Fiona Wright’s Kill Your Boomers is a novel about houses, and because its set in Sydney, Australia, it is about the severe housing crisis. More deeply, it is a book about home and what makes a home. Therefore fittingly, Kill Your Boomers is full of materiality, abound with descriptions of the everyday objects and built environment that furnish a world, but also with the routines and ways of living that make a “home”.

Keira is a thirty-something year old living in a share house in Inner-West Sydney. Despite holding a journalism degree, she is left side-hustling content for sales on top of her day job being a nanny to twins in the affluent Eastern suburbs. Her two contrasting worlds are described in detail: the world of her nanny job includes macadamia milk in the household’s coffee, a Prius car to drive the twins around and a shopping list for “Naked Foods” that includes activated almonds, beluga lentils and walnut oil. In Kiera’s words:

Everything within the Brierleys’ house, from its benchtops and doorhandles to its furniture and cookware and appliances, from the children’s toys to the fucking bathroom soap dish, is beautiful and gleaming, unsullied.

In contrast, her share home in the Inner West is old, mouldy and practically falling apart — including a hole in the kitchen floor that will pay a pivotal role later on in the novel. Incidentally, there are many descriptions of an important aspect of Sydney life, as anyone who lives here knows — yes, I’m talking about parking. Finding it, doing it, figuring out where it might be free. The book contains many instances of Kiera doing just that. Through descriptions of the built environment — of the buildings, objects and roads of Keira’s world — the novel seems to be saying: pay attention. This is what forms us, shapes our daily routines and habits, and therefore creates our reality

We also get detailed descriptions of Keira’s labour as a nanny looking after the twins. They do not even seem that badly behaved for the most part, and yet, as every parent knows, even on the best days the exhaustion is real: “A good day, all in all, but by the time I leave I am so tired I can barely stand”. The novel does well in depicting the tiring and sometimes mindless boredom of childcare, which is often a succession of endless menial tasks that nonetheless take up all your time, energy and attention. Just moving the twins in and out of the car is work. Looking after children is not what Keira had assumed:

I thought I’d have time to write in the late afternoons, maybe even when the twins were sleeping. I thought that babies couldn’t be much different from hairless puppies: let them play for half an hour and they’ll sleep for half the day.

The wealthy can outsource childcare and the attendant emotional labour and physical drudgery, highlighting the kind of invisible work that gets done to maintain their world. This work is highly gendered. Despite the fact that the family has a nanny, it is only the mother, Johanna, who does the liaising with Kiera about the children. Not to mention the fact that nannies are often women, so it is the labour of other women that ”frees” wealthy women from this kind of work.

Keira herself is obsessed with visiting homes for sale, even while taking care of the twins. She sees many around her neighbourhood, and even though they are completely out of her reach financially, she admits, “There’s no point going, but I already know I will”. We are given elaborate descriptions of the apartments and houses she visits in these inspections — the homes are in various conditions, from all but dilapidated to newly renovated, but regardless, we know that they are mostly likely priced in the millions. (Last year, the average house price in Sydney shot up to $1.75 million.)

Yet the fantasy is strong in Keira, for whom home ownership would mean stability and security, an existential anchor in the world. Owning a home would be “concrete evidence that I do, in fact, have a place in the world, and one that isn’t temporary, tenuous, and ultimately granted to me, on loan, from someone else”.

Keira complains about what she sees as her generation’s woes — that of being shafted by the Boomers who have benefited from the system but are now dismantling it for the current generation: “It’s going to be toast, and the very people who toasted it are sitting pretty in the houses they bought cheaply…” Keira and her housemates even joke about killing their Boomer parents off because they won’t let go of what they have willingly.

For Keira and her peers, it is the Boomer generation that have deprived them of not just owning a home, but of existentially making a place for themselves in the world. She notes for example how her parents have the privilege of owning not merely a building, but home, her childhood home, and how over time it has traces of them all over it. Like the grooves in a tree, familiar lines have deepened over time in the home through daily routines, objects and furnishings:

Here, too, so much is marked by my parents’ long inhabitation: the dents in the carpet under the legs of Dad’s favourite chair, the scuff marks on the staircase from his clunky shoes, the stain on the timber doorframe where Mum has always hung her gardening gloves …

Wright has previously explored the meaning of home in her collection of essays The World Was Whole, including essays that pondered the ways in which the homes we inhabit become inscribed upon our bodies, how built environments shape our habits of movement, and in turn how our bodies leave traces in our homes through routines and everyday rituals. The link between the body and the home is key, in fact the body is home — she notes how when you don’t have a permanent home, the body cannot shape it in a permanent way, and therefore the body itself cannot become a “home” in that sense.

Keira’s envy for property-owning Boomers is expressed in statements such as “I want to live in a house long enough that a sapling I plant can grow into something beautiful and blossoming and shady”. However, there is a big assumption in Keira’s thinking: that all Boomers owned homes and therefore that everyone has generational wealth to benefit from.

Keira does get a small reminder that this is not a privilege everyone has when one of her housemates tells her that even parenticide wouldn’t work for her: “my parents sent half their pay back to their families every week for their entire working lives…” But this revelation barely makes an indent in Keira’s thinking, probably because it has no consequences for her.

It’s incorrect to only distinguish by generation — as Keira does, and as we often do when we talk about Boomers versus Millennials and Gen X/Z  — instead, what might be the actual difference is that the middle-class dream of home ownership is something the middle-class children of the Boomer generation — that is, middle-class Millenials and Gen X/Z — no longer have access to. Hence Keira and her peers’ resentment towards the Boomers as well as their hurt sense of entitlement: they’re no longer getting what was implicitly promised to them, what they’ve seen their parents have.

For everyone below that class, perhaps not much has changed. Because what Keira doesn’t acknowledge is the fact that having a childhood home which her parents own and which she could conceivably inherit in the future is already a step on the real estate ladder.

The issue explored in the book, then, is really about the loss of a particular privileged middle-class coming-of-age ritual — acquiring a home in your twenties or thirties, the great Australian dream. And along with that, the loss of another middle-class expectation: a stable, well-paid job that can afford that home. It is a wider disillusionment of Keira’s specific class and generation: despite Keira’s degree in journalism, she struggles to find a job in the industry and tops up her day-time nannying job with writing content that are thinly-disguised advertisements. This is the shattered dreams of a certain kind of middle-class arts person: “This isn’t how I imagined my adult life”, she laments.

Keira also feels envy towards others whom she perceives as having “…busy gainful, public lives”, whereas she feels that she has “been left behind”. But she never acknowledges that she has the safety net of her parents and the ability to ask them for money (which she does once to help her pay the rent, and which they grant begrudgingly). In fact, her envy turns into outright bitterness towards her family whenever they spend any money on themselves. When her retired parents talk about going on a trip to Italy, she almost bursts with resentment that they should even consider it while she is struggling. She is even more enraged when she finds out that her parents are planning to help her brother Josh pay for his daughter’s private school.

Keira believes her life is hard, and that others have it much easier. “…I start thinking about Josh, about his job and his promotion, his beautiful, successful wife, his apple-cheeked baby girl”. She makes sweeping, unwarranted assumptions about how much easier people’s lives are compared to hers, instead of seeing how perhaps her brother has responsibilities that she can’t even imagine, of supporting a family, of looking after children. In comparison she only has a responsibility to herself, and even then she blames it on others:

I’m smarter than he is, and I work just as hard. This should not be happening. This isn’t fair. I don’t want to cry.

Even when her parents do spend money on Keira, she comes off as a spoiled and ungrateful. For her brother’s destination wedding, her parents pay for her flights “and god knows what else besides” but she “had very little to do with all the fussing and planning around the wedding…I’d figure it was better to stay a bit distant”. Keira does very little to help the people she supposedly loves, but takes for granted that they will help her and is resentful if they don’t. There is a sense of entitlement there that she should be helped by her family, without even thinking that the onus is on her to support her family too — for example, her sister-in-law has just had a baby, and Keira knows that “…it’s hard for her, at home with the baby. She misses adult company” and briefly has the thought “I feel guilty momentarily, even though this is absolutely not my fault” before moving on. It’s not that Keira should feel guilty necessarily, but as the aunt and as a sister, she does not feel any impetus to provide actual support to her own niece or her brother’s family even when she sees them struggle.

The idea of “home” that Keira envisions is a self-enclosed space. For all of her longing to have a home, to have that anchor in the world, her idea of home seems to be limited to her needs only.

*

What is a home without a village? If it doesn’t open up and extend to our loved ones; if there isn’t a mutual exchange of giving and receiving. The concept of home articulated in the novel through the character of Keira is individualistic and self-focused. Yes, Keira does have a sense of camaraderie with her housemates, and she helps her best friend move when he buys a house with his partner. But these feelings and actions seem convenient and easy, because they are directed toward people like herself, whom she enjoys spending time with, and don’t require any real sacrifice.

For all of Keira’s rallying against the system, for all her protestations against the rort that is the housing market and the private school system and her parents buying a Tesla, it all feels just a little bit performative and part of her inner west-leftie identity. Because in the end, she only really expresses care and concern about herself. Her anger also feels misplaced — at her parents and her brother, and at the Boomer generation overall, rather than at the government and those in power who have allowed this to happen. Keira is not interested in changing the system or the way things are. She just wants to get her own.

Hence, the plan to kill her parents.

It begins benignly enough: the hole in the kitchen floor in her share house begins to talk to her. Slowly, it starts to plant the idea of parenticide: “When the older generation clings to power, when they will not step aside — sometimes there is no other way”.

What is that hole in the kitchen? Is it really talking to her? Are there really googly eyes on it?
We get clues later on, but in the first instance Keira ignores it. It’s only after her parents do something significant enough to outrage her political sensibilities that, in a neat narrative plot turn, she decides to go ahead and plan their murder with the aid of her former employer’s company.

There is a lack of narrative tension in the novel. Although a lot of things pile up on Keira, her shitty side hustle, losing her nanny job, tenuous rental situation, as well as of course the anger at her parents spending their money, it doesn’t feel like all these things add up to really warrant her going to such extreme lengths — especially for someone who is by her own admission a bit of a slacker. The talking hole acts as a device for instigating the double murder, but then, it also lets her off the hook, since these aren’t thoughts that came from her.

Also, not to go into the whole “hierarchy of struggle” thing, but Keira’s situation is not as bad as she makes it out to be. Would she be deemed a loser if she had to return to her parent’s home in her thirties without a stable job? Perhaps. But having a childhood home to return to, having any kind of safety net at all, is a luxury. And in Australian history, this particular kind of safety net is the product of generations of land theft.  

Inner-West Sydney is described with careful attention. We get to know the material world and built environment that Keira moves through — her share house, her employer’s house, houses she goes to inspect, streets, parks and cafes. But for all the lamentations and melancholy she inscribes on them because of her situation, it is, again, an incredibly privileged landscape. Housing in the Inner West, once the home for the working class and migrants, has been gentrified for people like Keira. Now it’s people like Keira’s turn to be pushed out.

What the novel describes is a privileged part of Sydney — it just doesn’t sound like it when Keira compares herself to her employer in the eastern suburbs. But it is, more than ever, with the housing market in the city being the second most unaffordable in the world, behind Hong Kong. So when the hole in Keira’s kitchen floor proclaims that “…the older generation, usually willingly and always according to a social contract, are killed in order to make space and save resources for their younger kin”, the anger feels misdirected. Wright makes it seem like it’s a generational issue, when really, it is and always has been about class, and about the shrinking of the middle class.

The precarity described in the novel feels mitigated — more existential than material. It’s the precarity of being lost in your life, rather than the threat of having to sleep out on the streets. For people like Keira, the opposite of not having a home is not being homeless. There is never the risk of that. And not to construct a hierarchy of precariousness, but the stakes of the novel don’t feel that high in Keira’s situation: not when we’re talking about the severe housing affordability crisis people are living through in Australia, especially in Sydney which is considered the “ground zero” of this crisis.

Despite its pervasiveness, the housing crisis is not often explored in literature, and Kill Your Boomers is an interesting exploration of a particular experience. In The World Was Whole, Wright documents her own precarious life of tenuous housing and temporary freelance work. She states that for her and her peers “our new normal is a less settled one, less homed, but I don’t think we have yet, the new narratives and metaphors we need to understand this”. The novel can be seen as an attempt to provide this narrative. But because the scope of the attention is limited to Keira and a particular category of persons, it will necessarily be a limited one: limited in how it can give us a way of talking about this all-pervasive and ever-growing phenomenon.

Because there’s no doubt that more people are being screwed than ever in the housing market, including the middle-class Boomers’ kids. But some people have always been screwed. The malaise of the Australian Dream has always been here.

This review is part of a series of critical essays supported by the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund.