slice of life – Jacquie Bosma

This story begins the way any good story should begin: with a castle.

It’s a fiberglass castle, actually. Hurricane resistant, too, if you can believe it. And I wasn’t even dressed for a castle that day. I was wearing a t-shirt and an athleisure skort. Showing up any better dressed than that, and folks might mistake me for one of the residents. Not that that would be such a bad thing, actually…

Fine. Disney. I was at Disney.

During a midday break in our family’s one-day-only trip to Magic Kingdom, I saw a text from a friend of mine. She invited me to take part in a start-up book club, one with an emphasis on (a) actually reading the book and (b) being as fancy as possible with our monthly book club discussion gatherings. This is… surprisingly groundbreaking for a lot book clubs nowadays. There are lots of “book clubs” out there that are thinly veiled excuses to binge drink with a bunch of people and/or chat so much that no one actually discusses a book (or, in the worst case scenarios, they don’t actually ever read the book.)

It sounded good to me. I was then added to the Fancy Book Club group chat on WhatsApp, and… I missed the first three meetings.

By May, I finally came to my first meeting. May’s book was The Secret Life of Sunflowers by Marta Molnar, a dual-timeline historical novel telling the stories of the lives of people who knew Vincent Van Gogh well. Our cake was decorated to look like Van Gogh’s Starry Night. We discussed the book for over an hour (and this was after dinner and chitchat). It was the best first taste of Fancy Book Club—a monthly gathering that I’ve come to love for so many reasons. Here are just a few.

We take turns. One of our members had the good idea to create a shared spreadsheet to schedule out the year. Members take turns hosting in pairs. We’ve been to one another’s houses, but we’ve also had meetings in an old tannery warehouse, an RV, and a distillery. Someone once brought up that she’d talked to someone who had run a book club for decades, and she always, always, always plays host. She has to buy the food. She has to mix drinks. She has to clean house. What a nightmare. I’m grateful that we share the hosting responsibilities among our members—less pressure, less stress, and more fun to see how everyone chooses to decorate/theme/host. Best of all: we have a fabulous December meeting each year, where instead of a book discussion, we gather at our local rooftop bar and participate in a blind-date-with-a-book style book exchange.

We all get to vote on book selections. Every month, the hosts will come up with a shortlist of books for the club to choose from, usually centered around a theme (romance, historical, literary, even—gasp!—nonfiction). We’ll read descriptions and vote on our favorites. The choice with the most votes is the book we’ll read that month. It’s more fun when we can have some options—and, more often than not, even the ones that don’t win the poll will be ones I’ll add to my TBR. This ensures we have a wide range of books to discover from lots of folks with differing reading preferences. (We also may or may not have an annual tradition where one month is “Petty Book Club” and the hosts will select a book that didn’t make the cut earlier that year. It was only once, but it should be an annual tradition. Without the temporary switchover to Petty Book Club, I would have never been introduced to The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue, and that would have been a darn shame.

We read outside of our comfort zones. We’re not a one-genre book club. Because we have diverse interests, Fancy Book Club has read contemporary literary fiction, romcoms, historical dramas, fantasy, among many other sub-genres. October’s book club pick was Grady Hendrix’s The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires. I have never voluntarily picked up anything even horror-adjacent in my life (real life is already scary; why would I want anything even more frightening?!), but this was one of my favorite books of the year. I have read books that I would have never chosen on my own. In turn, I have learned so much more about the various experiences, perspectives, and people that make up our world.

We’re an amazing bunch. Fancy Book Club includes some familiar friends as well as some new-to-me-since-book-club-started friends. Some of these women are actual Pinterest Boards of hosting ideas, many are astonishingly skilled at crafting a gorgeous meal. Mixologists, teachers, party planners, parents, leaders—it’s like our very own Barbie World full of bookworms. Icons everywhere.

We’re different readers. We have different perspectives on life. Some are introverts; some are extroverts. We’ve got different strengths. But we do have a profound shared love of books and getting out the fancy serveware once a month Just Because.

If you find yourselves blessed with a book club that feels like a warm, welcoming, decadent party, one where life’s crazy anecdotes meets thought-provoking literary discussion, then you are blessed indeed.

I know I am.

Most—not quite all—of the bestest book club ever.

I’m not cute no more. I growed out of it just like when I growed out of my favorite Reptar jammies. —Chuckie Finster

There are a lot of helpful things I’ve learned over the years, but one thing is so helpful I use it almost every day: Two things can be true at once.

You can love your job and also feel burnout. You can be a cat person and a dog person. You can make steps toward building a more sustainable environment and feel a bit of you die inside when the paper straw disintegrates as soon as you take your first sip. And you can be old and young.

Because I’m a Blockbuster-card-carrying, Garden-State-soundtrack-listening, unprecedented-times-living millennial. And I feel like more of an incongruence than I was in seventh grade. Which, I mean, you didn’t know me then (maybe), but just know that it’s saying a lot. Trust me.

The in-between: where we don’t recognize anyone at the VMAs but we also use tap to pay

Millennial is invoked pejoratively by every group except millennials ourselves (and sometimes not even us, because self-loathing is a shared experience among our generation AND WE’RE WORKING ON IT OKAY). Middle schoolers use it as a catch-all for the perpetually uncool, try-hard, cringe folks that are their parents’ age which, okay, fair. GenX and up still think we’re teenagers, apparently, if the grainy memes on my occasional trips to my Facebook feed are any indication. (Fact check: we actually do know how to read and write in cursive, we did not ever eat Tide Pods, but bless you for thinking we’re still teenagers. Lord knows I’d like some of that skin elasticity right now.)

My fellow millennials have either hit forty or we’re teetering dangerously close to it. Our backs hurt. We have to make up for killing our pores with Noxema pads and St. Ives apricot scrubbing by embracing multi-step skincare that costs about the same as a car payment. The Challenger exploded when I was three weeks old, and I’ve been living in Unprecedented Times ever since.

There’s something lovely and freeing since I turned forty this year, though. I have learned to embrace the things that make me weird—all that cringe behavior that gets eyerolls from my children and would have earned me a sneering look in high school from the cool kids’ table—and let it fly. I’ll use the gif reaction. I’ll send texts longer than three or four words (which I’ve now learned is apparently a super millennial thing to do?). I’ll wear the clothes I want to wear, read the books I want to read, and I’ll enjoy it even if I’m the only one having fun. “Weird” hits even deeper after forty than it ever did when I was eleven and listening to it through my boom box and gazing at my multiple posters of Taylor Hanson on my walls.

If you’re not careful, you might just buy the sweater that “looks a little young for you,” wear it on a solo trip to Disney, and get a bunch of esteem-boosting compliments on it. Embrace your whimsy responsibly.

I read somewhere recently (and by “read somewhere” I mean “it was a caption on an Instagram post I think”) that being in your forties means getting to be the person you wanted to be at fifteen, only this time, you’re not apologizing for it or minimizing it. I’ve leaned into that in recent months, and I’ve got to tell you, my soul has never felt lighter.

My fellow millennials, our whole lives can be summed up in the two things can be true at the same time truism. We can feel our age when we get out of bed and we can wear cute clothes. We can crash out over Italian brainrot and we can still go bar for bar on the End Of The World flash video from eBaum’s World. We can run tech support for our kids when they don’t know how to connect to the router and we can run tech support for our parents when they don’t know how to find that PDF they saved. We can embrace a firm “I will not be leaving my house after nightfall” policy and we remember what to do when we hear that Cash Money Records Taking Over For The Nine-Nine Into Two Thousand. We can be emotionally exhausted at the state of the Everything Going On All The Time and still have hope that it won’t always be this way.

We can be old and we can be young. Let’s make like Hannah Montana and get the best of both worlds.