A Literary Prescription for

Young Adulthood

For the decade nobody hands you a map for.

The twenties get sold as the best years of your life, which is an unhelpful thing to be told while you are broke, in a flatshare, and privately certain that everyone else received instructions you did not. It is the decade of first jobs and first proper rejections, of friendships that were total at nineteen quietly reorganising themselves, of working out which of your opinions are actually yours, and of watching people you were at school with appear to overtake you on a screen you check too often. Some of it is genuinely wonderful and most of the wonderful parts are only obvious later. These books, poems and quotes are for the whole of it: the freedom, the flailing, the friendships, and the strong suspicion that you are behind on a schedule nobody has ever actually shown you.

Books Poetry Quotes & Prose

Books

Prescribed reading

Two of these will take some pressure off: one on why settling late tends to work out, one on what the phone did to this stage of life. The novels are the reason to be here, though. Four books about being twenty-something and getting most of it wrong, written by people close enough to remember it exactly.

Tiny Beautiful Things

Cheryl Strayed · 2012

Collected agony-aunt columns from Strayed’s years writing as Dear Sugar, and most of the letters are from people in their twenties who have made a mess of something and cannot see a way through it. She answers by telling them what happened to her, at length, and the effect is nothing like advice. It is the closest thing in print to being taken seriously by an older woman who is not going to lie to you.

Normal People

Sally Rooney · 2018

Connell and Marianne from school through university, endlessly almost saying the thing. Rooney gets what almost nobody else does about being twenty-two: that the difficulty is rarely the feeling and almost always the enormous, exhausting business of working out what you are permitted to say about it, and to whom, and how much it will cost you socially to be honest.

The Anxious Generation

Jonathan Haidt · 2024

Haidt’s case is that the phone-based childhood rewired adolescence, and that the sharp rise in anxiety and depression among people born after about 1995 is not a coincidence. The research has been argued over hard and it is worth reading the criticism alongside it. What is not in dispute is the experience he describes: growing up in permanent view of everybody, with the evidence of what you missed always available.

Queenie

Candice Carty-Williams · 2019

Queenie Jenkins is twenty-five, in London, coming apart after a break-up and making a series of decisions that get worse. Carty-Williams is very funny and does not flinch, and the book is unusually honest about a thing nobody warns you about: that your twenties can involve a genuine breakdown while everyone around you assumes you are simply going out a lot.

The Idiot

Elif Batuman · 2017

Selin arrives at Harvard in 1995, is issued an email address she does not understand, and spends the year misreading almost everything, including a Hungarian mathematician she is in love with. Very little happens and it is extremely funny. Batuman captures the particular condition of being nineteen and clever and completely without a clue how any of it works.

The Rachel Incident

Caroline O’Donoghue · 2023

Cork in the years after the crash: Rachel is at university, working in a bookshop, broke, and forms the intense flatmate friendship that will turn out to be the defining relationship of the decade. O’Donoghue is superb on the friendships of that age — how total they are, how much damage they can do, and how you only recognise what they were from a long way further on.

Quarterlife

Satya Doyle Byock · 2022

Byock is a Jungian therapist whose entire practice is people between roughly sixteen and thirty-six, and her argument is that this is a genuine developmental stage that our culture refuses to name. She divides people into Stability Types and Meaning Types, each missing what the other has too much of. Being told your twenties are a stage rather than a failure is worth a great deal on its own.

Poems about being young

Three poets who were roughly your age

A man of twenty-two admitting the wise man was right all along, a list of every small thing somebody loved before he learnt to be embarrassed about it, and thirty-two words on yesterday being a sun-down name.

“When I Was One-and-Twenty”

A.E. Housman, 1896

When I was one-and-twenty
I heard a wise man say,
“Give crowns and pounds and guineas
But not your heart away;
Give pearls away and rubies
But keep your fancy free.”
But I was one-and-twenty,
No use to talk to me.
…
And I am two-and-twenty,
And oh, ’tis true, ’tis true.

Sixteen lines and the whole mechanism of being that age is in them. The wise man is right, the speaker knows he is right, and it makes not the slightest difference, because nobody has ever been talked out of anything at twenty-one. The last two lines are delivered a year later by somebody who has now found out, and Housman lets you hear both the rue and the faint satisfaction in it.

Shop A.E. Housman prints →

from “The Great Lover”

Rupert Brooke, 1914

These I have loved:
White plates and cups, clean-gleaming,
Ringed with blue lines; and feathery, faery dust;
Wet roofs, beneath the lamp-light; the strong crust
Of friendly bread; and many-tasting food;
…
And oaks; and brown horse-chestnuts, glossy-new;
And new-peeled sticks; and shining pools on grass;—
All these have been my loves.

Brooke was twenty-six and wrote out a list of everything he could think of that he loved, most of it absurdly small: plates, wet roofs, the crust of bread. It is a young person’s poem in the best sense, before anybody has taught you to be embarrassed by enthusiasm. Worth copying the method rather than the poem. Write your own list and keep it somewhere.

Shop Rupert Brooke prints →

“Youth”

Langston Hughes, 1924

We have tomorrow
Bright before us
Like a flame.

Yesterday
A night-gone thing,
A sun-down name.

And dawn-today
Broad arch above the road we came.

We march!

Hughes was twenty-two, and it is thirty-two words. What makes it worth having is the middle stanza, where yesterday is dismissed as a night-gone thing and a sun-down name. That is the great advantage of the decade and the one people forget they had: almost nothing that has happened to you yet is load-bearing, and very little of it has to be carried forward.

Shop Langston Hughes prints →

Quotes & Prose

Quotes about young adulthood to keep

Short lines for the Sunday evenings, which are the worst of it.

You are not behind. Your life is not a race, and there is no deadline you are missing.

Bianca Sparacino

Get this quote as a print →

Nothing is so painful to the human mind as a great and sudden change.

Mary Shelley

Get this quote as a print →

Twenty is the age of hope. Fifty is the age of experience. Thirty is the age of doubt.

Attributed to Victor Hugo

Get this quote as a print →

Nobody tells you that your twenties are largely a matter of finding out which of your opinions were actually your parents’.

Georgia Clare

Get this quote as a print →

The most terrifying thing is to accept oneself completely.

Carl Jung

Get this quote as a print →

From Georgia

Getting used to your own company

A few short practices, on the theory that learning this at twenty-five saves a great deal of trouble at fifty.

Embracing Your True Self

Guided meditation by Georgia Clare

A guided practice for setting aside who you think you should be, and returning gently to the person you actually are.

Listen Now For Free

How to Tell What’s Really Meant for You

A short talk by Georgia Clare

A reflective talk on listening past the noise to sense what genuinely fits your life, and what does not.

Listen Now For Free

How to Stop Seeking Validation from Other People

Personal essay by Georgia Clare · The Library

On stepping off the treadmill of approval and learning to trust your own sense of who you are, which is most of the work of this decade.

Read the Essay →

The 21-Day Meditation Course

Guided Meditation Course · Georgia Clare

Three weeks of short, guided meditations — ten minutes a day, and a way of getting used to your own company early rather than at fifty.

Start the 21-Day Course →

Questions people ask

Reading for Young Adulthood

Where should I start?

Start with Tiny Beautiful Things by Cheryl Strayed, which is the closest thing in print to being taken seriously by an older woman who will not lie to you. If you would rather have a novel, Normal People understands the specific difficulty of being twenty-two better than almost anything, and Queenie is funnier and braver about falling apart.

Everyone seems further ahead than me. Is that normal?

Extremely, and it is mostly an artefact of what you can see. You are comparing the inside of your life with the outside of everybody else’s, on platforms designed to show you their best forty seconds. Quarterlife by Satya Doyle Byock is the useful corrective: she treats this as a genuine developmental stage rather than a period you are failing at. There is a fuller prescription here for feeling left behind.

Which quotes about your twenties are worth keeping?

Lines worth keeping include “Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves” (Rainer Maria Rilke) and “The most terrifying thing is to accept oneself completely” (Carl Jung). You will find these and others in the quotes section above.

What actually matters most at this age?

On the evidence, two things that are easy to neglect. The friendships you make now are disproportionately likely to be the ones you still have at sixty, and they need actual maintenance rather than good intentions. And getting good at something, anything, tends to produce more satisfaction than choosing correctly does — which takes some of the pressure off having picked the right thing first time.

Young Adulthood

Prescribed reading

Three poets who were roughly your age

Quotes about young adulthood to keep

Getting used to your own company

Reading for Young Adulthood

Where should I start?

Everyone seems further ahead than me. Is that normal?

Which quotes about your twenties are worth keeping?

What actually matters most at this age?

More prescriptions await.