Keira lives in a hellhole Newtown share house with two friends, is barely scraping by as a nanny for a rich, vacuous Double Bay woman while trying to make a living as a journalist, and her longing to buy property is palpable.
The set-up sounds like Kill Your Boomers is a cheesy, sparkly romcom, but it’s anything but. For one thing, the writing is beautiful, befitting literature of a much higher standard than you expect from anything in Booktok genres like this.
Wright also has such a deep understanding of life for millennials (the thankless indignity of trying to be a writer in today’s market, the unattainable housing market in Sydney’s inner city suburbs), she’s either lived it or her talent is even more prodigious than it appears.
The title itself hints at something of a descent into farce or black comedy, but Kill Your Boomers never breaks the tone or characters that Wright sets up, making the denouement something altogether darker than you expect.
And that’s from a narrative that already has its share of darkness. Keira’s desire for her own place might be a strange addiction, obsessively scrolling through real estate websites and routinely attending showings for places she could never afford.
She’s constantly tired, stressed, despairing or fraught and might even have a mental health issue, finding herself both terrified by and drawn to a nasty hole in the kitchen floor – especially when it starts talking to her, outlining the only grisly plan that could possibly lead to her owning her own place.
Kill Your Boomers has a brilliant sense of the contemporary here and now and the writing is as affecting as it is assured.
Reviewed by Drew Turney
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Fiona Wright is a writer, editor and critic from Sydney. Her most recent book of essays, The World Was Whole, was published in October 2018. Fiona worked as an editor at Giramondo Publishing for five years. She holds a PhD in Literature and Creative Writing from Western Sydney University, and is the host of Six Degrees From the City, a podcast about writers and Western Sydney.
She tutors casually in creative writing, as well as journalism and literature at Western Sydney University, and has taught creative non-fiction at UTS and Sydney University.
She also runs writing workshops in high schools, libraries and for writers’ centres, and performs her work frequently at literary events and festivals.
Visit Fiona Wright’s website here.
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