This is an early 1990's interview with Douglas Copeland, the author of the book Generation X. She mentions the third printing of the book, which was published in 1991. This interview appears to be in 1993, two years later. Copeland was born right at the end of 1961, now considered the late part of the Baby Boom generation. That make's Copeland was about 30 or 31 in this interview. Yes, the only Generation X interview I could find with Copeland from that era is on an LGBT Canada YouTube channel. I had no idea what his sexual preference was, and don't really care. But this is the only interview about this book I could find.
A young writer writes a novel about a small subgroup of people around his age, and winds up naming three whole generations by accident. He was writing about some of the people born between 1961 and 1971. He never mentions the band Generation X, from the late 1970's, and fronted by Billy Idol, so that seems to have little influence on this book, except the term "Generation X" was out there. The generation after Douglas Copeland's, my generation, got tagged with the title of his book, Generation X. Now, over 30 years later, the widely accepted age range of Gen X is those born from 1965 to 1980. The Baby Boom, which actually began as a real baby boom after World War II, was born from 1946 to 1964. I was born in 1966, making me one of the older Gen Xers. The group after us, born from 1981 to 1996, largely came of age around the year 2000, and got dubbed the Millennials. After that, the powers at be apparently gave up trying to name any more generations. The post-Millennial generation, born from 1997 to 2012, is now known as Gen Z. We were X, the Millennials would then be Y, the next group is Z. Who comes after Gen Z? Gen Alpha are the new kids, born from 2013 to present, and probably until about 2028. Back to "A," but now it's "Alpha," so now we're either using the Greek alphabet, or military walkie talkie radio talk letters, you decide.
I got a bad leg infection in January, struggling through SoCal's chilly, rainy winter, as a homeless guy in the suburbs north of L.A.. That led to a couple of days in the hospital, then a couple weeks in a sketchy "homeless recuperation center," which was a sketchy, underfunded, broken down motel in Palmdale. I could barely walk for a couple of weeks, had no wifi, and no place to work on art. For two weeks, I laid in a small bed, with my leg raised up on my backpack, thinking. I decided to work on an idea for a novel. I used a book about screenwriting to block out the different pieces of that story.
As research for that novel I started planning out, I just re-read the book Generation X, published in 1991, and then looked up this interview, to see what Copeland had to say about the book back then. Much to my surprise, Generation X wasn't even written about Generation X. In this short, but solid, interview above, Douglas Copeland explains that he was writing about a subgroup of what is now the late Baby Boom generation and early Genartion X, those born from about 1961 to 1971. They are the last part of the Boomers, and Copeland, born in late 1961, is a part of that group. In his experience, many of them had a much different outlook on life than the early Boomers, and that's what Generation X was written about.
The story is about three young people, in their late 20's, Andy, Dag, and Claire. They all careened off of the traditional career path of life, the rat race, as we used to call it, and wound up in Palm Springs, California. Palm Springs, about an hour east of the Los Angeles metro, is a desert resort town, inhabited mostly by old people, a bunch of TV and movie stars from days gone by, and other old people who love plastic surgery. The three main characters work "McJobs," low pay, low prestige, no future gigs, and live in small bungalows next door to each other. All three are hipsters, at least by my standards. To pass the time, they get together and tell each other weird stories. Generation X follows their lives over a few months time, as they navigate life, family expectations, and try to find meaning in a world where a nuclear holocaust could bring all human life to and end, at any moment.
I thought Generation X was a decent read back when I first read it in 1992 or so. But the characters were just too hip for me then, and I couldn't relate to them very well. It reads a lot better now that I'm a middle aged loser. I cranked through it in about three days this time. I had almost completely forgotten the book, there were very few parts I remembered from my first reading. If you're kind of burned out on life, or want to time travel back to the "before times," pre-internet, before cell phones, but when young people struggled with finding meaning in life, much like they do now, Generation X is a good read.
Douglas Copeland- "Life is not about essays"- 2019 or early 2020
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