Don't Worry, It Gets Worse
Writer Alida Nugent wakes up one day to find herself prepared to tackle the world with a first rate college education from a top tier liberal arts school, but completely unprepared to take on the greatest challenge of all: adulthood.
Nugent is the writer behind the popular Frenemy Tumblr blog and Don’t Worry, It Gets Worse is an outgrowth of much of her slice-of-life, observational style writing.
In this collection of humorous essays, Ms. Nugent expands upon her experiences as a hapless twentysomething to offer her take on post-college life. The author sends readers on an odyssey familiar to many in her peer range who have been let loose in an economically fragile world unsure about how to manage their energies or appetites. One way, Ms. Nugent wryly muses, is to grind them down in the New York City real estate market where millennials get charged a small fortune to live in a place with “visible mice.”
Ms. Nugent’s foray into Manhattan apartment hunting is only one of the activities she keenly mines for comedic fodder in Don’t Worry, It Gets Worse. She also takes on the millennial angst of not just finding a job, but figuring out a career, suffering through the social humiliation of living with your parents and, of course, negotiating the complicated terrain of dating, made infinitely messier by social media.
“I spent a lot of time creating what I felt to be the perfect image of myself,” writes Nugent of her OK Cupid profile. “It didn’t come across as well as I had hoped. In some sections, you really had to wonder if I should just marry a sandwich and call it a day.”
As someone adept in this type of comic self-deprecation, Ms. Nugent still manages to come across as sympathetic and relatable. Who among us has not worked a soul sucking retail job, or held our breath waiting for the debit card to clear, or attempted (disastrously) to throw a refined, mature, “grown-up” party?
Snark, sarcasm, and fast-paced comic patter mark Alida Nugent’s writing voice. It is an aesthetic and style that requires a skill with nuance the author does not always demonstrate.
At times, the writing threatens to overrun what are many of the author’s wickedly crafted insights; however, there are moments when Ms. Nugent allows herself to shift out of snark hyperdrive to offer some truly lovely moments.
Part of her ruminations on working in retail involves taking a job on the way to a career in order to pay the bills. Taking stock of her own place in the nine-to-five food chain while enjoying an after work drink at a bar, Ms. Nugent writes about feeling sympathetic for the waitress, hustling for a living just like her: “I feel you, girl, I think, as I take another gulp, stretch my legs, and watch a bar full of people making ends meet.”
Her last essay is a particularly moving valentine both to New York City and the kind of *gasp* adult Ms. Nugent has become. She writes of easing into the city’s rhythms and, more importantly, finding one’s own rhythm in a place not known for coddling newcomers. Here, Ms. Nugent offers advice to her reader that might also be a line out of a millennial manifesto on how to stumble into maturity, how to brace yourself against an era that is of your making even if it does not always feel that way, how to start “figuring out” life:
“Wherever you are, it is your city, so set a flag down today, and try somewhere new tomorrow.”