Prologue

For a long time I pretended turning thirty was no big deal. But looking back, it’s clear I was bat-shit na-na for a good nine months either side of that birthday. I spent three weeks’ pay renting a 1971 Dodge Challenger convertible in an original factory colour called plum crazy. I pictured myself at that auspicious anniversary, a wine-dark streak in a TV desert, ears too full of the summer wind to hear that ominous ticking in the sky: the sound of a cultural clock counting me out of youth.

The Dodge was the same model Mickey and Mallory Knox drove in the 1994 hyper-violent romance classic Natural Born Killers. It was a good car for rolling up to a Las Vegas drive-through chapel — important, because I’d decided that thirty was wedding age, regardless of how troubling my partner and I found the idea of marriage. For months I’d been pausing significantly outside jewellers. For months I’d been locked in an internet search loop that oscillated between white dresses, unaffordable houses in towns I’d never been to, career aptitude tests, and pop-psychology articles on obsessive compulsive disorder and rare degenerative brain diseases, all of which seemed to explain the patterns of behaviour that were rapidly becoming my life. I tried to tear my attention away from these seemingly pressing matters back to my terminal degree — a doctoral dissertation on the apocalypse — but only seemed able to focus on wastelands in literature for mere seconds before the literal wasteland of listicles, think pieces, and advertorials ensnared me once again.

Thirty Things You Should Know by Thirty, screamed my Facebook feed, drawing me into a tunnel from which I would emerge hours later, screen-shocked and disconnected.

Around me, friends were marrying, having babies, and buying houses, or gliding gracefully along a path of career advancement — at least, it seemed that way. What was wrong with me — why was I failing to come of age? Why was my life on the cusp of thirty so similar to what it had been at twenty-five, or even seventeen? And why did I care so much?

When my birthday finally came around, I got so pre-emptively drunk that I couldn’t drive the Dodge and spent most of it holed up in a family motel popping generic-brand valium and watching The Big Bang Theory.

‘It’s okay,’ my boyfriend, Serge, assured me. ‘We have the car for another twenty-four hours. We can pretend that tomorrow is your birthday.’

I nodded palely, though I knew this pretence would not suffice. Some crucial illusion had been broken.

A week later, I had to fly home suddenly to put my dog to sleep.

A month later, I thought, I can’t get fucking married, are you serious?

Six months later, oxygen streamed back into my lungs as if I’d surfaced from thirty continuous laps of the pool.

‘What just happened?’ I spluttered, the sky suddenly too bright, the past year coming into sharp relief against this vicious spread of blue.