By Maria Bregman
Not long ago, I found myself at a dinner party in Islington, seated between a gallerist despairing over her Hinge profile and a barrister lamenting the impossibility of securing a mortgage on a two-bedroom garden flat. The wine was natural, the sourdough was artisanal, and the anxiety was thick enough to slice. The conversation was a delicate ballet of competitive vulnerability, a litany of first-world problems so exquisitely specific it bordered on performance art. Everyone was, by any sane metric, a staggering success. Everyone was also, it seemed, profoundly miserable.
Reading Marie Aubert’s slim, surgical novel, Grown Ups, I felt a familiar, chilling sense of recognition. This is the definitive novel for the Islington dinner party and its global equivalents. It is a book that has been praised for its psychological acuity, its relatable portrait of sibling rivalry and the anxieties of turning forty. But to read it as a purely psychological drama is to miss its true, lacerating genius. Grown Ups is not a story about the universal pain of adulting. It is a meticulously researched economic document about the specific unhappiness of a class that has won the game, only to discover the prize is not what was advertised.
Aubert’s novel is a masterpiece of compression. Over a single weekend at a Norwegian summer house, a family gathers to celebrate the matriarch’s 65th birthday. The narrative orbits Ida, a 40-year-old architect. She is beautiful, professionally accomplished, the ‘incredible brain’ of the family. She is also a wreck. She scrolls obsessively through her ex-boyfriends’ new lives online; she drinks a little too much wine; she performs breathing exercises to quell her panic; and, in a moment of bleak desperation, she tries to seduce her sister’s husband.
The source of this unravelling is precise. Ida is single, and her egg count is dwindling. She is racing against her own biology to secure the one asset that her glittering career cannot provide: a child, and the normative family life that comes with it. Her agony is not existential in the grand sense; it is the agony of a project manager whose flagship project – the Self – is behind schedule and over budget. Aubert has not written a tragedy; she has written a terrifyingly accurate audit of a life lived as a business plan.
A Mortgage on the Soul
The novel’s central conflict is not between sisters, or between lovers, or even between generations. It is between two competing definitions of a successful life. Ida has achieved what an earlier generation of feminists fought for: professional autonomy, financial independence, creative fulfilment. She is, on paper, a triumph. Yet she is haunted by the ghost of an older, more traditional model of female worth, one measured in husbands, children, and a house with a terrace.
Herein lies the novel’s exquisitely cruel joke. The liberation her mother’s generation dreamed of has morphed into a new form of tyranny. It is the tyranny of having it all. Success is no longer an à la carte menu from which one can choose a career or a family. It is a set menu, and every course must be consumed. Ida’s panic about her fertility is not just about a primal desire for motherhood. It is about a fear of defaulting on a key clause in the social contract of her class. She has accumulated the right kind of cultural and professional capital, but she is failing to acquire the requisite domestic assets. Her desire to freeze her eggs is the ultimate expression of this: a desperate, high-cost investment to hedge against future emotional bankruptcy.
It’s a uniquely modern predicament. The best wildcard analogy I can think of is that of a video game. Ida has completed all the main quests – the elite education, the successful career – but she cannot seem to unlock the final, elusive achievement pack labelled ‘Personal Fulfilment’. She is a high-level player stuck in the game’s loading screen, and she is beginning to suspect the DLC was a lie.
The Freedom Cage
Aubert brilliantly captures the generational shift in a brief, devastating reflection. Ida recalls her mother at forty, surrounded by friends who seemed like ‘middle-aged women with school-age children’, women who wore lipstick and called their get-togethers ‘ladies’ evenings’. There was a script. It might have been restrictive, but it was clear. Ida and her sister Marthe, by contrast, are adrift in a sea of choice. Their freedom is a cage. They have been told they can be anything, which has created a paralysing pressure to be everything.
When Ida’s friend offers the hollow comfort that being alone is a good way to ‘get to know yourself’, Ida thinks, ‘I wouldn’t mind getting to know someone else’. It’s a moment of perfect, bitter comedy. She is suffocating from a surfeit of self-awareness. The late-capitalist injunction to constantly work on, optimise, and understand the self has become its own form of prison. She doesn’t need more introspection; she needs a project outside her own head. She needs what the terrace and the baby represent: an external structure, a purpose that is not endlessly, narcissistically self-referential. And then, of course, she tries to shag her sister’s husband. Because why not?
One might argue that this is a callous reading. That the pain Ida feels is real and deserves our empathy. Of course it is, and it does. To dismiss the very real anguish of loneliness or involuntary childlessness would be churlish.
But to universalise it is to be wilfully blind to the architecture of that pain. It is a form of suffering constructed from a scaffolding of immense privilege. Aubert’s characters are not worried about keeping a roof over their heads; they are worried about the thread count of the emotional linen. This is a luxury problem. The truly precarious do not have the time, the money, or the headspace to cultivate this particular strain of exquisite despair. Their anxieties are more brutal, more fundamental. Ida’s unhappiness is a bespoke product of a society that has given her everything except a reason to be happy with it.
It’s a small thing.
And a huge one.
The novel’s ending offers no grand resolution. There are no epiphanies, no dramatic changes. There is a tense conversation, a moment of fragile connection, the feeling of the sun on skin. ‘Problems will remain’, the narrator seems to suggest, ‘but freckles will be added to them’. It is a conclusion of radical, almost insulting, modesty. Life will go on. The wine will be drunk. The panic will, presumably, return.
Perhaps I’m mistaken, but this refusal of a neat ending is Aubert’s most profound statement. The issues are structural. A frank conversation cannot solve the contradictions of a society that demands its citizens be both ruthlessly competitive professionals and serenely fulfilled homemakers. The fundamental dissonance of Ida’s life remains entirely unsolved. But now, at least, she has freckles. And somewhere, in a quiet corner of Oslo or Islington, another successful woman is staring into a glass of overpriced wine, wondering if this is all there is, and quietly panicking that it might be.
