Life’s complicated. Many of us first realise this when puberty hits, and unfortunately this feeling never truly leaves us. All we needed when we were teenagers was a hug, or tips to help us brave the world. When I was younger, I devoured Francine Oomen’s How to survive…?-novels, which were full of survival tips. Now, years later, Oomen wrote a sequel to these novels, How to survive everything I don’t tell anyone?, written especially for the grown-up fans of the series. Want to know if it helped me deal with my problems? Read on!
How to survive everything I don’t tell anyone? is about twenty-five-year-old Rosa, who doesn’t know what to do with her life. She quit studying, her mother passed away, and her Italian stepdad decides to go back to his native country. Rosa feels lonely and tries to reconnect with friends she hasn’t seen in years. Together, they travel to Portugal to find themselves.
Being stuck, finding yourself, loneliness: How to survive everything I don’t tell anyone? deals with all the things young people struggle with. Add to that depression, anorexia, panic attacks, Covid, climate change and trust issues, and you have the perfect summary of Millennial angst. This is Generation Y, which I belong to, and many of these problems sound very familiar. That’s why the sequel to Oomen’s novels features many survival tips.
I used to love these survival tips. They told me what to whenever I felt sad, misunderstood, or lonely. Now, almost twenty years later, I failed to enjoy them; quite the contrary. They frustrated me. Rosa and her friends are in their mid-twenties, they’re grown-ups, have studied (or tried to), and they live on their own (or tried to). However, it feels as though they have not matured in any way, for the tips they share with each other are the same as they were all those years ago.
While this book should make me think about the characters and their (admittedly far-fetched) adventures, it instead made me think about myself and my generation. What’s wrong with us? Have we Millennials never truly grown up? Do we still think we can learn alla bout life from a novel? Are we incapable of solving our problems ourselves? Are we so afraid to fail that we prefer watching others doing so before we attempt anything? Did we never learn to deal with our problems, making us so fragile we become afraid of everything? And does that make Francine Oomen the parent we all wished we had?
When I was younger, I thought the author of the How to survive…? novels understood me better than my own parents. Now, having read this latest instalment, I think she is absolutely clueless. I feel like she has no idea that personal issues aren’t as easily dealt with as when we were sixteen. Here are some examples that illustrate this notion: one should simply leave the environment that makes one sad. Rosa should simply talk about her problems, Jonas should simply fall in love, and Esther should simply have a baby. Mind the word ‘simply’ here. There is nothing simple about any of those solutions, and it gives a wrong impression of how we should solve our problems. Apparently, we should fix the outside world, and then our inner world will follow. Would that it were so simple – especially since it would mean we would not have to put any effort into fixing ourselves.
Despite its simplicity, How to survive everything I don’t tell anyone? was a huge hit – or maybe because of it. Maybe Generation Y doesn’t want to think too much about all those things that make life so unbearable at times. Maybe this novel is the shining beacon of hope we all turn our faces to, because it shows us our problems solve themselves. I think we Millennials are the easy generation, the generation that thinks life should not be painful.
I don’t really feel connected to my generation. I don’t believe in things solving themselves. I don’t believe in short-term solutions, and I don’t believe in running away from my problems. I think we should all work hard to keep our lives on track. But that life lesson, or, as Oomen would put it, that survival tip, is glaringly absent in How to survive everything I don’t tell anyone?.
Life’s complicated. Many of us first realise this when puberty hits, and unfortunately this feeling never truly leaves us. We can learn how to deal with it, and we can learn how to solve our problems. But please let’s not pretend it’s easy.
What did you think of How to survive everything I don’t tell anyone?? Did you read any of these books when you were younger? What is the English equivalent to these books? What are your survival tips? Please let me know in the comments! Also, don’t forget to follow me for more bookish posts!
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