Squashed: Messy Millennial Fiction

Nearly twenty-three and examining the (requisite) existential dread.

Hello, and welcome to the first *paid* content on the Squashed feed.

This month, I’m digesting the 2022 novel, All This Could Be Different, by Sarah Thankam Mathews. Vogue called it “one of the buzziest, most human novels of the year” this past August, though I didn’t hear of it until December, when Vulture (of New York Magazine) listed it as one of its top ten books of 2022 (Vulture editors generally chose buzzier books than their counterparts at the New York Times). Aside from a banger of a cover, the premise of the novel piqued my interest: a 22-year-old moves to the Midwest and tries to make it. Her life gets messy in the process.