Yet more on Guyland, the book published in 2008
An excerpt from the beginning of the first chapter:
“‘The ignominy of boyhood; the distress/ Of boyhood changing into man; /The unfinished man and his pain.‘ –William Butler Yeats ‘A Dialogue of Soul and Self’
Jeff is 24, tall and fit, with shaggy brown hair and an easy smile. After graduating from Brown three years ago, with an honors degree in history and and anthropology, he moved back home to the Boston suburbs and started looking for a job. After several months, he found one, as a sales representative for a small Internet provider. He stays in touch with friends from college by text message and email, and still heads downtown to hang out at Boston’s ‘brown bars.’ ‘It’s kinda like like I never left college,’ he says with a mixture of resignation and pleasure. ‘Same friends, same aimlessness,'”
A few thoughts:
- The author explains in a footnote that Jeff is not his real name; I think this is proper with many journalistic subjects when writing of their personal lives, if the writer chooses not to disclose it.
- The first few years after college can be awkward. I got a job immediately after college and found a room to rent with a college buddy in a house share but had lost touch with most of my high school friends (for reasons undisclosed).
- I am 51 now, but an in-law relative reprimanding me said recently that I am like a five-year-old. It is true that I have never married.
- Yeats was a great poet and writer, but I don’t think he was often funny. I think it may have partly been because he had failed romances in his young life and because of the difficult political climate in Ireland at the time.