None of This is Serious Review

Tws: sexual assault, mental health, anxiety

Dublin student life is ending for Sophie and her friends. They've got everything figured out, and Sophie feels left behind as they all start to go their separate ways. She's overshadowed by her best friend Grace. She's been in love with Finn for as long as she's known him. And she's about to meet Rory, who's suddenly available to her online.

At a party, what was already unstable completely falls apart and Sophie finds herself obsessively scrolling social media, waiting for something (anything) to happen.

None of This Is Serious is about the uncertainty and absurdity of being alive today. It's about balancing the real world with the online, and the vulnerabilities in yourself, your relationships, your body. At its heart, this is a novel about the friendships strong enough to withstand anything.

General Impressions

"None of This is Serious" follows a group of young Irish people that just having graduated university, have to contend with (trying to) join the workforce. Sophie, the narrator, in particular seems to struggle more than most of her friends, being one of the few that after graduating with a degree in politics with no intention of working in government, sees herself with little prospects she is excited about.

So as she becomes more and more delusioned with real life, she starts to live more and more online, one of the few places someone her generation can afford to live. I read this book in a single afternoon and felt guilty every time I looked at my phone but at the same time completely recognized myself and my generation in it: the way we interacted and curated our online lives, our lack of hope for a future we have been told all our lives is doomed, looking forward to a dying planet with no way of stopping it and feeling that every step towards equality made in the last century is at risk, disappearing the moment we stop paying attention. All those concerns seem to be met with derision and accusations of being privileged and lazy by previous generations.

Sophie is at the same time a very easy to relate to character and someone mostly unaware of her own privilege: she gets to wallow in her disillusionment because she is being financially supported by her parents. Someone else in her situation would have grabbed any job that put food on the table while searching for better opportunities but she looks mostly at what she doesn't have, behaving exactly like the people she disagrees with. Her liberal ideals are the same: while it's easy to agree with her complaints about capitalism and the way the world works, she is lucky enough to not be in position in which she has to bite her tongue. She gets to inhabited spaces and choose to spend her time with people that either share her ideals or feel socially cowed into shutting their prejudiced mouths, most of the time.

That is not to mean that she is a "snowflake" with no reasons to complain, just that she is in a mindstate in which she can see no light at the end of the tunnel and is not surrounding herself with people with her best interests in mind or listening to good advise. I spent this entire book rooting for her and not being sure that she would make it, the more she spiralled into her online life.

Conclusions

If there is a truth universally acknowledged in my library is that Irish books rarely disappoint and this one, was able to deliver an impactful story with timely characters and settings while surprising me at every turn. The author was able to perfectly capture the anxieties of a generation, the state of the world and how it feels to exist as a young woman who is still finding her feet and herself.

Thank you to Canongate for sending this proof.

Rating: 4/5