Kids in America by Liz Prato

Book Review by Rebecca Beardsall

Opening with a quote from the Class of 1984 that so perfectly encapsulates a generation: “We are slightly overeducated and adrift in a miasma of social inequality,” Kids in America, a dynamic collection invites the reader to remember, reminisce, and reflect on the America that created the first latchkey kids.

We tried this career, then that, and then still changed to another. We became employed and unemployed more times than we could count. We are still counting. [. . .] We are the first generation in modern history to make less money than our parents. We are the last generation to live without fear of being gunned down in school. (4-5)

Liz Prato’s essay collection on Gen X, Kids in America, brings together personal recollections, stories shared, and historical details to provide a broad sweep of the world and media that raised this generation, now in middle age, sandwiched between Boomers and Millennials. The collection weaves in the Iran Hostage Crisis, AIDS epidemic, Lockerbie – moments that affected a generation.

Prato shares stories not only of her experiences growing up in the 80s, but also how much the world of the Boomers no longer serves the following generations, and how there continues to be a shift in the narratives we were raised on. Prato faces it head-on in essays like “The Indian Way,” where she recognizes how the schools where we learned didn’t provide cultural understanding, let alone accurate history lessons,  “Reading Tom Sawyer spawned its own issues. Back then, we weren’t culturally aware enough to discuss the book’s problematic view of Indians, and next thing you know, kids were calling Mina (a classmate) ‘Injun Joe’” (11).

As a Gen Xer, I resonated with the text and found places within me that I shoved deep down in my memory. The essays “Reckoning” and “Scenes From My Youth” take a magnifying glass to the rape culture Gen X was spoonfed via media, and how this generation of women was the first to realize forced sex with a partner was in fact, rape: “The term ‘date rape’ didn’t enter the public lexicon until 1985, when Ms. Magazine published the results of a three-year study into rape on college campuses” (28). And in “A Letter to Frederic Lyman and the Plethora of Other Private School Teachers Who Sexually Abused Their Students,” Prato address a literature teacher who preyed on preteen and teenage girls, and it was hard to read this essay/letter without remembering my own experience in an English class in junior high, where our teacher singled out all the pretty girls and sent the rest, average/ugly/unwanted girls, to the library with the boys.

Prato investigates the effects of one of the first generations raised in front of the television – we grew up on Sesame Street, Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood, The Electric Company, ABC Afterschool Specials, “We watched from our TV screens – something we’d been trained to do since early childhood. We watched a year later when the four officers who’d beaten King were acquitted” (123). Prato continues, “For better or worse, we’d been conditioned to learn through watching” (124).

Mixed in with the hard-hitting reality of growing up in the 80s, Prato captures some of the fabulous moments as well:

When my brother comes home from college that night, he just stares at the way I’m dressed in paisley leggings and a knee-length sweater and a vintage polyester vest and a rosary and gold John Lennon glasses with no lenses and my bleached blonde hair with shaved sides, and he doesn’t even try to be discrete about being disgusted. (79-80)

We Gen Xers may have been a generation of over-teased, Aquanet hair, thick black eyeliner, and neon, but we knew how to claim our space. Kids in America is a vivid and delightful collection of essays on a generation that is often forgotten but continues to slightly judge you all the same. Read this book. Or not. Whatever. 

Rebecca Beardsall (MA, Lehigh University; MFA, Western Washington University) is the author of My Place in the Spiral. Find her at: rebeccabeardsall.com