Kill Your Boomers – Fiona Wright

I have seen the best minds of my generation destroyed by housing stress, starving hysterical renters (to bastardise Allen Ginsberg). I’m noticing this theme emerge more and more in fiction – understandably, as it plays a growing role in the real lives of today’s writers. The latest is Kill Your Boomers, Fiona Wright’s dark tale of a 30-something freelancer in Sydney’s housing market. My friends at Ultimo Press were kind enough to send me a copy for review.

Kill Your Boomers starts off upsettingly realistic, then takes a strange hallucinogenic turn into the outright weird. The protagonist, Keira, is a perpetually broke kind-of-journalist-slash-part-time-nanny desperate for a home to call her own. She tortures herself attending open houses she could never afford to actually buy. These aren’t mansions or penthouses – just regular apartments and small houses in Sydney, that are listed for fortunes and go for considerably more.

“All I can see is everything I lack,” she observes on page 190.

Then, a hole in the kitchen floor of her current shithole rental (yes, she’s submitted repair requests, four of them) starts talking to her… suggesting ways to expedite the process of “wealth transfer” from her boomer parents.

Kill Your Boomers is a kooky book written by a Sydney millennial, for Sydney millennials. It’s all the more unsettling for how understated it is, with Wright deliberately abandoning narrative justice in service of the practical and emotional realities.

Read Kill Your Boomers on audiobook via Libro.fm here. (affiliate link)