Multimedia genre for the new era of adulthood

By Caren Lissner

As the "new adult" genre moves beyond books, what does it mean about our own willingness to grow up?

At the end of last month, the editors of Publishers Lunch, the publishing industry's daily digest of book deals, announced that they would add a new subgenre of literature to their ever-growing database of deals. "Welcome, new adult books," they wrote. "With six 'new adult' deal reports in the last month alone, we have created a new Deals subcategory for this growing genre."

The announcement surprised and intrigued me as a novelist. It was one of several recent signs of the growing popularity of "new adult" literature - novels whose protagonist is either in or just out of college and is navigating the rough waters of adulthood. The trend has only picked up steam since the term was introduced by St. Martin's Press in a contest in 2009. Protagonists ages 18 to 25 have been especially prominent in romance novels, including virginal college student Ana in Fifty Shades of Grey.

But it's becoming clear that the "new adult" designation is no longer confined to books. It has been slowly creeping into television and music.

The approximately 30.7 million Americans ages 18 to 24 who have aged out of vampire-centric teen literature and Harry Potter movies have changed the conventional wisdom that college-centric TV shows and books can't sell. The millennials seem better at garnering attention than my generation, Generation X, and those before it. Perhaps it's the fact that there were 2.5 million more Americans ages 18 to 24 in 2010 than there were in 2000, according to the U.S. census. Perhaps it is the way they are atwitter with Twitter and Facebook at the sign of any life change.

When Lena Dunham's HBO series Girls premiered a little more than a year ago, there were no wide-scale protests that the "girls" in their early 20s are technically women - 23 years after political correctness became a buzzword and four decades after the women's movement roared. The show is now filming season three.

The characters in Girls cling hard to their adolescence - relying on their parents for rent, pouting when they are cut off. In the pilots of that show and MTV's Underemployed, which premiered last October, a main character underwent the same life change - asking her boss to finally put her on salary after a long unpaid internship. Dunham's character is promptly fired, while Daphne in Underemployed is seduced by the boss.

The millennials in these shows treat sex casually (but condoms are the norm). Yet the characters yearn for permanence and even sexual innocence. Ana in 50 Shades is not only a virgin, but has never tried masturbation; Sofia in Underemployed and Shoshanna in Girls are also innocent.

Even popular music has started to adopt "new adult" themes. The first faint stirrings were heard 14 years ago when Blink 182 sang, "Nobody likes you when you're 23 / and you still act like you're in freshman year" in "What's My Age Again." Now, an emerging category called "frat rap" focuses on childhood dreams and college life.

Rapper Hoodie Allen, a 24-year-old graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, has sold out concert halls by singing about the hopes and broken promises made to his generation. He recently traded Tweets with fellow millennial Jimmy Fallon about making his national TV debut on his show. In Allen's seminal 2011 song "White Girl Problems," he sings, "'The Hills' / used to be cool / what happened to L.C.," a reference to Lauren Conrad, who grew up on Laguna Beach and The Hills, along with her generation, then left the latter MTV program in her middle 20s to have a normal life - leaving her twentysomething fans to wonder where she'd gone. The next line wraps it up: "Parents moving to Florida / so who's left to help me?"

While the rise of the new genre may be a testament to the demographic's buying power, it tells us something else: Perhaps even older readers and viewers understand that it's hard to leave the comforts of early adulthood for the harshness of the real world today. We have a new appreciation for that time when the future is uncertain - because even in our 40s and 50s, we may be facing it again.

Six decades ago, those just out of college would have been told to settle down, have children, and get a job right away. Allen frequently refers to his fans as "kids," while Dunham's "girls" avidly resist growing up. Considering what their elders know about adulthood, health-care costs, and unemployment, there is an attraction in characters who try to hang on to their tribal tattoos and original Xboxes a little while longer.