ONE IN A MILLENNIAL

A deep dive into the psyches of American girls and their shared cultural experiences over the past two decades.

Kennedy, host of the Be There in Five podcast, created her first online profile at the age of 10. “In the early days of AOL and MySpace,” she writes, “having visibility into the personal lives of popular girls after school hours was an ideal way to perform some light discovery on how to infuse my personal brand with more desirable attributes.” She identifies this intense pressure to conform as the defining feature of her generation, “whether you're a younger millennial who did so with Troy Bolton and the other Wildcats or an older one who got their start at the Peach Pit or The Max.” If those proper names mean nothing to you—or if you've never had a personal brand—you are not Kennedy's target reader. Like the author’s podcast, this collection of essays revolves around nostalgia, regret, and reevaluation of the formative references she shares with other women her age. Among the topics considered are popular-girl handwriting, a hand game called Quack Diddly Oso, Christian purity culture, and the malign effects of the hidden misogyny on Saved by the Bell. Kennedy reminds us that her generation did not actually come out of the womb texting; they had their own version of the pre-digital olden days. “It’s like, yeah, I bet walking miles to school in the snow was hard,” she writes, “but have you ever had to navigate an empty new-release VHS shelf at Blockbuster with a sleepover crew in tow that will never achieve rental consensus?” The author first entered the public eye as the entrepreneur behind a doormat for college girls that reminded them to turn off their curling irons: The skinny on that episode is here, too.

Witty, earnest reading for fellow millennials.