The demise of adults and contemporary follies in an irreverent personal, generational, and political memoir, an inquiry into the many "ages of reason," the present we deserve, and nostalgia for a past we (perhaps) invented.

"By the age of fifty I have read at least fifty million articles that swear to me that life begins at fifty, and now I just have to decide whether it is true or not."

Having crossed the unmentionable threshold, Guia Soncini measures herself against the toughest challenge: to show what happens when the transformation is accomplished and from being an extraordinary creature of childhood, convinced that adults are always the others, you find yourself the oldest. In this tight, sweeping review, reassuring-"the embarrassments you're ashamed of for life are almost always stuff the rest of the world didn't even notice"-and terrifying-"you'll never sleep again, you'll never digest fried food again"-totems and taboos are questioned: "If we remembered what a nightmare youth was, we wouldn't be chasing it." The goal is to understand not only "who convinced us that the end of desire is a condemnation and not a liberation," but also: how come we stopped noticing that we were wrong about everything when we were young? The generation that can boast of having invented nostalgia - even as a profession, "the only legacy we will leave to our grandchildren (along with the collapse of the pension system)" - is the same one determined not to stop dressing as a high schooler, to pretend not to know even at fifty what they ignored at fifteen, twenty, thirty, to live forever as if they were of childbearing age, to consider "you're always the same" the ultimate compliment. In the background is a single, inescapable question: now that no one is willing to grow up, when does one start to grow old?