![]() "It's my fantasy of what would happen if I gave up," she explains. The book, she admits, has an unexpected touch of wish-fulfilment to it. But now, I'm very lucky that it's landing at this time – it's like this perfect storm, it's all happening." As I was writing it, I didn't know that kids moving home was a thing – it was just something that had happened to me and I wanted to write about. But slacker women – this is a new thing, I think. "I don't want anyone to call me a slacker!" But she happily admits that, "when I think of Esther I think the humour comes from her being a loser, tiptoeing that line. "I have such a major reaction to that word!" she laughs. Esther may embody slackerdom but Stein herself, a former New Yorker staffer and widely published poet, bridles in mock horror at the term. I meet Stein in a SoHo cafe where, rather than outsized ironic T-shirt, she is working an admirably stylish line between bohemian and smart in a colourful skirt and boots. Specifically, Cinnamon Toast Crunch while wearing "the T-shirt I had worn to bed the night before" – a wolf-emblazoned number she describes as, "my so-ugly-it's-awesome T-shirt, but my parents didn't appreciate that, even after I explained it to them". And yes, she is fond of eating cereal in her pants. Unlike Stein, Esther languishes in her parents' home, rereading books from her childhood, while desultorily popping Vicodin and hoping to contract a chronic illness that will exempt her from life. It's a sweet, strange and hilarious autobiographical novel about moving back home after graduation, told in the voice of Esther – who, like her author, is a former acting student. ![]() She has just published her first book, The Fallback Plan, to swooning reviews. In New York, Leigh Stein is a smart, animated 26-year-old who has written about loserdom and achieved success with it. Their aimlessness, in other words, has come to have a point. There's a kind of mock heroic pride to that and it's one mixed up in their autobiographical quality: most of these characters are being authored by young women for whom a struggle to find a job, or even a sense of direction, has proved creatively fruitful. The version of twentysomething womanhood being reflected back at us in 2012 isn't dressed in Louboutins, busy ball-breaking in boardrooms: she's eating cereal, in her pants, in her parents' basement. Right now, a welter of films, books and TV shows from both sides of the Atlantic is yielding a new cultural archetype: the girl slacker. This might be the year that changes that. On screen and on page, slackerdom has forever been a curiously male preserve, as if the glorification of idleness and a cheerfully non-aspirational attitude were dependent on an extra chromosome. T hink of popular culture's great slackers – Bill, Ted, "Dude" Lebowski, the many schlubs of Judd Apatow's movies – and you realise that what unites them is not just their use of the word "dude": it's that they are all dudes. ![]()
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