Such a Fun Age by Kiley Reid

 

The Urban Life Experience Book Discussion Series continued on Saturday June 26^th with a lively unpacking of Such a Fun Age by Kiley Reid. 

Such a Fun Age begins when Emira Tucker is called away from a birthday party late one night to care for two-year-old Briar Chamberlain when the Chamberlains have a household emergency. Emira agrees to go get Briar and take her to a high-end supermarket to keep her distracted until the coast is clear for Briar to be returned home. Emira is dressed in provocative late-night weekend party clothes and she's had a couple of drinks. 

The manager at the market sees 25-year-old Emira who is Black with the little blond toddler and accuses her of kidnapping Briar. Another bystander in the store films the incident. Emira called Briar’s dad, who comes in and immediately clears up the misunderstanding. Emira is extremely embarrassed and thinks that if she had a “real job” this would not have happened. The guy who did the filming is Kelley, who later begins dating Emira. Emira convinces him to delete the video, which he did, after emailing the video to her.

One of our book club members, said she would have sued the hell out of that store. She invoked the memory of John Lewis, stating that Emira should have caused “good trouble.” I think that the author didn’t give us Emira as the type of person to take a political stance. She just wanted it to be over.

Jezrie took offense at Bonnie’s statements and pointed out that for Emira, it was important to her how she gets to choose how she dealt with the situation. Bonnie continued by saying it’s only when people stand up and show how they feel about a situation that things change.

After the incident at the store, Briar’s mom, Alix Chamberlain becomes obsessed with Emira. Her motivation (at least she tells herself) is to make up for Emira’s humiliation at the store. Alix is an online influencer who built a career out of critiquing products for which she gets thousands of dollars’ worth of free products and was able to create her own online brand called “Let Her Speak.”

It’s revealed later that Kelley and Alix were a couple in high school, and their relationship ended in a very racially charged way, even though they’re both white.

  

Frances commented, “I really see Emira trying to figure out where she’s going to be embedded. Everyone has opinions, from her parents to her roommates to her boss who wants to be her friend about what she should be doing and not giving her the space to figure it out.”

 

Marsha added, “Emira’s position is ‘This is just a job. I’m not trying to incorporate you into my life. You get free stuff? Good for you.’ Emira might have been more impressed with someone her own age being an influencer. Alix is bothered that Emira isn’t jumping on that bandwagon.

 

Rachel explained, “I think that Alix is all about popularity, notoriety, possessions, professional advancement for herself and for her husband.  Emira just isn’t wired that way. We live in an era in which we’re telling young people they aren’t ambitious enough. We pay nannies and pre-school workers really poorly and we say, ‘Well if you had ambition, you’d become an administrator.’ Emira is an incredible care provider for Briar.

 I asked the group if any of them felt unmoored at Emira's age. Did they have goals? Were they already working toward careers?

Laura shared, “With Emira, I was relating to myself, reaching out for relationships (instead of a career.)

 

Marsha continued, “I didn’t feel the whole thing in relating to Emira.…I had a goal…but I didn’t have the support that I needed to get to that goal. there was no sense of crossing that bridge. I was a pre-med major. I switched my major.  I switched my major again and became a teacher.

 

Shelara offered, “I don’t really put anything past Alix…she claimed ownership of Emira.

 

Jezrie said, “I agree completely with what Shelara said. Emira had said that she wasn’t dressed for babysitting.  Alix made a career out of speaking up, getting free stuff, yet, she could never hear anyone else speaking up, not even her own daughter. 

 

Kiley Reid discussing her book at Politics and Prose Bookstore Jan. 2020

 

I told the group that I had a criticism of the book. At the end of one section, Emira is at Kelly’s house and there’s a map of Allentown, PA on the wall. Emira is tracing the map with her finger and the third person narrator, not Kelley, not Alix, the narrator says, “Her thumb touched the spot where Kelly Copeland ruined Alex Murphy’s life. The author could have written, “Emira’s finger touched the spot where Alix maintains that Kelly Copeland ruined Alex Murphy’s life.”

 

Someone in the group (they were all kind of chiming in, all correcting me at the same time,) pointed out that I was remembering this wrong. It actually says,

p.70 “She stared, upside down, at the name of the city above her head and blinked as the letters went in and out.”

p.71 “On the blueprint behind her, two streets over from where her pinky hung, was the place Kelley Copeland completely ruined Alex Murphy’s senior year. Back in the spring of 2000, before she became Alix Chamberlain.”

 

Rachel offered that the narrator had to keep that myth going. Alix knows that Kelley didn’t share that information, (the information that was at the center of the incident in high school.) The narrator has to keep us believing Alix’s story for a while yet.

 

Susan reiterated that this was the author’s way of keeping Alix’s myth going along. The book really points out the idea that at age 26, a person can no longer stay on their parent’s health insurance. Before President Obama, if a person didn’t go to college, they were kicked off as soon as they finished high school.

 

Wendy said she disliked Kelley as much as she disliked Alix.

 

Barb said she was really struck …things about race and things about class. Emira just needed money and just needed a job.

I’ve never seen a woman crush on a babysitter so much. The obsession truly shows when she leaves the baby home by herself, so she could go confront Kelley. Alix's position is that she has to protect Emira from Kelley but the truth is that Alex is still very much enamored with him. 

 

Robin added Alix presumes that she’s going to teach Emira and pull her up. She’s going through Emira’s cell phone. Reading someone's personal messages on their cell phone is not looking out for them, it's actually invading their privacy. 

 

Alix’s friend Tamra becomes the real orchestrater of Alix’s plan and Tamra is a Black person. Tamra is almost offended by what she perceives as Emira's lack of motivation. As an older Black woman, she takes the liberty of trying to give Emira advice (even about her hair!) The problem is Emira's not her daughter or her neice, she's her friend's employee,

 

 

Judy just came right out and admitted that she didn’t like this book. Alix and Emira were both members of a four-girl friend group. The name of Alix’s company is “Let Her Speak,” but she hates her daughter Briar because she speaks all the time.

 

Wendy observed that Alix needed everything to be so superficially perfect but Briar didn’t fit any mold.

 

Frances shared that she thought about Emira. She came from a very creative family. Her creativity was in child care (although she didn’t see this as a gift, partly because as a society we don’t value child care.)

 

Laura said that one of the things that struck her was that the best example of true caring was between Emira and Briar. The scene that really got me was when the fish died.

I asked the group if they thought Kelly had a fetish for Black people. Better yet, when does a preference cross over into a fetish?

 Marsha said that Kelley didn’t have a fetish for Black people, that it was preference for him. The white kids at his high school weren't friends with him, in fact they bullied him. As a response he turned to Black kids for friendship and only dated Black women now. 

Meghan said she definitely leans toward fetish.

Jezrie said she thinks there is a level of fetishism in Kelley’s attraction to Emira. Their second date, after they sleep together, he comes right out and drops the n bomb. She sees his record collection and asks him why he has the soundtrack to Waiting to Exhale in his records and he answers, “because I have the taste of a middle-aged Black woman.” He does not see that he fetishizes Black women. There was something that Barb and Robin said about Emira’s friends, that they seemed like caricatures, but I liked Emira’s friends. In Alix’s friend group, there was the friend that always takes Alix’s side: she felt more like a caricature.

Emira might not have been assertive or determined about careers or income, even after she left the Chamberlains. But one thing that she was determined about was to stop seeing Kelley. 

p. 303 "Despite being more broke than she'd ever been in her life, and still grieving the loss of Briar Chamberlain...there was no way that she and Kelley would ever recover from the acknowledgment that he'd been right about Mrs.Chamberlain. Forming a relationship again would somehow dictate that he could be right about everythig else, when really, he had a lot to learn. Emira never texted him again. His name in her phone remained Don't Answer."