Grown Ups: a millennial Bridget Jones's Diary

Grown Ups by Emma Jane Unsworth is the story of Jenny McLaine who is dealing with a break up and essentially having a breakdown. Jenny’s life is falling apart, her friendships are losing stream, and she lost her job as a columnist at a feminist online magazine. She is a woman obsessed with social media. She constantly checks the likes on her posts, during work meetings, during every possible moment even during sex. As she deals with her ex and his new girlfriend, she must deal with her mother is moving in. After leaving home at eighteen to be a self-sufficient millennial but now as a woman in her thirties, adulthood isn’t all what she thought it would be. The story is told in a series of texts, emails, and social media messages, Jenny must decide how she will pickup the pieces and learn how to grow up. Will she have the strength or willpower to take such a leap?

Grown Ups was described as Fleabag, a British comedy series which ran for two seasons, meets Conservations with Friends, a 2017 book by Sally Rooney about the relationship between four people. While I have not seen the show or read the book, I was intrigued because Fleabag has received high praise. Unfortunately, Grown Ups was not what I thought it would be. I expected a humorous, gritty story about a woman who must deal with the life she has instead of the one she thought would have. It was boring. It wasn’t humorous at all and I couldn’t connect with Jenny at all. She was completely unrelatable and by the end I felt she hadn’t changed very much, if at all. Even though social media is a large part of everyone’s life now, the social media angle in books how has been overdone, in my opinion. Grown Ups is the millennial version of Bridget Jones’s Diary (1996). While it is not something I enjoyed, audiences who enjoy Fleabag may enjoy Grown Ups.