Books that defined my generation. Or not.

My generation.

Douglas Copeland is getting a lot of publicity at the moment. His novel Generation X is 30 years old. Cue lots of nonsense about generation theory. Again.

The Guardian Review carried a piece called The books that defined a generation. There are two things wrong with this concept. 1. Generation theory is nonsense. 2. Generations don’t define themselves by books.

I was born right at the end of the 1950s and no-one I know sees themselves as a baby boomer. (That was true even before “boomer” became an insult.) One of my older Twitter friends was born in 1950 and even he doesn’t accept it. As he points out, “boomer” used to mean babies born just after World War II (only later did someone decide it went up to the early 1960s) and those kids grew up to trad jazz, skiffle and rock and roll. My friend grew up in “an entirely different era in music”, and acknowledges too that “my musical milestones will be a million miles from yours.”

It should be obvious, to anyone who doesn’t edit a magazine called Review that only reviews one art form, that people are more likely to define themselves by music than by books. But there are other cultural touchstones too. I got a lot of my education not from books but from the NME. It was there  that I first  heard about surrealism (via Peter Gabriel era Genesis) and postmodernism (via Jayne Casey).  It was the NME that told me to read On the Road, too. Which is in the Guardian as a baby boomer book. 

As well as On The Road (published 1957), the boomer books mentioned in the Guardian piece include The Female Eunuch (1970) and Knots by R D Laing (1970). Blake Morrison, who chose them, was born in 1950 so I guess the cut-off date is that they came out before he gained adulthood.

The last two came out when I was 12, so I think I can claim those for my list too. I didn’t read The Female Eunuch until I was older but I was certainly influenced by Knots, mainly because I saw a TV documentary about it while I was babysitting (and when you’re a teenager in a dysfunctional family that stuff resonates). 

Weekend telly was generally dreadful in the early 70s but we did have the South Bank Show, a door into art and ideas. The other good things you could do when babysitting was play people’s records (usually Bridge Over Troubled Water) and read their books. It was a chance to read the dirty bits in The Naked Ape by Desmond Morris (published 1967). I’d be tempted to put that in my list, except it turns out now that it was a bit problematic. Not least from a feminist point of view.

I think most of the books that would go into my "defining" list would be "from a feminist point of view". After all, I came of age in the era of second-wave feminism. Surprisingly, this isn't reflected in the lists compiled by the boomer and Gen X authors in the Guardian. Who are both men.

One book that I would definitely admit into a “defining” category, because it was very zeitgeisty, is Marilyn French’s bleakly angry feminist novel The Women’s Room (1977). I remember it as being hugely influential. It certainly terrified me, reading it a few years after publication, in my first year of marriage. 

A more cheerful feminist classic that was popular around the same time was Fear of Flying by Erica Jong (1973), because it was about sex. But most women my age got their sex education from The Happy Hooker (1971) by Xaviera Hollander. I remember this being passed around, and much discussed, in my first year at university. But you don’t see that mentioned in lists of Books that Defined the 1970s.  

All these shaped the way I, and my generation, thought about men and women and the relationships between them. Maybe not for ever, but at the time.

The thing is, though, you don’t stop learning. I read several of the Books that shaped the 1980s listed on the Penguin website when they came out. I was an adult then so I don’t know if they count as shaping my generation, but they still shaped me. And you read retrospectively too. I first read The Golden Notebook (1962) in the 1980s; I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings was published in 1969 but was also part of my education.

Also, the books that define my generation continue to be written. Not books written by people older than us that influenced our growing minds: books by our generation that talk about who we actually are.

Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha by Roddy Doyle (born 1958). A perfect evocation of being 10 years old in 1968, as I was. See also: Guts, which revisits the characters in The Commitments in middle-age and Love, a scarily accurate depiction of late middle age.

The Rotters Club and Middle England by Jonathan Coe (born 1961). For laugh out loud satire about the world I grew up in. 

Microserfs by Douglas Copeland (born 1961). Because I've worked with people like that.

Books by women about lives lived in music: Tracey Thorn and Lavinia Greenlaw (both born 1962), Viv Albertine (born 1954).  

But my “books to read” pile and my library wishlist aren’t just written by, or about, people like me. Yes, of course my books define me. (That’s why I can’t get rid of them, and my bookshelves are full.) But they do more than that: they tell me about other generations, other times, other places. That’s what books are for.