Being eighteen is, well, weird. You are treated as a grown-up, but also like a child. The responsibilities are crushing and new, and the world opens up in exciting, scary ways. No one teaches you how to make friends or how to pay taxes. People fall in and out of your life, and the need to be selfish is engulfing. It is terrifying and exhilarating at the same time.
Natalie, the main protagonist of Bronwyn Fischer’s debut novel The Adult, is freshly eighteen and starting college in Toronto, a big city far away from her small hometown of Temagami. She’s new, she’s young, and she is on a journey of painful self-discovery. She is a quiet young woman, homesick but interested in the big city. Natalie’s shy but intellectual nature makes making friends easy, and soon she becomes involved with a small group of young women in her dorm. While her new friends make Natalie feel more comfortable in Toronto, something is still missing. She longs for the security of her hometown, and the safety net of her own family. Her newfound place in the city as a young adult is crushing, and Natalie feels like she is drifting off into a storm alone. The need for Natalie to find home and safety in so much newness quite literally walks up to her in the park one day. Nora, a writer, and long-time resident of Toronto, introduces herself to Natalie, and after a chance second meeting in a convenience store, the two women’s lives begin to intertwine.
It does not take long for Natalie to become infatuated with Nora; her huge and elaborately decorated house, her elusive ex-wife, and her striking independence all draw Natalie in like a fly to a lightbulb. Within weeks, Nora becomes the center of Natalie’s existence, and Natalie’s identity becomes entangled in Nora’s to the point of unrecognition. A friendship morphs into a romance, and the older woman becomes Natalie’s every waking thought. Her every breath. Her every movement. No experience or decision is made without Nora in mind. Afraid of judgement, Natalie keeps Nora a secret, using a fictitious boy as an excuse for her absence from her friends.
Though Nora offers Natalie the stability she has been so craving, it becomes clear that Nora isn’t all that she makes herself out to be. She probes Natalie about complicated topics she is unsure and uncomfortable discussing, such as her love life and identity. She is prone to bursts of anger when Natalie struggles to be vulnerable. She becomes jealous of Natalie’s poetry professor, a woman whom Natalie has grown to look up to, and begins making invasive assumptions about their relationship. The comforting presence of Nora becomes fraught, and Natalie blames herself. What’s worse, when Nora gives Natalie some life-altering news, Nora forces Natalie to make a choice; a choice that Natalie is too young to make.
I felt for Natalie through this entire story. Watching her flounder with her identity as a young adult made me reflect on my own directionless days, and I burned with grief for her as she became involved with someone who would ultimately bring her pain. Natalie is so desperate to become an adult—and to be seen as an adult—that she attaches herself to someone who follows her wishes to the extreme, and it is both devastating and powerful to witness. Fischer does an excellent job at portraying the calamities of growing up while commenting on the instability adulthood still brings. This story takes place over Natalie’s first year of college, so this is not a novel to devour in one sitting; it is one to be savored and mulled over.
The way Bronwyn Fischer injects poetry into her novel made this story feel unlike any other coming-of-age book I’ve read. Fischer’s writing is striking and deliberate, her prose reading much like lines of poetry. While this can be distracting in some pieces, it works for Fischer’s, especially because poetry plays such an intimate and prevalent role in Natalie’s life and her relationship with Nora. Natalie seeks solace in her poetry classes at school when situations with Nora become difficult, and poetic moments in the book brought me closer to the woman Natalie was becoming. She is allowed to express herself as the person she truly is, not the person she so desperately forces herself to be, and I began to hear Natalie herself in Fischer’s words. While Natalie is not in poetry class through much of the novel, Fischer’s writing serves a constant reminder of the importance of poetry in Natalie’s life, as well as envelopes readers in the maturity Natalie both already possesses and desires to have.
This book checked all my boxes for a coming-of-age novel. I watched as Natalie made some friends as well as lost a few; got raging drunk for the first time; discovered sex; began to find her true voice; play ridiculous games on campus; and complain with roommates about weird hookups. This book immersed me in the life of a young woman rather than distance me from it, and I grew to love Natalie for it. Bronwyn Fischer’s story of youth, love and discovery truly illustrates the terrifying yet insatiable desire to grow up.
The Adult, by Bronwyn Fischer. Chapel Hill, North Carolina: Algonquin Books, May 2023. 320 pages. $27.00, hardcover.
Amelia Kingman is a senior in English at Maryville University in St. Louis. Her work has appeared in Magnolia. Find her at @amelia_meels on Instagram.
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