The Year of Yes
Maria Dahvana Headley
Hyperion, $22.95
Imagine an episode of Sex and the City where all the throwaway references to Jimmy Choo and Manolo Blahnik are replaced by throwaway references to Shakespeare, Keats and Aeschylus. Throw in the improbability of a typical Penthouse Forum tale, minus the pervy sweetness and charm. Top it off with a fairy-tale ending that makes The Bachelorette look edgy and unpredictable, and you pretty much have The Year of Yes, Maria Headley's memoir about her life as an NYU undergrad looking for love in late-'90s Manhattan.
Fed up with the "substandard" actors, writers and academics she typically deems dateworthy, the then-20-year-old Headley decides to spend a year saying "yes" to any man (or woman) who asks her out. Enter a motley parade of toe-lickers, masochists and randy septuagenarians. Ultimately, Headley finds them just as unsatisfying as her previous class of suitors, but at least they allow her to imagine herself as a wacky, adventurous soul, ready to be (open-mindedly) appalled and amused by whatever weirdness life bequeaths her.
Alas, while Headley loves dry-humping eccentricity, she never goes all the way with it. Theoretically, at least, The Year of Yes is about growth and change, but Headley seems the same in the last chapter as she does in the first, a fact underscored by the knight in shining armor who ultimately wins her heart. Guess what? He's a writer. A successful, presentable writer, with no peculiar quirks or fetishes (or at least none she finds entertaining enough to publicly document). In fact, he's exactly the sort of man Headley was pining for before initiating her yearlong experiment in exploring all of life's unlikely possibilities. Call it a victory for convention, then, and in this doggedly idiosyncratic narrative, the moment that rings truest.
Generation Debt: Why Now is a Terrible Time to be Young
Anya Kamenetz
Riverhead, $23.95
Last year, Time ran a cover story about a new group of Americans it called the "twixters." Though old enough to be adults, twixters behave more like adolescents. They change jobs frequently and eschew marriage in favor of serial dating. When they don't have the cash for something, twixters simply put it on the plastic.
In Generation Debt, Anya Kamenetz makes a compelling case that there is a lot more to this picture than fiscal irresponsibility. In fact, she argues, today's youth graduate from high school with a future full of red ink. Higher educa-tion is more expensive, and so students graduate with record amounts of debt, some of it on credit cards. And what does this money buy?
Not much, Kamenetz argues, and the trend looks even worse for those who don't attend college. "In 1970," she writes, "high-school graduates entered the world of GM and $17.50 an hour" in today's dollars. Now Wal-Mart is the nation's largest employer and its average wage is $8 an hour. Many of those workers don't get health care or can't afford it. And, as Kamenetz points out, women still earn 78 cents for every dollar their male counterparts take home.
Compiling statistics like these, Kamenetz reveals how American society has undergone a radical "risk shift" over the past decades, from the old to the young, and from companies to individuals. As a result, young people must now take care of their own health care, their own retirement funds and, in all likelihood, the health-care bill of their aging parents, too.
Kamenetz is right to find this alarming. She even has some good suggestions about how to address the problems she raises. But the one thing Kamenetz can't do—even by publishing this thoughtful and rigorous book—is force her comrades to do something that might actually make politicians listen: vote.