Though in many ways Alix Chamberlain and Emira Tucker couldn't be more different, they both experience feelings of inadequacy and struggle to find meaning and purpose in their lives. Alix, a social media influencer and businesswoman, feels irrelevant and purposeless when she becomes a mother and relocates from Manhattan to Philadelphia. She struggles to find motherhood as rewarding and meaningful as the business endeavors she enjoyed before undertaking the demands of domestic life. Meanwhile, Emira, the recent college graduate whom Alix employs to care for (and love) Briar, the firstborn child Alix has come to resent, struggles with her own identity crisis. Emira comes from a family of creative, hardworking artisans: Emira’s mother binds books, Emira’s father keeps bees, Emira’s sister Justyne sews clothing, and Emira’s brother Alfie is a nationally-acclaimed latte artist. Emira might be the first person in her family to attend a four-year university, but she struggles to find something she's genuinely passionate about. And though she adores Briar and enjoys caring for her, she simultaneously struggles to see babysitting as valid work in a society that often fails to recognize childrearing and domestic labor as meaningful. Beyond this, Emira struggles to make ends meet, and she constantly compares herself to her more financially stable and professionally successful friends, like Zara and Shaunie. One of Emira’s biggest anxieties is that she has reached adulthood without becoming an adult. Alix’s economic stability and white privilege certainly afford her more opportunities to improve herself superficially, but she and Emira contend with similar feelings of unfulfillment, uncertainty, and inadequacy. Such a Fun Age thus construes the quest to find meaning and purpose as a fundamental part of the human experience. While privilege can disguise or distract from that quest, it doesn’t fully eradicate it.
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The Quest for Meaning Quotes in Such a Fun Age
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.
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.
“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.
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.
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.”
She chose you. Emira and Kelley are no longer together. Stay with it, Alix. You’re almost there.
Kelley was the guy who ruined her senior year, much in the same way that her name was spelled A-l-i-x.
