - writing them, talking about them on tv and radio and interviewing other writers about their literary loves. I present my own books tv show on BBC - check out The Big Scottish Book Club on BBC iPlayer. You can follow me on twitter @damian_barr and insta @mrdamianbarr.

I live by the sea in Brighton with my husband.

Reviews

[Jacqueline · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book helped me a lot! There are a lot of differences from the US to the UK but there are also a lot of similarities. I think everyone suffering through their quarter life crisis needs to read this, just for the hell of it. Just to know that other people out there are struggling too.

[Sarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

Glad to hear the bewildering time post-uni is not soley the condition of this English Lit student.

[Arifah]

One of good references for how to get through the quarter life crisis. "Get it Together" before its too late. You decide.

Whilst my twentysomething crisis went to the other way round. All was great.