BOOKS
to other cultures. She
compares the Japanese respect
for age with America’s
obsession with youthfulness,
for instance, and mentions that
Chinese women seem to define
adulthood more in terms of
responsibility to others — but
other non-western notions
scarcely appear.
Nor does literature appear,
apart from psychoanalytic
literature and a couple of
children’s authors. When
in passing she mentions the
bildungsroman, or coming-of-
age novel, I found myself
begging her to read one. Jane
Austen has a few things to say
on growing up. And what
about Rudyard Kipling’s poem
If? Generations have found
in it the quintessential
articulation of adulthood,
admittedly of a masculine and
stoical kind. And talking of
stoics, how about the actual
Stoics? But the philosophers
seem to have been elbowed
out by the psychoanalysts.
The other gap is awkwardly
baby-shaped. Sarner says that
she had hoped to be pregnant
by the time she finished
the book. And she admits
that for many people
becoming a parent equates
with becoming an adult. Yet
ultimately she dismisses
this “seductive” idea
as a lazy acceptance
of a “linear” idea
of adulthood.
I think this
misrepresents what
parents experience
— and misses a central
point about growing
up. Being a parent
doesn’t make you an
adult, but it does tend
to force or perhaps
confirm a change in
focus from yourself to
someone else. I call
that growing up.
Psychoanalysis,
with its relentless
interiority,
inevitably rejects
such a view.
Sarner’s quest
really set me
thinking, but
I struggle with
the destination
it arrived at.
Adulthood means
“to be as truthful
to myself as I can to
find out who I am and
stick with me”? Grow
up, I thought. And
maybe dump
the analyst. ctortoise beneath whose shell
was “just darkness and some
wisps of smoke”.
She sometimes seems on
the verge of breaking down.
Perhaps as a result, the goal
of growing up increasingly
blurs into achieving what you
might call psychic wellness.
For instance, Sarner feels
“fireworks going off in my
mind” when the psychoanalyst
Margot Waddell tells her that
a grown-up is someone “who
can go on accepting their
inadequacies”, and that
growing up is “a process which
with luck can be sustained”.
Sarner compiles an
interesting portrait of
adulthood, but there are gaps.
She talks to lots of people, but
not to the past, and not muchALAMYSOCIAL
James McConnachie
When I Grow Up
Conversations with Adults
in Search of Adulthood
by Moya Sarner
Scribe £16.99 pp304Do we ever really grow up?
A painfully honest
exploration of what
it means to be an
adult and why
some of us never
feel like one
BOOKS
Moya Sarner is beset by a
gnawing doubt. She seems
to be living an adult life — she
ticks all the boxes, except for
having a baby. Yet she feels
increasingly that not “only did
I not feel like an adult — I did
not even know what one was.”
“What an adult is” turns
out to be a very interesting
question, and a surprisingly
difficult one. Sarner’s
approach in this thoughtful
and painfully open book is
journalistic: she asks a lot of
people what they think. They
range from psychologists and
sociologists to people such as
Boru, who survived addiction,
and Sam, whose mother died
when he was 13. Their stories
are affecting and illustrate
movingly how people grow up
at different times and stages,
from adolescence to old age
by way of the midlife crisis
(there are chapters for each
phase). Sarner calls their
formative experiences
“grow-ups” and insists that
they can happen at any age.
Her experts tend to agree.
The neuroscientist Sarah-Jayne
Blakemore observes that the
brain does not enter some
mature state, but develops
“every time you have a new
experience”. The literary
theorist and psychoanalyst
Josh Cohen suggests that an
adult is someone “comfortable
in the skin of his age”. The
children’s author Jacqueline
Wilson warns Sarner that
adulthood isn’t “the
pinnacle”, it is when “you
start to pretend”. Rabbi
Jeffrey Newman, who was
arrested at an Extinction
Rebellion protest at 77, talks
about “learning more about
living in the moment and
discovering what it means to
be of service” — growing up, in
a way, even in your seventies.
Sarner learns to understand
that adulthood is an attitude
and a process, not something
you acquire, like a dishwasher
and 1.89 children. This
conception is deeply informed
by psychoanalysis — and while
writing this book Sarner was
training as a psychotherapist
and undergoing analysis four
times a week.
She talks about it, and
her mental state, a lot. She
describes having had a vision
of herself as a wizened oldJourney
of life
“Grow-
ups” can
happen
at any
age36 29 May 2022