Such a Fun Age features many characters who behave in ways that contradict what they feel on the inside. This phenomenon features most prominently in Alix Chamberlain, a social media influencer, businesswoman, and champion of female empowerment (she heads a business called LetHer Speak) who employs college graduate Emira Tucker to babysit her two-year-old daughter Briar. The closest thing the novel has to an antagonist, Alix is the embodiment of performative white feminism. Though she’s often uncomfortable with the privileges her wealth and whiteness afford her, she nevertheless takes full advantage of them, often in ways that contradict her outward support for progressive ideals. Alix’s business, LetHer Speak, urges women to find their voices and empower themselves through self-confidence and career development. Yet it soon becomes clear that the values Alix and her brand preach are performative, superficial, and insincere. For example, while LetHer Speak is supposedly about helping women find their voices and become self-reliant, Alix finds her daughter Briar’s confident, curious nature to be a nuisance, and she resents the sound of Briar’s voice—she even describes it as “loud and hoarse” and compares it to a “fire alarm.”
Meanwhile, Alix has no qualms about using Briar as a prop to make a splash on social media and expand her business. At one point, Alix breastfeeds Briar onstage at a panel discussion to make a point about empowering working mothers. Yet once there are no cameras around to document Alix in supermom mode, she becomes disinterested in motherhood and dismissive of Briar, and so she hires Emira to take care of her. And while Alix considers herself far more progressive than her parents, she repeats many of their misguided actions in her adult life: for instance, she pays a Black woman to care for her children, just like her parents did before her. And Alix also has Emira wear a LetHer Speak polo as an unofficial babysitting uniform, a detail that uncannily mirrors the way her parents made their hired caregiver, Claudette, wear a polo with the family’s last name, Murphy, stitched across its back. Such a Fun Age examines the disparities between characters’ external behaviors and their internal truths and, in so doing, satirizes contemporary progressivism. The novel suggests that racism, classism, and sexism are still alive and well in contemporary American society—even if people choose not to talk about them.
Related Themes from Other Texts
External Behavior vs. Internal Truth ThemeTracker
External Behavior vs. Internal Truth Quotes in Such a Fun Age
With her phone pressed to her face and Briar’s hands in her hair, Emira screamed, “You’re not even a real cop, so you back up, son!” And then she watched his face shift. His eyes said, I see you now. I know exactly who you are, and Emira held her breath as he began to call for backup.
On thick, textured stationery and with dreamy cursive handwriting, Alix asked nicely for the things she wanted, and it became a rare occurrence when she didn’t receive them.
If the decision had been Briar’s, the theme of her party would have been glasses because the toddler savagely wanted glasses, and to touch everyone else’s glasses, and to see how she looked in all of the glasses. But Briar also loved airplanes and pointing at them and the sounds they made, and Alix felt that this, out of all of Briar’s other interests (smelling tea bags, other people’s belly buttons, touching the soft skin on Mama’s earlobe), should be openly encouraged.
In her first week of babysitting for the Chamberlains, Emira took Briar to a painting class. She’d been wearing an oversized knit cardigan, the kind that paint would never come out of, and Alix offered her one of her many white LetHer Speak polos. “I actually have tons of these and you’re the same size as my old interns,” she’d said. “Well, they might be a bit big on you, but you’re welcome to wear one anytime.” This became Emira’s uniform. Three times a week, Alix came downstairs to find Emira slipping a white polo over her head. She hung it up on the coatrack just before she left. And suddenly, as Alix walked through blue ribbons hanging from the balloons above, the tenderness of this tradition made her throat start to close.
As she turned the bowl so that the ribbon faced forward, Alix remembered. Yes. Emira had asked if she could get Briar a fish for her birthday. She’d asked both Alix and Peter days ago. Alix hadn’t considered it would be a real one, because she hadn’t really been listening, but here it was, gold and wiggling.
There were moments like this that Alix tried to breeze over, but they got stuck somewhere between her heart and ears. She knew Emira had gone to college. She knew Emira had majored in English. But sometimes, after seeing her paused songs with titles like “Dope Bitch” and “Y’all Already Know,” and then hearing her use words like connoisseur, Alix was filled with feelings that went from confused and highly impressed to low and guilty in response to the first reaction. There was no reason for Emira to be unfamiliar with this word. And there was no reason for Alix to be impressed. Alix completely knew these things, but only when she reminded herself to stop thinking them in the first place.
Emira had dated one white guy before, and repeatedly hooked up with another during the summer after college. They both loved bringing her to parties, and they told her she should try wearing her hair naturally. And suddenly, in a way they hadn’t in the first few interactions, these white men had a lot to say about government-funded housing, minimum wage, and the quotes from Martin Luther King Jr. […] But Kelley seemed different. […] but still . . . shouldn’t he have said “the N-word” instead? […] Sitting across from him, she wrestled with feeling moderately appalled that he had said the whole thing, with that painfully distinctive hard r sound at the end, but as she watched the veins in his hands move as he took a last bite, she settled on, You know what? Imma let you get away with that too.
Somehow, even worse, that night at the Murphy house accomplished everything Kelley had evidently hoped it would. Alex learned that Kelley had left her house only to run into Robbie’s fleeing friends on the street. He drove them to the precinct, where they waited all night until Robbie was released. Kelley was the one to drive Robbie home.
“Bri, look.” Alix picked up a pink ball from a bin of toys and tossed it down the hall. Briar gasped, overjoyed, and dutifully pumped her arms as she went running after it.
Whenever Alix was afraid that Emira was mad at her, she came back to the same line of thought: Oh God, did she finally see what Peter said on the news? No, she couldn’t have. She’s always like this, right? Emira came upstairs as Alix finished washing her hands.
Shaunie’s two-bedroom apartment had a kitchen with an exposed brick wall and a fire escape outside the window. Josefa lived there too, but Josefa never objected to anyone referring to the space as “Shaunie’s.” It was filled with Shaunie’s things, and co-signed by Shaunie’s dad.
Alix also found herself reorganizing her lifestyle around Emira, despite the fact that she didn’t have an explicit reason to. If Alix went shopping, she took the tags off clothes and other items immediately so Emira couldn’t see how much she’d spent, even though Emira wasn’t the type to show interest or ask. Alix no longer felt comfortable leaving out certain books or magazines, because she feared Emira eyeing her Marie Kondo book and subsequently thinking, Wow, how privileged are you that you need to buy a hardcover book that tells you how to get rid of all your other expensive shit.
The reality of how completely different this run-in was from the last fifteen years of Kelley Copeland fantasies came down on Alix and crushed her lungs. She was still eight pounds heavier than she’d been before Catherine. The current state of her home wasn’t the modern, minimalist environment she’d worked so hard to achieve. And there were babies everywhere, not just the sleeping cute kind but Briar with her questions […] Throughout marriage, motherhood, and monumental career changes, Alix had always found herself forming ideal scenarios of how she would see a grown-up Kelley Copeland, or rather, how he’d see her. There were the cliché pipe dreams (seeing him after a particularly good blowout, running into him while wearing heels at the airport), but there were elaborate premises that took Alix entire showers and subway rides to fully flesh out the logistics of.
Emira said, “Sure,” but this all felt very strange. Not only did she not know how to fold silverware into napkins, but the pile of hand towels seemed careless in a way that didn’t match Mrs. Chamberlain. Mrs. Chamberlain definitely would have completed this task before guests arrived. Had Tamra unassembled them just so she and Emira could have this moment? Weren’t they all about to have dinner together anyway? Emira looked down and she was almost startled to find her own olive green dress, instead of the oversized white polo she wore every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.
“You’re not better than anyone,” she said, “when you hang up your own coat and take your plate to the trash. I’ve been those girls helping out tonight. I fucking am those girls helping out tonight, and you’re not making anything easier by giving them less to do. It’s like eating everything on your plate ’cause you think someone else won’t go hungry if you don’t. You’re not helping anyone but yourself.”
Alix pivoted. “At first I was just so stunned to see him at all. But knowing him as well as I did, I became a little concerned about his reasons for dating you.”
Emira flinched and looked at the floor. “I don’t know. I think I’m like . . . pretty chill and dateable.”
“I’m not finished.” Alix held up a flat hand in the air. “If you think I’m going to sit back while you try to look cool with someone who is like family to me, then you’re crazy.” Alix took a second to pause for effect. “If you’re still okay fetishizing black people like you did in high school, fine. Just don’t pull that shit with my sitter.”
“You act like what happened to you was worse than what happened to Robbie, even though—let’s not even go there. If you love Emira so much, then let her wear what she wants,” Kelley jeered. “I’m sure I didn’t handle things well back in high school. I was seventeen, I was an idiot. But at least I’m not still requiring a uniform for someone who works for me so I can pretend like I own them.”
“Ohmygod!” Alix formed fists with both hands on the table. “You have no idea what you’re talking about. She asked! I lent her a shirt!”
“You lend her the same shirt? Every day? In the business we call that a uniform.”
“You are so completely out of line.”
Alix had started her day in Manhattan, ready to tell Kelley, I know who you really are. But now she sat in Philadelphia, participating in a losing game called “Which One of Us Is Actually More Racist?”
Tamra’s eyes went small in an exaggerated and confident expression. “Oh girl, yes,” she said. “One hundred percent. This is probably the best thing to ever happen to Emira.”
“Everybody wins with this,” Laney promised her. “Emira gets to clear her name. Peter’s little mix-up will be smoothed over. And you’ll get to come back into the spotlight a bit. And don’t worry, I know exactly how to plug your book without plugging your book. You know what I mean.”
She chose you. Emira and Kelley are no longer together. Stay with it, Alix. You’re almost there.
“All of this was for you!” Mrs. Chamberlain cried. “We wanted to help you clear your name and you turn around and do this? Whatever Kelley said, I . . . Emira. Everything we’ve done was for you. Everything,” she said. Her focused stare seemed to say, I know you know what I did, and I also don’t care. “You might be too young to understand this right now, but we have always had your best interests at heart. Emira, we, we love you.” Mrs. Chamberlain threw her hands up in surrender as she said this, as if loving Emira was despite her family’s other best interests. “I don’t . . .” She shook her head. “I don’t know what to say.”
Kelley was the guy who ruined her senior year, much in the same way that her name was spelled A-l-i-x.
Deep into her thirties, Emira would wrestle with what to take from her time at the Chamberlain house. Some days she carried the sweet relief that Briar would learn to become a self-sufficient person. And some days, Emira would carry the dread that if Briar ever struggled to find herself, she’d probably just hire someone to do it for her.
