Kate Kennedy: On Being Basic
Kate Kennedy is a brilliantly astute historian of millennial culture, which she explores, in depth in One in a Millenial: On Friendship, Feelings, Fangirls, and Fitting in, a bestselling book that’s part memoir, but really a love letter and a critique of the culture so many of us grew up in.
As part of my book tour I went on Kate’s podcast, Be There in Five, where I was immediately taken by her intelligence and deep, deep knowledge of the programming that shaped our consciousness, from Jessie Spano’s feminism in Saved by the Bell—and the laugh track it inspired—to the way so many women and girls were taught that our interests were dumb, shallow, and silly. Or, to use the parlance of the day: Basic. In One in a Millenial, Kennedy points to this long tradition of the veneration of action figures, Marvel, and football—and the deprecation of pretty much anything that girls and women value, whether it’s romance novels, the Spice Girls, or American Girl Dolls. While her point is not new—and certainly aligned with our summer of the Barbie movie, Taylor Swift, and Beyoncé—her exploration of how it shaped her own mind in childhood, and the way she experiences herself now as a result of it, is revelatory, and something we explore in today’s conversation.
MORE FROM KATE KENNEDY:
One in a Millenial: On Friendship, Feelings, Fangirls, and Fitting in
Kate’s Website
Instagram: Follow Kate and Be there in Five
TRANSCRIPT:
(Edited slightly for clarity.)
ELISE LOEHNEN: It's funny, I'm not a millennial. Do you use astrological terms? How do you describe it, Kate? I'm on the cusp. I'm young Gen X.
KATE KENNEDY: I think it's a zillennial with an X, not a Z.
ELISE: Oh! Interesting. But is that Gen Z millennial, or what about X-zennial?
KATE: X, Xennial. I mean, I don't know if the pronunciation is different, but it's technically an Xennial...
which, But audibly that just sounds the same as the Gen Z Millennial cusp, Zillennial. So I'm not totally sure, but yeah, the cusp works.
ELISE: the cusp works. I'm on the cusp. So as I was reading your book, I got most of the references. And it's funny as being like not an older millennial, but just older than the older millennials, recognizing those moments and wanting to participate in them and doing that to some extent, while at the same time chastising myself for being too old. Like I had an American Girl doll. I had Samantha, but I feel like I was like, I think I'm too old for this. Samantha's a dark haired one.
KATE: Yes.
ELISE: With the very fancy clothing. Yeah, I am a Samantha, right? I'm such a Samantha. But, anyway, I related hard specifically to this, the way that our culture is programmed, which is what your entire book is about, the way that you felt programmed as both a millennial and a woman or a girl. And then the way that we start to feel bad about that, right? And or like these interests are sad, pathetic, embarrassing, trite, airheady, in a way that men and boys are never, nobody is chastising and shaming boys for their fascination with GI Joe or Marvel or, Star Wars, right?
KATE: And even beyond like interest, I was thinking about your book a lot recently, because even the way behavior is coded, like most of my outstanding qualities, like being observational and really curious, for example, that somehow gets branded to like nosy or a busy body, or like loving to talk with your friends gets branded as gossip. It was kind of interesting writing the book, realizing everything that I kind of enjoy or pride myself on is, yeah, so easily coded to be something negative when it doesn't have to be.
ELISE: No. And there's this idea, and we talked a bit about this on your podcast, you know having done things in my career that would be perceived as Not, I don't know, anti intellectual. Some of the books that I've ghost written that are part of pop culture, mass culture, working at a magazine about shopping and working through that in real time through the cultural criticism of it and putting consumerism and the environment aside because that at the time wasn't the complaint. Nobody was conscious really about fast fashion and its effects. But working through how being at Lucky Magazine and how deprecated it was. It was mocked even though it was the fastest growing magazine in the history of Condé Nast, women loved it. We were like the first blog. We were the first people to profile real women and real women's style and different bodies. But it was wild to be there and to be like, I can't be here because I'm being shamed for having these, quote unquote, like light, superficial, silly, stupid, interests and qualities. And this is so persistent, right? This is what your entire book is about. And you are like a professor of Millennial Studies. Has anyone offered you a teaching position?
KATE: No, weirdly, in my in between eras of jobs, I've applied for some, but I think that's kind of the, I guess the fun part about my job as kind of a casual commentator, or as I like to say, a self-appointed DIY internet radio host, 'cause I guess that's kind what a podcast is. It's like I can comment and have fun with it without having to be too intellectual or to research base. I think this book's kind of a balance in like, these are just my experiences in my opinions, but I try to underscore it with like, there are broader trends here that a lot of millennials will relate to, but it's not a science, but there are similar themes in terms of how our coming of age intersects with social and cultural and economic, you know, circumstances. But yeah, I don't know if I have an adequate cross section of all millennials enough to be a professor. That'd be cool though.
ELISE: No, I mean, I do think you're a historian. I don't think you're giving yourself enough credit. But I also recognize like the dance, I mean, at the beginning, where you write: "There are so many ways I wish to preface this book. When you have an internet career and become aware of all the eyes and ears, you slowly develop a superpower called the disclaimer. Even if it's at the expense of the work speaking for itself, you start to prioritize preventative qualifiers so they get lengthier and lengthier, usually as a result of the painful experience of people misunderstanding your intentions or requiring your work to cater to their individual needs to be allowed to exist. This is very, very challenging for me, hence this very, very long intro." I'm just" going to cut to it and say that you are a historian. This book One in the Millennial, which again, disclaimer in the title, but you are highlighting huge cultural trends that I think even if listeners didn't feel directly influenced by NSYNC or Miley Cyrus, any of the other people that you're speaking about, you are a historian of a time in a way that like where there probably aren't academic historians because they would deprecate this as silly. And meanwhile, this is like deep in our consciousness. Right? Which is what your book is exploring as both like a loving embrace of the culture that formed you and also a criticism or an awakening to the ways in which you perceive yourself in the world. And it's interesting to hear you disclaimer because It's exactly that, however many years later, right? And we all know how to do it. I read a ton, and every woman that I know is disclaimering, stating their identities and their privilege, I mean, I think maybe 2 percent of men do that.
KATE: Mm...
ELISE: It's not an expectation of men, only of girls. It's really, really interesting.
KATE: If I could have included I don't know, 13th or 14th chapter in the book, because I didn't include a lot about my podcasting career, cause it's new or relative to most of my story, and there are certain things that I think you need distance from to reflect on adequately. And I'm in the middle of this career I really like, but I will say that the exercise of performing your identity as an entertainer and all that comes with it has fundamentally changed my brain in a way that I don't even know if I fully understand yet, where I think if I wasn't a podcaster and had, you know, didn't live in a feedback loop, I would have just written the book I've been like. Here it is in all its glory, but I'm so trained and predisposed now to apologize for everything I credit myself for to disclaim everything. And it's an example of how these things are so deeply internalized and a form of conditioning where I can intellectualize these things all I want and explain them, but I still am also actively experiencing them and implementing them in my life in ways that I wish I could separate from.
ELISE: Yeah. You know, like you probably, I wrote, I don't know, 18 versions of my intro. And that seems really extreme as I say that, but it's true. And as I was trying to find different ways in, there was one early version that was essentially just me explicating to the reader all of the things that I'm not. I wasn't conscious of it. But I was like, I'm not a theologian. I'm not an academic. I don't have a PhD in religious stuff. I mean, on and on. And a friend read it and was like, this is kind of perverse. Like, why don't you say who you are, not who you're not?
KATE: Wow. I mean, I have one of those versions, too, and that's so true. It's like, before I get to who I am, I want to be clear that I'm aware of everything you're going to say I'm not.
ELISE: Yeah, I'm gonna anticipate all of your criticism. And I'm already on my knees. I'm already keeping myself small. I already know my place. I already know that you're going to dismiss this as sort of the ramblings of a millennial about culture and this is the other thing I think you do exceptionally well. I don't know if it's a function of podcasting. You talked about it as a feedback loop. But I think the feedback loop can be quite positive. And I think having hosted a show prior to this for a long time and getting a lot of feedback and a lot of people who would say, like, we're the same person or you, we have so many of the same stories.
And I think we're at this moment in culture and I applaud you for this, because this is your book does this exceptionally well, father, Richard Rohr called it the cosmic egg, where he says that, you know, there's the me story which should exist sort of like a nesting doll inside the we story. And then there's the story. And right now we're in this period where it's all me story, right? It's like my exceptionality. This is me. This is my story. My story matters. And some of this is great, but it gets kind of tedious after a while because nobody is connecting it to the we story and theoretically the the story.
And what I think is so powerful about so many of these essays, whether it's an essay about a day bed, the day bed, I loved the day, I wanted a day bed desperately, or Bed Bath and Beyond, or any of these other cultural moments, American Girl dolls and their backstories, it's a we story, it really is a wee story, and I can say that as someone who's not even of your generation.
KATE: I love hearing that, and honestly something I thought a lot about was, kind of to your point earlier about, like, do we have historical record of people, like, you know, how they lived in these times? And it's like, so many books, so much art, like, is about truly exceptional. People who really do something different. And I kind of look back on my life and from talking to a lot of listeners over the years, I'm kind of like, you know, but what about those of us that were like programmed to stick with the status quo that avoided being unique at all costs, what about those of us that kind of like chased brands and versions of ourselves as a means to get through the world a little bit more easily? Like what are our stories and do they count? Not all of us have been a blazing individual since day one. And, I think there's a lot to be learned from this, my kind of commonplace existence. And I, you know, could caveat that term a million times, but even just to the term of in a sense of being called like literally basic over the years, like there's kind of a type of existence that is easily not celebrated for being pretty regular. You know, I had average grades. I grew up in the suburbs. Like my culture is the cheesecake factory. Like I didn't grow up in high art. And I just think that I'm an example of a person that people would maybe, you know, in some circles label as artless or uninteresting, but it's really cool to be able to write this book. And as I like to say verbally, like, man spread the minutia of my existence because it's like all the things I thought I had to bury that weren't important and me kind of like speaking their validity into existence.
ELISE: Yeah. Well, and you start to understand, like for example, I didn't have cable and so I missed a lot of sort of the cultural moments. And you write about that, like the kids who would come over whose parents didn't have cable who would want to sort of watch 90210. But I like, I missed 90210, et cetera. And I saw Saved by the Bell, but more I feel like as reruns over time. Certainly remember the Jesse Spano breakdown that you write about. It's so interesting to think about Elizabeth Berkley in that character, I just remember thinking that she was highly unlikable. And then your sort of exegesis on this, and then I think it's really interesting that she went on to do that, you didn't write about this, showgirls, almost as like a course correction to the sort of strident, earnest early feminist. Right? So can you talk a bit about Saved by the Bell and as you reexamined it and the laugh track and I just thought that was so Fascinating and insidious.
KATE: Yeah. So I have a mini chapter called saved by the bell jar about kind of like my journey with feminism through the lens of millennial culture. I think I was calling it like the Spano to C SPAN pipeline. It was like, I was experimenting with different ways to talk about feminism but it ended up in this, in this essay where I talk about how a lot of the. You know, women I grew up with, we kind of look back now at how we didn't want to call ourselves feminists. So we were a lot older, like, problematically older, and how we had a negative connotation with this term. And I was trying to really dig into, like, okay, well, there's the, you know, bra burning tropes and the kind of Rush Limbaugh coined in calcified terms, like feminazi that were pervasive in the 90s. There, there were elements of adult culture that I wasn't privy to and my parents weren't saying that stuff's like, why was I internalizing this, but I realized my first point of entry to a feminist on television as a self proclaimed feminist on television was Jesse Spano and saved by the bell, which aired in a morning block adjacent to cartoons on, it was called teen NBC at the time it was Saturday morning, kind of like it's Friday night counterpart.
I remember Jesse also being very unlikable. When you rewatch Saved by the Bell, it's actually Jesse making a lot of very salient points about her rights, about equal rights, about closing the wage gap, about men and women in, you know, in domestic labor. And she'll say things like, you know, both men and women should be contributing to the household. And then Slater will clap back with like, you know, we'll get right back into the kitchen type of comment. And when Jesse says something pretty insightful. The audience is completely silent. Then Slater or Zack or Screech, whoever, makes fun of her, and the audience roars with laughter. So when you're a nine year old in Short Pump, Virginia, and you're like, oh, when I go to high school, this is what feminists are like, and this is how boys are reacting to feminists, and even her friends, Kelly and Lisa, didn't support her. They made fun of her. You're kind of internalizing a message like, oh, okay, well, if I want to be liked, if I want boys to like me and to not be a punchline, I need to not behave like Jesse. And when I was re watching it and prepping for this book, I kind of couldn't believe how A, how manipulated a lot of these shows are by laugh tracks, because there's something called sweetening that can happen where the laugh track is added after the studio audience to punch up what the writers want to emphasize as being the comedy, and you quickly notice that Jessie is used as an object for comedy, like she's a punchline, she's not contributing to it, and then I would notice in Boy Meets World, like, You know, Topanga, she started out kind of like hippie and alternative, and she would say these really beautiful, insightful things. And then Corey Matthews would be like, oh, you're going to be one of those girls that doesn't shave her legs. Audience roars. So it's like, okay, what is that telling me of how to be?
And the second piece is that when I went back and looked at some of these shows that I loved, I noticed that the writer's room was all adult men with the exception of one or two episodes in Saved by the Bell's case. And I just thought, wow, it is so interesting that we talk about diversity and representation, like yes, of course, who's on the screen matters, but who's in the writer's room and who's telling the stories really matters too, because that's where stereotypes abound. Because those men were not writing Jesse Spano as an example of an actual feminist. She was written as a character from an adult male's response to like second wave feminist stereotypes. And they found that type of woman, irritating, so they wrote Jessie as an irritating character. And it just was an interesting thing for me to explore the way I internalized themes from pop culture thinking about who was writing this and when did it contribute to a stereotype versus when did it communicate an authentic experience.
ELISE: Yeah. No, it's so fascinating. Not to put you on the spot, but when you think about culture now, and I don't know if you're as much as a student. I'm guessing you are. Like you seem like a very keen observer of culture. Is there anything that you think that we'll similarly look back on and think That's wild?
KATE: I mean, I think that, besides soap brows, you mean? I'm just kidding. I'm a little worried that the spiked up lamination, I'm going to regret, but I'm still doing it, but I think that in the past couple of years, we've realized like the girl bossification wasn't the vibe, you know, the leaning of it all. I think that following that, we realize that the shapeshifting of diet and health related terms where we just stop saying like skinny and thin or like not eating and then would say things like intermittent fasting when it was kind of not eating, you know what I mean, like the shapeshifting of things, it's like acting like we've changed, but we haven't.
ELISE: Yeah. Yeah. Totally.
KATE: Something that's even newer, probably is like skincare. I think anti aging is going to be just as offensive eventually as like diet culture related stuff, but we're not quite there yet because it's in the name of self care.
ELISE: No, 100%. I interviewed Kate Mann recently. That episode will come out before this one. And her latest book is called Unshrinking. And it's about fat phobia. And it's just wild. I mean, it's wild how rampant antifatness is in our culture and how we profess or insist that the science aligns with this and it just doesn't, not unilaterally, not in a tidy way. But yet it's completely acceptable if not applauded in a way that will be, I think, wild to reckon with in 20 years. I don't know how long it takes for these feedback cycles now. It seems like they're swifter. There's so many cultural moments, I mean, American Girl dolls, I think when I had my doll, I was obsessed, from what I recall, with her, as you point out, very expensive outfits. But I don't remember if I even read the backstory books, but I loved that exploration too, because there's a depth to them that I'd never appreciated that sort of under the cover of, like, girls playing with dolls. Is there male corollary? No, right? Besides these superhero backstories?
KATE: Good question. I don't know that there is. I mean, they started making like girl boy, twin American girl dolls after my day, but I don't know if there is one cause there's like the Barbie GI Joe parallel, right? But I don't know what the American girl one would be, but yeah, that's a topic I love to revisit because it's one of my earliest and most, I don't know how to explain it, like my most significant memories of consumerism without knowing that's what it was. And I just think the sending of these catalogs with this gorgeous furniture and these expensive clothes at this inaccessible price point and being there tearing through the pages at like five years old, you know, it's funny for me to think about how it was just like a very early example of like exclusivity marketing. And it just for the comedy of me, like jonesing for you know a kit to quilt blanket with a muslin border or, you know, wanting a doll that came with a wooden spoon as our key accessory who lived on the minnesota frontier. Like, it's just funny because I was very much in like the Malibu Barbie era, but those books got me genuinely interested in women's backstories. And what I think is really beautiful about it, if it's done well, is, you know, a doll represents something young girls played with because it represented women's limitations in terms of, you know, Oh, you can be a caregiver, cosplay this for life, but using that doll to explore the historical backstories of women who were excluded from history, I think is really, really cool.
ELISE: But it is true. Like the status y components of American girls. I remember When I was a child, United Colors, the Benetton was huge, Gap, Esprit, and then Guess Jeans. And I don't know if Guess Jeans were big for Millennials, they certainly were for my generation. And there was like the Z Cavaricci knockoffs, and my mom would buy me the Z Cavaricci knockoffs because two for the price of one pair of Guess Jeans, and it was just, that was my first experience of sort of label shame and anxiety, to me it felt worse to have the knockoff. I don't know where I internalize that either, worse to have the knockoff than to have the real thing.
KATE: But, and when you actually would have the real thing or a good knockoff, that's like paired with how great that felt like. It really was exhilarating to feel like you had a status symbol that could precede you and kind of define your reputation in the times when you're uncertain about yourself or your own identity, it's kind of like, yeah, these jeans will buy my way. I mean it's so not linear, but at the time you really feel like those are the keys to social acceptance. And there's something sad and charming about that, I think, and that I'm seeing girls still doing with like drunk elephant products, you know? that are nine years old, which it's just crazy how these things shape shift. But I love hearing those anecdotes, I've heard of Z. Cavaricci, but I didn't understand that context. And that's what I want people to do reading the book is to like, remember just from kind of spark those memories that I don't even know if it's a helpful exercise for everyone, but I there's something really fun about like honoring the younger version of you that just cared so much about these things.
ELISE: I think it's really important because I think that when you're nine you start reading teen and then you're too old for teen by 12 and you're on to 17 right and then you're YM and then I had sassy, then you're moving on to Vogue, right? When you're a teenager, yeah, exactly.
KATE: Yeah.
ELISE: And such an interest, like a keen fascination with anticipatory aging, which is interesting because then you hit a curve and then it's all anti aging. But when you're young, it's like, how do I telegraph? What, I don't know, like, a sense of what's cool, a sense of belonging, wanting to be older, wanting to know. And then you have so much shame about yourself as a child. At least I felt that way. Like, I was too old to be playing with Barbies. Or it was not feminist, right? When I got to a certain age, I threw away all my Barbies and my neighbor's Barbies. She was pissed.
KATE: What a statement.
ELISE: yeah, but out of shame, which is sad.
KATE: It is. And I thought about that when I went to see the Barbie movie, I was like, God, it really is crazy how, I don't know if you're a boy and you like, you know, tractors and cars and sports and things marketed to little boys, like you get to keep those hobbies. But like, we had to throw our dolls away or else we'd be ridiculed. And I realized I had a lack of closure with Barbies. Like you just one day walk away and decide you're over them, but you're kind of not you just feel like you have to be and it is an interesting experience being a young woman that I hadn't thought about before is like you're even ashamed of it while it's happening in ways that like you don't even recognize as shame at the time because. It's just whatever any authority figures telling you or anybody you want to impress. Like it's just the truth. You're not putting second thoughts if it's valid or not. It's just like, Oh, I shouldn't be playing with Barbies.
ELISE: no and why like what's the shame? What is the programming that we get about all of these interests? Is it specifically age like you should be beyond this or Is it you should be beyond this coupled with cultural sort of pile on the girls interests are lowly and pathetic and embarrassing. Whereas as you said, you know, grown men go to monster car rallies and football, and obviously there are female fans as well. And they go to, I don't know, Avengers. I mean, my husband has the worst taste in culture, but there's more energy behind him making fun of me for occasionally watching the Kardashians, you know, meanwhile, he's like if there's a the lower the Rotten Tomato rating, the more inclined he is to watch a horror movie or whatever it may be, but it's acceptable for men. It's acceptable. It's celebrated.
KATE: No, it's so true. And, when I was kind of talking about the role of male authority in terms of how they perceive taste and in the last chapter, Pumpkin Spice Girl, at first I was kind of digging into, like, more history of behind this perception of male authority. But as I was writing it, and I remember my editor saying too, she's like, you almost don't need to overexplain this sensation of you saying you like a rock band and somebody saying name five songs. Like, if you're a woman, you've experienced this. You don't need to prove that this is the problem. It's like, we've all felt like our interests, you know, weren't sophisticated enough or they were dismissed for being a part of mass culture or whatever. And it was kind of true, because when I was trying to dig into more history behind how this works. I was trying to use anecdotes, like even with soap operas, like they were incredibly lucrative. They were financing the entire networks yet. They were the only programs that weren't reviewed formally in local newspapers because they were women's shows. So it's like that conundrum of the economic viability of something versus the credit it's given is something that's a tale as old as TV and even time before then, but it is interesting thinking about how, yeah, this year, fortunately, there's been that celebration of, you know, the value of women's interests. And, the conversation has changed to the point where that chapter is old and almost seems trite, which is kind of funny.
I think it's important regardless, because while we can have these overarching cultural conversations about validating our interests, those things don't usually permeate behind closed doors, and I'm still having awkward conversations with uncles and, you know, friends of my husband and people in real life that I have to over explain my book or my podcast or justify Taylor Swift dance parties or whatever the hell it is. The optics of how evolved we are one thing, but I think behind closed doors is often another story, and people do need to, like, be conscious of sticking up for their interests.
ELISE: Yeah. I mean, Taylor Swift, Beyonce, Barbie, like that trifecta and its impact on the economy is absolutely not surprising. And yet, was stunning right and still perceived as sort of women stuff whereas women have been engaged and the stuff that men again speaking not to essential eyes but speaking broadly that men are interested in just thinking as an as a fellow author our whole industry is supported by people like Colleen Hoover, right? She's a romance novelist. Her books, I don't know how many books she has in the top 100 on Amazon, but like her success is the reason that you and I can get in advance to write a book and yet we deprecate and disparage and mock and trivialize. I mean, thank God for Shonda rhymes and her counterprogramming Bridgerton again, another, you know, runaway success written by a woman who went to Harvard. And yet it's perceived as like Dross and crap.
It's interesting with my book and I feel like your book sort of fits in this corollary. All I wanted to do was write a book for no man's land and because I feel like there's a market, women, because I still have yet to be interviewed by a single man because I think that men are just not worried that they're really not interested in women. But this no man's land of sort of approachable, smart, heavily researched, but like accessible language that's not just dressed in highfalutin vocab so that not to sort of appeal to this academic intellectual crowd and to land it in a space where most, a lot of women read a lot of fiction, but they're like, I'll maybe read a couple of nonfiction books. I'll read this. This is accessible. It's fast. It moves. But it's interesting because like to also be like, Oh, well, this isn't going to be reviewed in any newspapers. This isn't intellectual enough. This isn't academic enough to be taken seriously. And I'm guessing that your book will have a similar thread where people are going to be really excited to talk about it. They're going to highly relate and yet like, the New York Times book review is probably not going to review your book. I could be wrong. Are they?
KATE: I don't know. I mean, it's kind of the dilemma I've had it with my whole career. I think that because I'm independent, so things people need, like an accolade or a backing of a network or some. thing that precedes you to kind of qualify you to be an authority on something. And I think the subject matter paired with even having millennial in the title and the press is often unfavorable treatment of millennials paired with me. Yeah. Not having kind of a formal institutional, like metric people can associate with me. It's a harder sell. Absolutely. And yeah, I guess we'll see what happens, but like my show has been, I've never ever really gotten, any formal nods for my full time job and podcast of six years. But it survives, it thrives because of people relating to my experience as like a normal person and not like an academic. So it'll be interesting to see if that, yeah, how that translates to the book's reception, but I'm grateful to try the material on a different channel and see how it resonates.
ELISE: I think that the Taylor, Beyonce, Barbie, Trifecta, obviously they got a ton of media, but I do think that it speaks to the disconnect that's only growing wider between more intellectual media, I guess that's how I would caveat or media that perceives itself in that way, what they're interested in and what people are actually engaging with, that Venn diagram to me is shrinking in a way that's just further underlines like you're not where people are. And I say this cause I think your books brilliant and hilarious and it really made me think and revisit my own childhood, including, and I think this is a rite of passage, right? Like, doesn't every generation sort of get the shit end of the stick? Isn't that a rite of passage? Don't we speak badly of every generation?
KATE: Oh, for sure. And about each other, I think everybody thinks that the people, you know, who came before then aren't like relevant to their plight and think that their advice is too old fashioned or whatever. And then the people that come after you, you know, they haven't paid their dues. They don't understand. They'll never get it there. You know, you kind of have the same gripes with the ways that they've changed as older generations do with you. I think with Millennials, I think what's interesting is that, with the exception of Gen Z and the Tide Pods, when I was writing it, there hadn't been such an unfavorable, consistent edit. There's the colloquial, like, okay, boomer vibe that's more recent, but like, Millennials from tip to tail, Ever since I got into the workforce, lazy, entitled, basement dwelling, job hopping, like go eat avocado toast and wear Uggs, you loser, like type of vibe. But then in the mid 2010s, it almost became like a caricature of itself where the, it was just clickbait about millennials killing major industries and economic sectors, ranging from paper napkins to diamonds, to low fat yogurt, to the American dream in its entirety. And it was kind of like, what? And it's never ever been something I was proud to call myself. And I mean, they're largely marketing terms. They're birds of a feather, it's kind of a way to Myers Briggs our birth, you're sure. But there are ways that our environment, when we're coming of age, really affect a large group of people. And I was kind of like, yeah, well, what about all this other stuff we identify with that you're just not going to get in the headline? I think millennials, when they look back on their lives, like we just aren't thinking of ourselves in the way that other people label us on the outside. Let me tell one person's story from the inside because, you know, what you might think is lazy is us having like work life balance, you know, kind of like the terms that you know, is he busy, but it's like, you can label people as these things, but they're when we explore the reason for that, maybe being the truth, it completely changes the definition.
ELISE: Yeah, now I'm trying to think of the sweeping definition of Gen X, but I feel like we were like burners.
KATE: It's Latchkey kids, right? Isn't that kind of the biggest term?
ELISE: Yeah. Benign neglect, drugs. I'm just thinking of like sort of the record or the movies that I feel like define our generation Empire Records...
KATE: would you say nineties grunge?
ELISE: Nineties grunge, Cobain, like, yes, a hundred percent. Which to be fair, I never felt cool enough for the primary culture of my generation, or rebellious enough, really and I don't know why. Maybe it's because I didn't have access to that? I mean, I had a Columbia Records subscription. Did those still exist in your generation? I bankrupted myself on the regular. When you were like, but there's nothing here that I want. I had some really random CDs. And every time my parents were like, you can do this for a penny. Wasn't it a penny? And then they start billing you.
KATE: Yep. It's like the magazine subscriptions. Yeah, you'll get charged for an eternity. That's an interesting example, what you said about rebellion, is kind of like these microcosms of monoculture, certain like generations experience that like are their own form of currency. And at one point to be cool means to be rebellious and in another point to be cool means to be like open and accepting to everyone, you know, there's just always different things that hold value. And I think when I was coming of age, in the book, I talk about the difference between popular and cool and popularity was like the word I think, I'm sure it still is like something people chase when they're in school, but how there was like different ways to be popular. It's like you either network and know a lot of people and people really like you or you can be cool, which means being rebellious or into, you know, sex and drugs and rock and roll, or you can have status symbols in clothes or wealth...
ELISE: or be mean. Yeah.
KATE: Yeah. Or be mean. Yes, exactly. And, me kind of pathologizing, where I could hedge my bets to give you the best chance at like social acceptance, which you don't realize you're doing at the time. But in hindsight, I was like, it was all a lot of arithmetic of like, okay, if I can get a Lacoste polo and be, you know, friends with this person. And I don't know.
ELISE: I desperately wanted a Lacoste polo. And I grew up in a small town where we didn't have, I mean, we eventually had catalogs, we had a Le Bon Marche, two story department store, but by two story, I mean, it was very small but it had stairs, which was a revelation in my town, which was primarily like a single story town and we had a Benetton for some reason, but then we would drive to Spokane, Washington. This is my like, I walk to school in 10 miles story...
Once a year we would drive to Spokane, Washington, where there was a Nordstrom and the Gap and a limited too, which I know is a big theme in your book, to get back to school clothing. Cause there was just nothing, which also is probably its own relief in a way.
KATE: I don't even know what that looks like now, but back to school shopping in person was, yeah, it was the event. It's kind of like I didn't appreciate while I was literally growing that I had a reason to turn over my wardrobe year after year, but now it's just like bloggers convincing me I needed a new capsule wardrobe every six months, but yeah, that was such a big deal and going in all those experiences in dressing rooms or going with friends, like the mall, yeah, was just such a third place for me. And even if it wasn't in your town, it was probably an event you looked forward to. And it is kind of interesting to think about retail experiences being so different now. And that is largely why many outlets hypothesize so many kids are hanging out in Sephora.
ELISE: Yeah. Well, that makes a ton of sense. I mean, I guess the mall was a third place for me too. You know, as you age and then you have sort of these ongoing backdrops for novels where that's the place that you imagine...
KATE: mm hmm.
ELISE: the Missoula mall is one of those places where I like think about those stores as the backdrop for so many books that I read, like when I am imagining. God, it's formative. And I have little boys, they're acquisitive, but in completely different ways. All they want is Robux. Ugh, God.
KATE: I don't even understand that world yet. My kid's five months old, but that's all I hear about from parents of like elementary middle schoolers.
ELISE: the Robux shakedown is so intense and so real. And So annoying and then I am like well at least it's digital at least they're not interested in sort of plastic crap and our house isn't full of that stuff anymore, but it will be interesting like the way that Minecraft and Roblox all of these games shape a generation, like when I was growing up I guess we had Gameboys. So much of the stuff wasn't that accessible.
KATE: It wasn't accessible. It wasn't handheld. I mean, I think that's a big part of it too, is like hooking up the giant like Nintendo or Sega or N64 or whatever to the TV with the controllers on a tether when you shared a TV and, you know, like there were just so many reasons to limit the time or access in addition to price point of the console itself that, yeah, I didn't really provide as much Ability to like get addicted to it I feel like, cause I couldn't have spent all my time doing it if I wanted to, like, I played Mario cart and stuff like that. And my brother played a lot of video games, but I felt a little sad wondering if I had had a phone, would I've missed out on all this mental real estate to like process my observation, to process the longing to explore so much about the anticipation of growing up, like you said, like, I don't know, because the second I got a computer, the second that cowl box of a Gateway 2000 showed up in my driveway. I was on aim and so it's like then at that point, that's what I wrote about. Cause when I think about a certain period of my life, all I did was try to like passive aggressively talk to boys in my class via way messages. And like, unfortunately that's a huge part of millennial lore is our early like addiction to that type of technology. And we couldn't even text or anything. So yeah, I guess that's kind of my, you know, walk miles in the woods to school is a well dial up or like texting and T9 word.
ELISE: Yeah. I mean, I loved that part. And this idea of, like, what are you telegraphing about your availability to other people as you sit there and, like, let the keyboard go idle with the hopes that their curiosity is sparked about where Kate Kennedy is, right? And what is she doing right now? But it is true like that the crushes the longing like that stuff is so essential, informative and is that still present and must still be present for younger generations. But there's so much more accessibility and in a way that's also crushing because to like have the fantasy of What is my crush doing and is my crush thinking about me without being able to sort of track them on Tik Tok or Snapchat or whatever. I don't know. It's wild.
KATE: I think there's something really funny about like we did all that stuff and there were no stakes in terms of like being famous or getting a lot of validation elsewhere. Like it's one thing for kids to, you know, do stuff online now because they want like recognition or to become an influencer. It's extra funny to me that all of that horsepower was just simply to get attention, it was just simply for people to think like, I'm doing great. I'm super busy. He'll curse the day he left me. Like the amount of brainpower devoted to just like making people jealous, making someone pass for Chris. We know I was mad at them. Or just like trying to find a boyfriend, be an electronic means is like really funny to me. And it was just like, it was an early course in online branding that I think I carried with me weirdly to my career. Like it's a skill in and of itself to figure out how to adequately convey yourself online.
ELISE: Create scarcity...
KATE: and create scarcity. Yes.
ELISE: And like a lack of availability. I mean it is early online branding and in a way that's so insistent now and you have to wonder like what generation is going to break that or is it so coded in us that it'll only become sort of more monstrous but yeah, now I mean, my youngest wants to be a YouTube star, a la Mr. Beast, but, and I'm just like, okay, I'm just gonna watch you hopefully grow out of this while at the same time trying not to disparage his interest or shame or mock him for doing something that I think is insane or wanting something that I think is like, obviously beneath him. But who am I to say? I don't know.
KATE: I know. Well, I think the problem with influencer careers is we just don't have the data yet for the longevity. So you don't want people to set up their entire lives around a business model that may cease to exist. And like tomorrow.
ELISE: Well, yeah, and it gets back to that sort of me, we, thee, like the cosmic egg, where, and I, I have this conversation with friends, too, who are writers or podcasters, and you see that you can easily trace this throughout culture, but where their story, they are the thing, in part because of maybe trauma, or an exceptional childhood, or a lot of interest in their particular story, and that's very dangerous, because when you are the thing and you have to manufacture relevance, newness, and you become sort of addicted to this idea of staying resonant with people in that way, not through connecting to the we or commenting on culture or bigger, bigger stories. I think it's very, very dangerous when your identity is sort of the core commodity in a way, and like the deep objectification of yourself where you're like, how am I going to blow up my life again to have more content?
KATE: Oh, for sure. And I think that that's a lot of the tougher stories. We see the tougher arcs in the influencer world. I think have have a lot to do. With, you know, at a point you're just mining your life for copy, for content and like, it's good to get inspiration from your life, but I'm very conscious of not overly tapping into that in a way where my relationships would implode. I always kind of marvel that even comedians can, you know, joke about their parents or siblings or friends as much as they can because to me, the telling of a story or the piece of copy at somebody else's expense in my real life in favor of my digital one just never feels worth it.
Like, even in my book, I talk about myself a lot, but very rarely, actually, hardly at all, will I talk about anybody that I know in real life doing certain things because I don't know, it's just like a line. I don't really feel comfortable crossing and I just even feel like with these family vloggers, that's like so many awful things have happened, you know, the family YouTubers like eight passengers and stuff. It's just, it's so sad to think of these people's childhoods being mined for content in a way that they didn't consent to. And yeah, I have no clue where it's going to go, but I feel like we're at least more conscious of it now.
ELISE: Yeah, I think so. And I tried to do this in my book as well, but the way that you use your own life, sort of centering it as, like, a typical suburban teen existence of, like, a blonde Bible Belt or Jesus loving, you know, all the different sort of factors, but it's in service to something that's, I think, collective, at least for a pretty wide amount of people. And I think when people use their own Story again as sort of the scaffolding to make larger cultural points, that has a lot of legs and you're hitting a drumbeat for people where they're like, Oh, this is my story too, in a way that I doesn't feel like you're sort of like, well, what shenanigans do I need to spark in order to be interesting?
KATE: Yeah. This book is like, kind of shenanigan free, because probably why I loved your book so much, like I'm just a cooperative gal, through and through. I don't have a lot of stories of rebellion or crazy things, stories of me trying on different versions of myself and dabbling in different things that would feel at odds with my gut and then I would be like, well, I certainly I'm wrong. Everyone else is right until you kind of find your own like inner voice and identity. I guess what I'm ultimately trying to argue for is that just because something isn't like necessarily objectively unique or exceptional doesn't mean that it's not distinct and doesn't mean that it's not a story worth telling and, I think that that even was kind of my own mental gymnastics I had to go through to even feel like worthy of writing the book was, that was a process I went through like creatively just being like, just because it's common, just because it's basic or average or this or that does not mean that it doesn't, you know, deserve to be on paper. And I think in what I tried to do is speak to general themes. A lot of people could relate to, but with references, get specific enough that for every 50, you miss the one you catch excites you or spark something that it makes the specificity worth it. So yeah, it was kind of a balance of like, how can I relate to a lot of people through my stories? While I'm not throwing anyone specific under the bus. Um, While also being so niche to my experience, you're kind of tapping into that psychology of meme culture, where the whole thing is like, Oh my god, this is so me, I thought nobody else did this, but the reason it's popular is because a lot of people do.
ELISE: Yeah, because you're hitting these huge cultural tropes and themes. You and, I don't remember, Janessica...
KATE: Vanessica. my fake friend. I know. Like, honestly, when I tell you I lie in bed, and I'm like, Vanessica's gonna know who she is, and I feel bad about including our aim wars , It's just not in my nature to like, say anything inflammatory, that that's like the craziest thing I say. But yeah, like I've had some readers say like, Oh my God, the first two chapters, I was texting all my friends saying this is so me. But then I got to the church chapter. And I was like, Oh, no, it's not. And I'm like, That was a risk to include that because it is specific, but I don't think it's irrelevant to, the broader situation we have with, Christian nationalism. I think it's good for people to understand the nuts and bolts of evangelical culture. And beyond that, what is distinct about Millennials is How it seeped into our sex ed and abstinence only sex education was how these parent interest groups that were conservative informed things like dress codes even, like there were so many ways purity culture, permeated into secular spaces. I thought it was worth calling out as something people might not even realize is kind of millennialists that wwjd era.
ELISE: No, totally WWJD. And it's so interesting as someone who, you know, had a secular childhood, culturally Jewish, but I wrote a book about the seven deadly sins being, initially being like, these have absolutely nothing to do with me. And then, but I think religion is culture, it's so primary to culture and it programs all of us. And of course we're influenced directly and indirectly, consciously and unconsciously by so much of this. So I'm glad you included that and it's funny because you were talking about how like the draw for you was music, dance parties, and I had an evangelical Christian neighbor who brought me to Sunday school once or twice, which my mom was just inflamed about but knew better than to sort of shut it down. But I loved it because we crafted. We made like Snowball Styrofoam Angels and stuff.
KATE: Yeah.
ELISE: The best time! I mean, don't they say that about the megachurches? It's like a party with all the services that you need.
KATE: That's like kind of the joke. I guess that's the dichotomy I'm expressing in all the chapters is like, it was problematic, but I had a great time.
ELISE: Yeah.
KATE: You know, getting somebody to a weekend co ed lock in at a laser tag place with extra cheese pizza, it's not very hard to do when you're in middle school and you can't drive yet. And in hindsight, I'm like, what a sneaky form of evangelizing. It looks like good old fashioned fun. Most parents, regardless of denomination, aren't really going to contest a supervised fun at a church. Like how out of hand can it get? So a lot of kids would go to these things that had absolutely no religious affiliation and like leave with their soul saved. And it's kind of like wow, that is crazy that you can speak to kids about their souls being damned and their purity and virginity and sexual immorality, like without consent of the parents, them just thinking you're going to water ski. I mean, they're pretty intense things to tell a minor who's just learning about their own body, to shame them for the things that make them human before they even have a chance to engage with those parts of themselves and I have friends in therapy to this day from those times and I have friends who were like, Oh, I didn't take it that seriously and we all internalize things differently. So I wanted to be good. I wanted to be cooperative. So if somebody is telling me do X, Y, Z, or else you'll go to the devil's air fryer like I'm going to be pretty scared of that. And it's going to be something I think about constantly.
ELISE: Well, and I think that you just said it, Afraid, so much of our wiring as mammals is around fear and fear of loss of approval, fear of loss of safety and security, fear of loss of control. And so much of one in a millennial is about that, like that fear of loss of approval, that intense human desire to belong and within our belonging to find safety, security, approval and control, right? To be sort of certain about your place in the world. It's so natural. And, yet for some reason, I think because in that quest for individuality, we all just don't want to accept how programmed we are by culture.
KATE: Mm hmm.
ELISE: It's intense.
KATE: Well, in writing, I turned the book in right when I found out I was pregnant and you know, was editing and doing the audio book while pregnant. And it was also kind of a reflection to me in terms of like going forward, thinking about that with my kid or kids, like I think we all grow up having a version of us, we present to our parents. And then feeling like we have this complex inner world that they'll never understand. And I think my mom reading this was like, Oh my God, we were always close. We always had a good-- she had no idea any of this was going on. And for me, it was kind of like an example of there is a point where you can nurture to your liking, but kids are going to be very affected by the several other environments they find themselves in and I think it was just a good exercise for me going into becoming a parent to revisit what ended up mattering because I think my mom was surprised to hear that like in the least likely of places like a church camp that was like so formative for me when to her, I just wanted to water ski, you know? So we got to be careful about what figures of authority people are around when they're young.
ELISE: yeah. And I think to that point it's always also surprising as you age and you go back and inventory your life to see what memories stick.
KATE: Oh, yeah.
ELISE: I don't know how predictable it is. And what proves to be formative.
KATE: And I always want to tell people too, because I think sometimes the questions I'll get are like, God, you have a good memory. I don't remember stuff like this, almost as if there's something wrong with them, but like I journaled a lot, my mom saved everything I ever made. I have like an archive and I also podcast for a living. And so if I'm, you know, reeling off a plot of a Disney Channel original movie from memory. It's because I looked it up six months ago. It's not because I just remember everything I ever did. So I always want to caveat that, it's not that I have a better memory than anybody else. I think that I just like, I don't know, I think some people are more prone to like journal and write and log stuff. And I felt very determined to log a lot of the mundane aspects of my life in ways I'm grateful for now, but I'm not sure it was normal.
ELISE: It's a public service because as you recounted so many of those cultural moments, I was like, Oh, I had not, I hadn't thought about, well, I had been thinking about the Spice Girls because of the Beckham documentary, but like, I hadn't thought of the Spice Girls and I forgot about their choopa choops, but thank you for the reminder.
KATE: People really remember those lollipops, I find, even if nothing else.
ELISE: God, it's so good. Well, thanks for staying on late with me and congrats on everything.
I know this conversation was a little different than what you might expect on Pulling The Thread, but I love Kate. And I loved One in a Millenial. It’s so smart and funny and fun and wise—it’s just a nostalgia romp that then she lands with these moments of cultural analysis, specifically about what it is to be a girl and the way that our culture socializes us to think that our interests are so lame, silly, dumb, trite, embarrassing. She writes, “A younger version of me (to use her words) would be SO pissed if I grew up to be an adult who parroted the thing other adults always said to her: that none of this matters. My life experiences mattered to me then, even when I was told they'd turn out to be insignificant, or that I was being too dramatic or emotional. And they matter to me now, because regardless of something's objective importance, it was important to me and shaped me into the person I became. Many of us spent our existence to make other people comfortable, feeling like our job was to make space for others, and not take up space ourselves. And turns out, as I've been writing to you, I'm also writing to a future version of me, too, saying, ‘Don't you dare forget who you were and tell me to shrink when it's taken me all these years to stand proudly plain and tall.’” That last thing is a reference to Sarah, Plain and Tall, which she also writes about which I’m sure many of you have read. Thank you for listening, I’ll see you next week.
