I was just out of my teens when I first read Joan Didion’s essay On Keeping a Notebook . Two sentences deserved a point with the pen: ‘I think we would do well to keep nodding in a good way with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they will show up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the door of the mind at four in the morning of a bad night, demanding to know who abandoned them, who betrayed them, who will make amends.’
We become alienated from our younger selves at our peril. This warning is central to Lucy Foulkes’ excellent and insightful new book, Coming of Age: How Adolescence Shapes Us. Making space for the pain, mistakes, and even traumas of the past is essential to our sense of self as adults, even when it seems safer to leave them out. You may also miss the fun and laughter of it.
While Foulkes’ first book – What Mental Illness Really Is… (And What It Isn’t) – focused on how the brain can go wrong, Coming of age focuses on the diversity of normal stresses and pleasures of growing up, and charts both harmful and beneficial transitions to adulthood. It is not a book specifically aimed at teenagers, but instead speaks to adults who may still be – years later – processing their adolescence, while possibly helping their own children through the same murky waters. As an academic psychologist at the University of Oxford who has been studying adolescent cognition for more than a decade, Foulkes is steeped in knowledge about, and respect for, teenage life. She expertly compiles clinical research, both classic texts and recent findings, interwoven with moving stories of people recruited through social media who open up about their formative years.
It’s worth understanding adolescence because it never goes away. Evidence points to a “memory bump” – with the teenage years in the middle – when memories are strikingly vivid and seem particularly meaningful in retrospect. This finding holds true whether one remembers the “landmines” of crisis or memories of intense joy, and is “thanks to the extensive neurological and cognitive development initiated by puberty.” Foulkes explores how the teenage years feature prominently as a period of firsts – from first love, trying out drink and drugs to dealing with grief – while also providing opportunities to try out identities in the hunt to find out who we really are. are.
Despite this period of intense transition, Foulkes is interested in how socially conservative teenagers are. Gender and gender norms are paramount to them, and adherence to stereotypes about femininity and masculinity is highly prized and tightly policed by a “peer society.” Athleticism and generic attractiveness confer high status; intelligence, introversion, and caution do not. The chapter on “The Paradox of Popularity,” which explores the dynamics of each school’s cool group (at my school they called themselves “the posse,” envied and loathed in equal measure), will leave readers, no matter where they fall in the social pecking order, collectively squeezing in. With the growing recognition of neurodiversity, fluid sexualities, and gender identities, the strangleholds of high schools are loosening, but only slightly and slowly. Not fitting in, whether by choice or circumstance, comes at a high price.
Foulkes wants to rehabilitate adolescence and encourage society not to ridicule teenage traits such as self-consciousness, sensationalism, risk-taking and laziness, which have evolutionary, physiological and pro-social purposes. They are features, not bugs, underlined by reason rather than pure hedonism. If we care intensely about how we are perceived, we can “develop independence while joining and being protected by a tribe,” she argues. Foulkes is also suspicious of teenagers’ supposed vulnerability to ‘peer pressure’ and the idea that a handful of young people are a ‘bad influence’, however useful these excuses may be for parents to exonerate their own children. In fact, most teens are aware of the company they keep, choose it, and agree to the activities preferred by their friends. Parents would do well to normalize their teens’ attraction to the unknown, test their boundaries, and explore their sexuality.
Coming of age concludes that teenagers have “always been utterly underrated” and focuses on features of adolescence that transcend our cultural moment. But Foulkes may be underplaying the ways in which modern teenagers are having a fundamentally different experience than previous generations. Historically, the recognized social phenomenon of adolescence is less than 150 years old. Today’s social media and phone use are changing attention spans, access to extreme content and ideology is readily available, and cameras in everyone’s pocket encourage self-consciousness. The photographic record of today’s teenagers will also fundamentally affect how they remember.
As a millennial, I have one box of photos from my life before I was twenty and not a single selfie. Smartphone teens, meanwhile, will live under a heavy weight of primary sources. Foulkes doesn’t connect her analysis to current events, but it’s impossible not to draw connections to our political and social moment. How can the Covid lockdown years ever be repaid to people now in their early twenties? Why hasn’t more research been done across disciplines on the teenage experience? If adolescence matters so much—and you can’t help but agree that it does after reading this book—why is it largely invisible in health care and society?
Foulkes remains off the podium Coming of age. She admits that she considered sharing stories from her own life, but instead chose to foreground her interviewees. I sympathize with the clinical and research instinct to take a step back, but it feels important as a reader to know the younger person with whom Foulkes is trying to stay on nodding terms (a person who has struggled with mental health issues, which she will discuss more tells in her first book). Her example, her authority, could have demonstrated in practice the brave, rewarding process of reflecting on and retelling one’s own past.
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When we think of what happened to us as a story of which we are a (more or less unreliable) narrator, it gives meaning and influence to our lives. It is also a component of lifelong mental health. However, it is not a story that we only tell once. In notebooks, real or the sketchpad of our memory, we review these stories, a process that can be supported and structured through therapy. A therapist can guide people to unseen redemptive possibilities and to find closure. A softer, amused and curious attitude towards the people we used to be makes our minds a healthier place to live. We will also think more about those young people whose adolescent notebooks are still unfinished first drafts, who could benefit from the hope that everything will (probably) turn out well.
Kate Womersley is a doctor and academic who specializes in psychiatry. Her work at Imperial College London focuses on sex and gender equality in biomedical research.