it's the climb.

on my late-thirties, some millennial thoughts, and Aysegul Savas.

I turned thirty-eight at the end of July, an age which feels impossibly old and still very young. I can comfortably say I am a thirty-something, or in my late-thirties, or, more startlingly, two years from being forty. Many of my friends have already passed through the forty-portal unscathed, coming out the other end laughing. But what I remember about ‘forty’ is my mom crying when she got a card that said, ‘over the hill,’ with a tombstone depicted on the other side of the hill. Yet, I don’t feel the crushing inevitability of death, at least not any more than I did before.

Perhaps the ‘lordy, lordy, look who’s forty’ jokes have died off in the intervening years simply because the millennial generation defies them. We still feel young in many ways because we haven’t been unable to attain the same milestones as our parents (job security, home ownership, pensions, etc.) or have chosen what would have previously been considered unconventional paths to happiness (van life, living overseas, being childfree, etc.). And, speaking from my own anecdotal experience, my thirties have been all about leaning into the hobbies and interests I neglected in my twenties in a misguided attempt to ‘fit in.’ We still play video games and watch TikTok and follow trends.

Millennials are arguably more fulfilled than those generations that preceded us because we’ve found our own brand of happiness. But many of us are getting a later start on the ‘milestones’ that we may still want to partake in. Or we must consider a revised version of what those goals and dreams might look like. We continue to be pioneers in many ways—first on the Oregon Trail and now in shaping our personal future which, in many cases, will be without the white picket fence, twenty years at the same job, and 2.5 kids.

I’ve often wondered at who the quintessential millennial author is and have never arrived at an answer (though I have copious notes), but I’ve been reading Aysegul Savas lately, and she’s certainly a (thirty-eight-year-old) contender.

I first read Savas’s White on White a few years ago and was struck by the writing style and her profound understanding of the artistic soul. Obviously, I pre-ordered The Anthropologists, her newest novel, when I heard about it. Then, serendipitously, I found her first novel, Walking on the Ceiling, in a free little library box. It’s a withdrawn library copy, and I couldn’t believe my own luck.

In both The Anthropologists and Walking on the Ceiling, Savas writes about adulthood and the various stages of it, the different extrapolations of who you are as an adult, how you can be in a couple, or friend group, or family unit. Her characters rewrite their pasts and inhabit a new self, sometimes literally.

Nunu, the protagonist from Walking on the Ceiling, rewrites a story for herself in a new city. She tells that story to her live-in boyfriend, in parts. “I told Luke I had not had an easy childhood, aware this sounded dark and exotic. … Those were exciting moments, those indulgences. I thought I could tell him anything at all.”Later, she claims a childhood book is her favorite, and “was swept away by the pleasure of this invented intimacy.”

Similarly, in The Anthropologists, Aysa and her partner Manu have carved out a life for themselves in an unfamiliar city, Paris but not Paris. From the first page, I felt that this book was perhaps one that most accurately defined my thirty-something millennial experience—moving to a new place, being away from family, seeking out a chosen family, pursuing your passions, and ultimately wanting to set down roots there. The ebb and flow of constant challenges that define creating an independent life for yourself.

The structure of the novel is guided by Aysa and Manu’s search for a home to purchase in this city they’ve fallen in love with, inspired by Savas’s own post-pandemic house hunting experience. Savas so accurately describes the feeling of forever walking forward and closing doors behind you. There’s a certain loneliness in the experience of standing on your own two feet and you’re so certain no one else could possibly understand, until you read a passage that shows you someone does.

“I felt stifled by the clarity of my knowledge, which seemed unreal, or too real. As if everyone ended up living the same sort of life, describing it with the same words. With enough focus, I could probably predict our lives as well, the types of people we would resemble. There was something inevitable in choosing, in looking ahead: there were only so many options. But just now, I preferred not to think about it too much.”

Savas cuts to the quick of the human experience in such a tender way. She takes care to describe the living spaces of her characters, the objects they cherish, the food they eat, the things they take note of on daily walks. She inherently knows that objects personify a home and give character to the people who inhabit it.

“He propped the notebooks on a shelf above his bed, like postcards, alongside the empty picture frames. He loved these things of impractical poetry.”

The observations of her characters moving through a city also give character to the city itself.

“Paris was full of people having meals,” Nunu describes. “And also the terra-cotta pots of plants squeezed side by side on the tiniest balconies. The first impression of a city is supposed to be the most authentic—the only time an outside is allowed to see its essence.”

In both books, but most obviously in The Anthropologists, Savas asks the questions: What does it mean to fall in love with a place? How does one define adulthood? What is family when you live far away from your own? How do you develop rituals that ground you in a place, in a life?

“We ordered beers and a plate of calamari.

I can’t remember the last time I ate calamari, Manu said. I used to think it required a special occasion.

We can do whatever we like, I said.

We’re adults goddammit, Manu said, which was one of our sayings.”

I am living in a similar moment to Asya and Manu. I’ve spent ten years in a place far from my family, a place I would, and do, refer to as my home, a physical space filled with rituals and objects that matter to me. Now, my friends are moving into different chapters, having children, buying homes, moving away from the city. I’ve read very few authors who speak to the loneliness of this particular cycle, but Savas does so incredibly well. She writes novels that feel both personal and universal, filled with the comfort of a well-lived in home.