129: it's like magic

THIS WEEK: texts for twenty seven

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• RAFTM¹ Rachel Davies has a new newsletter,

  Personal Space
  , where they’ll be covering “culture, design, and life at home.” Rachel is the person behind some of my favorite AD stories, like this one about people who love estate sales and a recent one on people acquiring old Redbox machines and tricking them out; they’re also the first person I reach out to when I have a personal design question. The first dispatch on Netflix’s nostalgia moment is live now.

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Over the weekend, I turned twenty-seven. My feeling is that the ages between twenty-five and thirty are mostly ambient ages. Sure, there is some pressure to make the most of the end of your twenties while somehow also making sure all your ducks are in order for when you turn thirty, when you’ll have figured out exactly how the rest of your life is going to go, but mostly it feels like a soup of passing time. As such, I didn’t imagine that I would spend much time thinking about turning twenty-seven beyond planning where I would go for dinner and excusing extravagant purchases as “birthday gifts to myself.” But then I started feeling a little existential on a flight last week and figured it wouldn’t hurt to think a little bit about what it meant to be turning twenty-seven. As I mentioned in my last birthday dispatch, my favorite thing to do when it’s my birthday is to read/listen/watch things that explicitly address the age that I’m turning. It’s not about getting lessons but just a nice reminder that everyone has done this before.

So I asked people for recs of books, movies, songs, etc. about being 27 and here’s what they said:

Frances Ha (2013); Frank Ocean’s “Nights”; Imagine Dragon’s “Zero” (“27 years and I’m at the end of my mind”); Pride and Prejudice (2005) (“I’m 27 years old. I’ve no money and no prospects. I’m already a burden to my parents. And I’m frightened.”)²; and Tierra Whack’s “27 Club”.

I found a list on Letterboxd, “Movies about being 27,” that includes entries like Garden State and Obvious Child, although the protagonists of those movies aren’t exactly twenty-seven (key to my particular exercise) but I guess they capture the same sense of transition and confusion. The description for the list is a lyric from boygenius’ “Emily I’m Sorry”, sung by Phoebe Bridgers: “I’m twenty-seven and I don’t know who I am / But I know what I want”.

As I was digging around the internet for essays about being twenty-seven, I remembered B.D. McClay’s essay for The Paris Review, “Anne Elliot is Twenty-Seven,” which I read sometime last year. The essay thinks about the relationship between age and memory in Jane Austen’s Persuasion, whose main character, Anne Elliot, is twenty-seven and treated like her life is over. (I watched the 2007 adaptation of the novel, starring Sally Hawkins, over the holidays and someone actually exclaims in horror at the fact of her age.) McClay mentions an interaction with a friend who expresses their affinity for the novel on the basis of the fact that it is Austen’s novel about “late-in-life novel,” only to be reminded that Anne is twenty-seven. Not so late.

To survey this (quite small) selection, it seems that, unsurprisingly, twenty-seven is considered a make it or break it year. Life either begins or ends at twenty-seven. Or so they say.

I forgot that Frances in Frances Ha is twenty-seven. In the words of Justine Lupe’s character “[she] seems older. Like, much older.” This makes sense because I first fell in love with this movie when I was sixteen and so that did feel much older to me. Even more, similarly to Persuasion, there is a sense of alarm that Frances is too old to be the way she is—with no credit, an affinity for play-fighting, and a penchant for rambling on randomly. I rewatched the movie last night with Rachel, which is the first time I’ve watched it since living in New York. Thankfully, it still felt special. As we watched, recalling our favorite lines (“Eating bacon like it was chips”), we both agreed that we had learnt to be people from this movie, taught ourselves how we had wanted to live. This is a feeling shared by several of my friends, all of us now twenty-seven. As teenagers and in our early twenties, we ran down the street, we made impulse travel plans with credit cards we couldn’t afford to pay off³, we romanticized the lives of other people, as well as our own. The language of the movie became our own language; its ways of seeing, our ways of seeing. In the words of Frances’ famous monologue, we had a secret world.

In Annie Baker’s essay about the movie, she talks about the contrast between the film’s French New Wave influence and its American setting: “Baumbach’s young people are literally pirouetting through the streets of New York City but soundtracked, costumed, and rendered black and white by the French New Wave.” This juxtaposition creates a sense of dissonance: as realistic as the movie is, there is a sense that it’s not exactly real life. There’s an additional layer of magic. For Baker this contrast suggests that, possibly, “being an aspiring twentysomething artist in a major city [is] necessarily about trying, unconsciously or not, to make your life look like your favorite movie[.]” This is the romance of both of the movie and the language that it offers us. An offer to look at and be in the world with wonder. Growing up, Baker continues, might mean “letting go of the movie you thought your life would be.” For me, this is not to say that it’s about losing that sense of romance or wonder.

Part of what makes Frances Ha special to me is that even at the end of the movie, when Frances “grows up” and sartorially transitions from leggings and chef’s clogs to pencil skirts and ballet flats, she doesn’t lose the sense of playfulness that characterizes her throughout the movie. Although we don’t see her run through the city’s streets again, we see her dancing in the park on her lunch break and taking giddy pleasure in discovering the space of her new apartment. Even the final moment of the movie, when she writes out her name to put on her mailbox and finds that it’s too long, her decision to fold it so that it reads “Frances Ha” rather than “Halliday,” the more practical choice, maintains that sense of playfulness. She might be becoming more of an adult but she does so without sacrificing her sense of wonder and whimsy. There’s still a chance that she will barrel through New York’s crowds soundtracked by Bowie’s “Modern Love.” As Baker writes, “She has almost reached adulthood but isn’t quite there yet; still green, but less green than before; more herself…”

I couldn’t think about running in Frances Ha without thinking about RAFTM

Tia Glista

’s article from 2022 about women running in film. She cites (at the time) recent examples such as The Worst Person in the World and Licorice Pizza. At the end of her piece, Tia recalls the final moments of Joanna Hogg’s The Souvenir Part II in which the protagonist, Julie (played by Honor Swinton-Byrne), makes a decision to go her own way, to trust in her instincts. Rereading the piece, what struck me was not Julie’s choice to do her own thing but that it’s treated as a decision to be made, not an inevitable result of an arc (or the passing of time). Two of the best pieces of advice I’ve gotten about being twenty-seven were about making conscious decisions: RAFTM Madison Mackley told me that at twenty-seven she made the conscious decision that she’s hot (true!); RAFTM Mingus New told me that I’m the only person who can decide that I’m a loser or not. Both of these are really about confidence, the confidence that I can see myself in my own way and shape my life how I want to. Because everyone has different ideas about what you should be doing at twenty-seven (or any age) and it can be hard not to be frightened by that. But one can decide for themselves. Even if my life isn’t like my favorite movie (though sometimes it does feel like it is!), it can still be one of my own direction. I can decide and go my own way.

1. RAFTM = Reader and Friend to Me; graciously stolen from RAFTM Rachel Tashjian

2. Fun fact: The actress, Claudie Blakely, who brilliantly performs this line turns out to have the same birthday as me

3. I decided to go to Paris for my 20th birthday precisely because of this movie. And I listened to Hot Chocolate’s “Every 1’s A Winner” when I was there. I listened to Taylor Swift’s reputation too.