20-something bird returns to nest, but motivations unclear

Enlarge Image

One Bird's Choice

A Year in the Life of an Overeducated, Underemployed, Twenty-Something Who Moves Back Home

By Iain Reid

Anansi Press, 240 pages, $30

IN a time of uncertain economics and shaky job prospects, some 20-somethings may well have to ask themselves, "Can I go home again?"

In this occasionally amusing memoir, Iain Reid asks the question but doesn't always supply a satisfactory.

Reid is a temporarily employed CBC Ottawa journalist in his 20s when he returns to his parents' rural Ontario farm for a year.

Nearly broke, he spends his time at Lilac Hill writing, imagining conversations with a rag-tag bunch of farm animals, and hanging out with his eccentric but adoring parents. He divides his experiences into the four seasons, the rhythm of the farm and the passing of time marked by chores and his growing frustration with what appears to be his jobless and directionless tailspin.

Reid's writing is at times engaging and humorous, particularly in his well-drawn portraits of his parents and a hideous and possessive guinea fowl named Lucius.

"I bet most are unfamiliar with the average guinea fowl's appearance," Reid writes, "how they resemble an unfortunate blend of frumpish partridge and diseased vulture, while their arched posture gives them an unflattering likeness to a stooped chicken."

Reid's jockeying with Lucius for the affections of his mother may pull on the heartstrings of any child whose favoured position has been usurped by a cockatoo or fur-balled cat.

Though some of us may assume (in our darkest of hearts) that parents exist solely for Sunday dinners, laundry runs and late-night collect emergency phone calls: their lives do go on after we've flown the coop.

Reid astutely observes this mind-boggling truth, and throughout the memoir he examines the ebb and flow of his parents' lives with the eye of a social psychologist.

His father is a pragmatic and practical professor, but his mother, the true comic star of the book, is more eccentric. She claims an allergy to cellphones and has a penchant for leaving Reid notes reminding him about well-endowed farm animals.

But while Reid succeeds at a lively depiction of his folks, not to mention the farm animals, he fails to provide an in-depth look at his own interior conflict and struggles.

At the beginning Reid writes, "Most of our parents left home before their 20s and never looked back. It's only my generation that has adopted a return to the nest as a precondition of adulthood."

There is a kernel of truth to Reid's observation. The shifting economics and principles of the "millennium" generation have some of the offspring of baby boomers clinging to their parents' purse strings in what only can be described as a death grip.

But Reid never attempts to explain why the 20-something masses cannot yet make a definitive step into adulthood.

Though Reid eventually finds his way out in the form of a literary agent and his first apartment, it is his journey to get there that remains the most important, and underwritten, portion of this memoir.

Winnipegger Britt Harvey is a 20-something master of journalism student at Carleton University in Ottawa.

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition September 11, 2010 H8