44 pages • 1 hour read
Kiley ReidSuch a Fun Age
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2019A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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BetaPart 1: Chapters 1-3Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 1, Chapter 1 Summary
Such a Fun Age opens on Emira, a young black woman out with her friends, as she tries to hear a phone call from Mrs. Chamberlain, who Emira babysits for. As Emira’s friends drunkenly fool around in the background, Emira makes sure Mrs. Chamberlain won’t be upset that Emira doesn’t “exactly look like a babysitter right now” (4). Although Emira’s friends Josefa and Shaunie don’t want her to leave, her closest friend, Zara, supports her by going with her, despite the fact that it’s late at night.
When Emira arrives at the Chamberlain’s house, she sees a hole in the front window and can hear the younger child, Catherine, crying. At Mrs. Chamberlain’s request, Emira takes Briar, the toddler, to head out of the house with her and Zara. They head to the local grocery store, or as Zara calls it, “a rich people’s grocery store” (6). Briar and Zara have an impromptu dance party in front of the frozen foods; Emira decides to join in. Briar is excited about dancing, which is rare for her, and Zara turns some music on her phone. As the song ends, a man walks down the aisle and applauds Briar after she bows. Zara leaves to go meet up with a man she’s seeing, and Emira redirects Briar to go walk around the grocery store.
Before Briar and Emira can go look at the nuts or smell tea (both of Briar’s favorite activities), the store’s security guard interrupts, asking Emira, “is this your child?” (10). Emira explains that she is Briar’s babysitter, and the security guard comments that her outfit doesn’t look like she has been babysitting. Emira becomes increasingly flustered as another shopper, an older white woman, explains that she asked security to come over because she “heard the little girl say that she’s not with her mom” (11). Emira does her best to explain as the security guard gets brusquer and more accusatory, refusing to let her leave the store. The white man who had applauded Briar begins recording the interaction.
After arguing back and forth further with the security guard, Emira calls Mr. Chamberlain, who rushes to the grocery store. When he finally arrives, the “security guard [begins] to explain and apologize” (16). The white man in the Penn State sweatshirt offers his condolences and suggests that Emira “get him fired” (17). She refuses, so the man, whose name turns out to be Kelley, emails her the video just in case she changes her mind. Emira finally heads home, where she meets back up with Zara and allows herself to cry.
Part 1, Chapter 2 Summary
Chapter 2 introduces Alix Chamberlain, a white woman who has built her career on being good at writing letters; when she got married to her husband, Peter, “at age twenty-eight, the part favors, her shoes, and the white wine at her wedding were all items she’d received free of charge from hand-writing gorgeous letters and promising glowing reviews” (21). A year after getting married, Alix found herself pregnant, and Briar was born. Though Alix had wanted to move to Philadelphia, she told Peter she still wanted to wait.
Everything was going well for Alix until Briar started talking; shortly after, Alix found herself pregnant again. She and Peter decided to finally make the move to Philadelphia, despite Alix’s reservations of losing the positive things about New York City. She maintained positive buzz by breastfeeding live at a women’s panel, allowing that to carry “her over the Pennsylvania state line, into her new home, and into her third trimester” (29).
Alix was supposed to be working on her book now that she had moved, so she found Emira, who had never heard of Alix’s company, “LetHerSpeak” (31), and was quiet but listened carefully to Briar. With Emira’s help several days a week, Alix began settling into a better routine in Philadelphia, reading and relaxing.
In the present, Alix is struggling with the aftermath of Peter’s bad move on TV that morning. Peter, a news anchor, had said something that one might possibly perceive as racist on live television; that night, someone threw eggs at their window and broke it. This is when Alix called Emira to come babysit Briar. When Emira had arrived at the house, Alix felt nervous of the possibility “of Emira knowing what Peter had said” (35).
Part 1, Chapter 3 Summary
Chapter 3 explains Emira’s backstory. The daughter of a beekeeper and bookbinder, Emira grew up in a town where “7.6 percent of the population […] are hearing impaired” (36) and it was common for everyone to speak sign language. Both of Emira’s siblings had a “proclivity toward craftsmanship” (36) like their parents. Yet as Emira moved into her adulthood, she found herself unable to identify her strength or interest. She made it through five years at Temple University as an English major, and began working as a transcriptionist, which she hated.
When Emira finally began babysitting Briar, she found it a “welcome break from Emira’s constant concern of what to do with her hands and the rest of her life” (38). Briar was interesting, always asking funny questions, which made Emira feel useful.
After the night at Market Depot, the expensive grocery store, Emira didn’t feel she could confide in her parents because they didn’t even know what she was doing for a living. Emira spirals into negative beliefs about herself: “This wouldn’t have happened if you had a real fucking job” (39). She begins thinking about applying for new positions.
Part 1, Chapters 1-3 Analysis
The back-and-forth narrative style of Such a Fun Age is a common structure in novels with more than one central character. As Reid moves between Emira and Alix, the novel’s core tensions come to light quickly. By juxtaposing Emira’s perspective with Alix’s, Reid makes explicit the ways that each character views the world around them differently. This contrast heightens by Reid’s choice to immediately present a conflict in the opening chapters, first through Emira’s lens and then through Alix’s. The Market Depot scene, in which a security guard accuses Emira of stealing Alix’s child, Briar, whom she babysits, is a frightening, traumatizing experience for Emira. Meanwhile, it is an eye-opening moment for Alix, a white woman, who had been avoiding dealing with issues of race. By presenting Emira and Alix side-by-side, Reid highlights the extremely different ways they each perceive the world around them, especially in regard to race and racism.
Being skilled with one’s hands emerges early on in the novel as a central thematic element. Emira wrestles with being less crafty than the rest of her family, only going to college so that she can wait “for her hands to find themselves” (37). Now, in her 20s, Emira is still stuck without a job that fulfills her, which is what leads her to babysitting Briar. Meanwhile, Alix very quickly figured out that she was so skilled at writing that she could get free things and build an entire career out of it: the origin of her company LetHerSpeak. This is an important contrast between the two characters: Emira is unsure of what to do with her hands while Alix is so completely sure that she builds her entire life around her skill. Emira seems to observe many of the people around her in relation to how successful they are in finding what they are best at, perhaps because of her own insecurity about not having her own passion to pursue.
Race and racism are a critical part of the tensions of Such a Fun Age. Not only are Emira and Alix different in their careers and life choices, they are also foil characters in their racial identities and backgrounds. Emira is a young black woman who is the daughter of hard-working tradespeople; Alix is a wealthy white woman who grew up in a suburban town with parents who got rich when she was a teenager. Reid forces these differences to the surface almost immediately in the novel through the Market Depot scene, which emphasizes the ways that Emira and Alix have been socialized to think about their own racial identities as well as racism in the world around them. The reactions of other people in their lives supplements their worldviews, like Emira’s friend, Zara, who is also a woman of color, versus Alix’s husband, Peter, who is unconscious to his own biases. Emira’s relationship with Kelley, who is a white man, will also lend more nuance to the novel’s discussion of race and racism as she struggles with understanding his motivations and perspective, as well as the ways he unintentionally perpetrates racism himself.
