Book Review: Kids in America: A Gen X Reckoning

Author: Liz Prato

Genre: Non-Fiction, Essay Collection

Page Count: 210

Publisher: Santa Fe Writers Project

Nonfiction is not a genre that normally fills my bookshelves or the scattered stacks that threaten to resemble the leaning tower of Pisa. The books I normally go for are ones that take me away from the normal everyday life, because to be honest, life can be a lot at times and we all need an escape every now and then. Fantasy, romance, a mystery here and there, the lives of these characters are ones I know I myself won’t have, so of course, I gravitate towards those.

I’m not the only person who likes to read to escape. But if we constantly avoid the real world, however, how can we ever expect there to be any change in our world?

Even though Kids in America: A Gen X Reckoning by Liz Prato felt completely out of my wheelhouse, it also kept stealing my attention when I went in search of a new book to read. Is part of that reason because the cover is a bright neon green? Probably, but I had never read an essay collection before, and was surprised to see that many of the things that Liz planned to tackle, had everything to do with today’s world.

If you’re like me, someone who takes pride in being able to say they were born in ‘98 – it still doesn’t click in my head that people who were born in the early 2000s are now adults – there’s the possibility that just hearing the name “Gen/Generation X” might not ring a bell. 

Generation X, also referred to as the “Forgotten Generation”,  starts around the late 1960s and goes all the way through the early 1980s. They are the children of the Baby Boomers, and the adults to the Millennials, but Liz paints the picture better.

“We stood in line to watch Star Wars, and then The Empire Strikes Back, and then stood in line again…We watched the attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan and the attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II and the successful assassination of John Lennon…We played the earliest wave of video games: Pong and Space Invaders, Asteroids and Galaxian.

We are the last generation to live without fear of being gunned down in school.

We are the last generation raised without awareness of neurocognitive disorders and mental illness in kids…

We are Gen X Prep.”

Kids in America: A Gen X Reckoning, pgs 4-6

We think that by living in 2022, we are invincible from what some of us consider to be a thing of the past. That it’s all just history. Interweaving stories from her own experiences, and from interviews with close friends, Liz sheds a light on not just a generation, but a society that in every line, every thought, every story, and every loss, can be found and related to the society we live in today.

A society that drinks in the drama and escapism provided by the media.

A society where a woman can count the number of friends, sisters, cousins, aunts, and mothers who have been sexually assaulted on their hands.

A society that is under attack by white supremacy, hatred, and mass shootings.

A society where we have experienced more loss than we would like to admit.

Undertaking some daunting topics, Liz Prato writes poetically and at times songlike (especially seen in “Long and Thin” from Part II) as she unearths a generation that deserves to be remembered, while educating the world on the parts where they failed to avoid being repeated, in the hopes that maybe, just maybe, the next generation won’t have to live through some of these things.