Your Turn: How to Be an Adult [Paperback]

New York Timesbestselling author Julie Lythcott-Haims is back with a groundbreakingly frank guide to being a grown-up,Your Turn.

What does it mean to be an adult? In the twentieth century, psychologists came up with five markers of adulthood: finish your education, get a job, leave home, marry, and have children. Since then, every generation has been held to those same markers. Yet so much has changed about the world and living in it since that sequence was formulated. All of those markers are choices, and theyre all valid, but any one persons choices along those lines do not make them more or less an adult.

A former Stanford dean of freshman and undergraduate advising and author of the perennial bestsellerHow to Raise an Adultand the lauded memoirReal American, Julie Lythcott-Haims has encountered hundreds of twentysomethings (and thirtysomethings, too), who, faced with those markers, feel theyre just playing the part of adult, while struggling with anxiety, stress, and general unease. InYour Turn, Julie offers compassion, personal experience, and practical strategies for living a more authentic adulthood, as well as inspiration through interviews with dozens of voices from the rich diversity of the human population who have successfully launched their adult lives.

Being an adult, it turns out, is not about any particular checklist; it is instead a process, one you can get progressively better at over time, becoming more comfortable with uncertainty and gaining the knowhow to keep going. Once you begin to practice it, being an adult becomes the most complicated yet also the most abundantly rewarding and natural thing. And Julie Lythcott-Haims is here to help readers take their turn.