Hindsight 20/Something

by Austin Beaton

Turning 23 is a cliff.

This is a response to that conversation young 20somethings keep having at happy hour, over FaceTime, alone in their brain: I don’t know what I’m doing. It’s all so fucking crazy. My job’s fine, I guess. I want to move. I want a different life, but I’m not sure how to change it and even if I could, to what?

Hindsight 20/Something is a chronicle of quarter-life crises—stories of moving to the midwest and losing a lover, losing your mind and changing your pronouns, renting a house with a urinal in the living room and getting a gun pulled on you at a gas station. It’s a book-shaped living room of honest friends—two architects, two nurses, an event planner, an immigrant med student, a poet, a nurse, a teacher, a web developer, the depressed, the wandering, the anxious—all in their 20s and all here telling you that it’s probably not okay right now. And that’s okay.

190 pages, Paperback

Published November 1, 2018

About the author

You're not an alien! is what Austin Beaton is sometimes remembering to tell the little boy hiding inside his memory. Through poetry and memoir, Beaton confronts what it means to feel like you're always outside of where you should be: the right job, the present moment, at a party in a hip city with food trucks and cleverly-named martinis.

Raised in Oregon as an only child in a forest beside a river, and now living in a pretty California that doesn't fit right, Beaton's poems are little stories about dealing with change, trauma, and the heartbreak of that life we live doubly: in our head and on the planet. As an experiencer of anxiety, depression, and depersonalization (a condition in which you don't feel like you're in your own body), his narrators comes to shake hands, share tea, and stay until you're ready to return to the safety and anarchy of what created them—the thoughts we listen to when we're alone.

Austin Beaton is a poet and essayist that studied regret at the University of Oregon, where he was a finalist for the Walter and Nancy Kidd Memorial Writing Competition in Poetry. His work has appeared in Boston Accent, Porridge Magazine, Angel City Review and elsewhere. He lives near the Pacific Ocean and gives nicknames.

Reviews

[Virginia · Rating 5 out of 5]

When I first got in touch with Austin, and he explained what Hindsight 20/something was about, I knew I absolutely HAD to get my hands on a copy and read it. It arrived around dinnertime a few days later, and I finished it within 24 hours. Hindsight 20/something is a collection of short essays, all written by 20-somethings while at a unique turning point in their life. Think: graduating college, first jobs, marriages, breakups, coming out, and everything in between. Within the short 217 pages, you are able to connect with 14 different individuals, some with experiences eerily similar and yet others completely different than your own. The common theme being: even on your darkest days, when you're literally laying on a busted air mattress in a room without a window or proper door (aka a "den"), you are not alone. Beaton manages to capture the essence of your 20s brilliantly and the essayists wit just makes the read simple, yet profoundly impacting. He shares the message that your 20s is this rocky landscape, where you're no longer a child and yet really not yet an adult... walking around trying to play the part and feeling like a fraud. I enjoyed this collection of stories, and genuinely believe that within its pages, every person would be able to relate to at least one (and likely more than one) of the essayists' stories. I laughed out loud at parts, I cringed when a story was eerily similar to my own, and teared up at parts that were raw and uniquely honest. In Hindsight (see what I did there?), your 20s are a decade of your life where you get to decide who you are and who you want to be, which may not be one and the same. This book is a unique collection of stories of individuals coming to that realization, each in their own, raw, imperfectly perfect way.

[Fred Samuels · Rating 1 out of 5]

If you are considering reading this book, I'd recommend putting it back on the shelf before you waste your time. This book is sloppy and unimpressive.

[Megan H · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed this book! As someone in their 20s it was very refreshing to hear stories of a bunch of people going through the same post-grad transitioning period. I enjoyed the honesty and vulnerability from the writers!