Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Such a Fun Age, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
External Behavior vs. Internal Truth
White Guilt, Ignorance, and Redemption
The Quest for Meaning
Race, Class, and Privilege
Summary
Analysis
In a flashback to her senior year, Alix—now Alex—remembers being a senior class representative at William Massey High. It’s customary for representatives to wear a Student Council polo and deliver announcements on Fridays, but Alex has received so much hate since everyone found out it was her fault that Robbie Cormier lost his volleyball scholarship to George Mason University that she doesn’t feel very spirited.
With Chapter Twenty-Seven, the novel finally offers the full truth about Alix (Alex) and Kelley’s high school breakup. Will it turn out that Alix has been telling the truth all along, or has she altered the story maker herself out to be the victim? While it’s understandable that Alex feels self-pity in this moment—social ostracization is no fun, deserved or not—it’s telling of her character that she sees herself as the victim. Alex will still be able to go to college as planned, but her actions have drastically altered Robbie’s life.
Themes
Graduation has just concluded. The Student Council is supposed to clean up afterward, but Alex has begged her advisor to give her a less public task, so that’s why she’s been assigned the behind-the-scenes task of cleaning out the senior-patio lockers. When Alex reaches Kelley Copeland’s locker, she feels something made of paper wedged between Kelley’s locker and the locker beneath it. She initially thinks it might be a dirty magazine that someone stored there for safekeeping. But what she finds is much worse: it’s her letters to Kelley.
Alex’s discovery here is critical. If her letters to Kelley are wedged in this discreet spot between Kelley’s locker and the locker below it, it’s possible that Kelley has been telling the truth all along about not receiving the letter inviting him to Alex’s house. And if this is the case—and if Alex knows this is the case—it means she’s been intentionally misrepresenting the story in the novel’s present.
Themes
Alex looks at the name on the locker beneath Kelley’s: it’s Robbie Cormier’s. She’s spent weeks thinking that Kelley had given her letter to Robbie. But now she realizes that they’d gotten stuck or slipped into Robbie’s locker below, and that Kelley has been telling the truth all along. Realizing that the malfunctioning locker is to blame for her social ostracization is much worse than thinking that Kelley is to blame; and so she chooses to believe that the former is still true. And over time, she starts to really believe it. And so, it’s the truth that Kelley was the one who ruined Alex’s life—“much in the same way that her name was spelled A-l-i-x.”
The novel finally reveals that Alix has been misleading others—and herself—all these years about Kelley being “the one who ruined Alex’s life.” Like so many other aspects of her life, she’s molded this incident between Kelley, Robbie, and herself to fit a narrative she can live with—that will make others look upon her favorably. And yet, after all this, the fact remains that Kelley did not ruin Alex’s life. Even if Alix has changed her name to distance herself from her loathsome parents and traumatic high school experience, she remains the same petty, self-absorbed person.
Themes
