Adulting for Amateurs

From the author of A Product of Genetics (and Day Drinking) comes a rowdy and hilarious new collection of essays on life as an elder millennial, filled with life lessons on everything from marriage to parenting to rolling with the punches when Gen Z mocks your TikTok dances

In Adulting for Amateurs, Jess H. Gutierrez marvels at how—we can’t avoid the fact anymore—her cohort, the millennials, are approaching middle age. While 1998 seems like just yesterday, we are now grown-ups who feel like we’re still growing up. And at forty-two, Jess has quite a trove of stories to tell.

Jess is leaning into her geriatric millennial years and reflects on how growing up does not necessarily bestow one with maturity. When the dinner covers were lifted to reveal vertically posed sausages, hundreds of the fanciest wedding guests, including the mayor, were treated to a demure and refined Jess’s explosive guffaws. While Jess’s brothers now have wholesome families and responsible jobs, she can’t stop one-upping them, even if it gets her brother nearly fired by a potty-brained prank right before he scrubs into surgery. When Jess and her wife booked their first grown-up vacation, they discovered too late that their Hawaiian trip was to a Mormon resort and therefore completely alcohol free. So Jess and her wife bravely put on their big-girl panties—and slunk off in a makeshift escape from this cheerful teetotaler paradise.

Turns out, even as a responsible homeowner with a mortgage, three kids, and a yard of chickens, Jess might not have matured much beyond her twenties. She’s still the woman who in an earlier era survived queer-dating fails and aughts-era pop culture moments—ultimately discovering that an illegal rave cannot heal a broken heart and that vampire-romance franchises are terrible dating manuals for a budding trailer park lesbian.

Altogether these are the makings of delightful material for this bawdy—sometimes poignant and, dare we say, occasionally wise—new read.