Girlfriend in a Coma

Girlfriend in a Coma

This week I finished Douglas Coupland's novel Girlfriend in a Coma. I like Coupland's books because I relate to the characters. It's not so much what the characters do, but rather their perspective and some of the thoughts (maybe neurosis) that motivate them. His characters are about my age, so I get the cultural references and I like the humor in his writing (a little warped).I am an X'er for better or worse.

A lot of negative things have been written about Generation X since Coupland made the term famous/infamous in his book by that name. For years it seemed like the media was labeling X'ers as complaining, underemployed, slackers. I took issue with that aspect of the label at the time the book came out, because I was a degreed and disillusioned waitress. I liked that we were thought to be rejecting Boomer values as they had evolved in the 80's, but I knew that we weren't the slothful ingrates portrayed in the media.

What many people misunderstood about X’ers was that underemployment was not our first choice for how to support ourselves. We were caught in the employment vacuum caused by the failing economy of the times and the huge number of Baby Boomers that preceded us. Disillusionment and mistrust of government came naturally to all of us whose childhood was colored by Watergate, the threat of nuclear annihilation, and spreading world terrorism. It's not that bad things didn't happen during the childhoods of previous generations; it's just that Gen X not only got the story, we got the accompanying visual aids via the nightly news. The Boomer's had the threat of nuclear war when they were kids, but they got the "duck and cover" version, in which they were given the hope (however misguided it was) that hiding under their desks in their classrooms would save them from the impending doom of the Russians' attack. X'ers didn't get the candy coated version of that scenario; ours was the scorched Earth/nuclear Winter adaptation. Some think us to be whiners, but I don't believe that to be the case. I believe it is just that our outlook was affected by having the world's ugliest truths paraded before our eyes night after night during our formative years. Continued exposure to the worst that mankind has to offer inevitably causes a change in how people view the world and themselves. This is something that previous generations experienced to a lesser degree than Gen X children, but children today experience far more than even we did. That said, I think that as a group we are somewhat cynical, but not completely without hope; and my hope for those who come after us is that they remain hopeful in spite of what they will bear witness to as children.

As for the book, I enjoyed it, as I do all of Coupland's books. His stories make me slow down and think about my world and my place in the world, which seems to be one of the themes running through Girlfriend in a Coma. The book leaves me feeling a tinge of nostalgia for the days that come back to me in memories like faded Kodak snapshots.