When I Grow Up by Moya Sarner review

A journalist and psychotherapist explores what it means to be an adult in a world that often infantilises

What's going to happen to the children, when there aren't any more grownups?" sang Noel Coward, satirising the self-indulgent hedonism of the 1920s. But Coward's ironic lyrics seem even more relevant today when the traditional values of adulthood, self-control, self-sufficiency and the willingness to take responsibility have become sources of angst rather than a desirable, if difficult, end. So what then, if anything, has been lost? In her book, journalist and analyst Moya Sarner attempts to find answers to this question.

The project arose out of her own experience of psychoanalysis, where four times a week, for a number of years, she discovered the remedial effects of being properly listened to. This, in turn, led her to train as a psychotherapist. She takes her skills as a journalist and what she has learned about listening to explore the vexed question of what becoming a mature adult personality might entail, and why achieving it has become such a trial and a puzzlement for so many today, herself included. The answer, inevitably, is many-faceted, as emerges from her accounts of the interviews she holds with a wide variety of people, which she intersperses with psychological commentary drawn from eclectic sources, alongside meditations on her own attitudes to adulthood that have been prompted and enlarged by these conversations.