Twentysomething Essays by Twentysomething Writers

A NOTE FROM THE EDITORS Between the hours of 10:00 A.M. and 11:59 P.M. on November 24, 2005, the inbox of 20by20essays@randomhouse.com was inundated with more than one thousand e-mails. Was it spam? A virus? Were people finally responding to our Match.com profile? No, we still couldn't find a date or a good deal on Viagra. It was simply the deadline for theTwentysomething Essays by Twentysomething Writerscontest, and as it turned out, nearly everyonetwo-thirds of the total contestantshad waited until literally the last minute to submit. According to our colleagues, this meant we were a generation of procrastinators, too busy blogging about our recently diagnosed ADHD or watching the first season ofThe OCto get our act together and turn something in ahead of time; the contest had run for a full six months, after all. And they had a point. But the more we thought about it, the more we realized that this procrastination wasn't necessarily a generational fault but rather an indication of how today's world works. In an era of text messaging, online shopping, and movies on demand, why would anyone do anything more than a day or two in advance? It's not that we're lazy or bratty or glib; it's just that we're fast. We know how to access all kinds of information, and we have absolute confidence in the tools at our disposal. In fact, it was precisely because of this technological immediacy that the contest attracted such a large, wide-ranging pool of writers. When we first launched our website, we had two listings on Google; the next week, fifty; as of this writing, we're at 1,130. Though at first we were concerned that certain groups or types of twentysomethings might dominate the collectionit would be a problem if everyone was from Albuquerque or played the lute or worked at Petcowe were bowled over by the breadth and depth of the submissions we received. We heard from prison inmates, soldiers, production assistants, corporate-ladder climbers, pastry chefs. And not only were the writers themselves diverse, but each offered a new way of thinking about a given subject. Is ethnicity tantamount to identity or is it a barrier to overcome? Should we be planning careers and families or living moment to moment? How do we negotiate our roles as both someone's child and someone's parent? Do we approach God with skepticism or trust? To what extent can we effect political change? What's funny? What's not? How can we make art that's new, and do we even want to? Because of this diversity, we had trouble discerning overarching themes in these essays. It seemed almost audacious to make any blanket statements about a generation that so consistently asserts its volatility, but we're nothing if not audacious, so we gave it a shot. We began by doing what any incredibly anal person confronted with an overwhelming amount of information would do: we pigeon-holed. Having narrowed the field down to one hundred essays, we subdivided the finalists and slapped on tidy little labelsEthnic Identity; Cubicle Culture; Born-Again Agnosticism; Indie/Underground/Post-Trip-Hop/Pre-Grunge-Revival; Deep, Philosophical, Possibly Drug-Enhanced Ruminations on Life; and, of course, Sex. Lots and lots of Sex. Some of the categories, like Gay Issues and Women's Studies, even started to sound like 200-level liberal arts courses. But ultimately our well-intentioned bigotry was for naught. For example, early on we relegated a piece about a Web-radio obsession to the Technology section. As we moved through the rest of the submissions, though, we saw that it could just as easily have worked under the heading Pop Culture or Career (the author listens to her favorite station to get her through the workday) or Family (she fondly remeKellogg, Matt is the author of 'Twentysomething Essays by Twentysomething Writers ', published 2006 under ISBN 9780812975666 and ISBN 0812975669.