Every generation tells its own version of The Big Chill, the 1983 cult film about what happens when youthful ideals meet adult reality. In So Old, So Young, Grant Ginder captures that moment of reckoning for millennials as they enter middle age and confront the ennui and disillusionment that come with reflection.
If The People We Hate at the Wedding (2017) was a riot, this one is bittersweet. It follows five college friends as they move through their 20s, 30s and 40s, taking stock of their lives and questioning how responsibility has dulled the parts of themselves they once valued most. Adulthood has also tested their relationships and, in some cases, torn them apart.
The novel opens in 2024. Mia is on a flight to attend a friend’s funeral, though we are not told who has died. When an intrusive stranger tries to cheer her up — “It’s not like someone’s died, now, is it?” — she replies, “Actually … they have.”
From there, the story moves back to 2007, to a New Year’s Eve party in a cramped Lower East Side apartment, with Flo Rida playing from an iPod jammed into a red plastic cup.
This is where we meet Mia, thoughtful and uncertain, Sasha, confident and performative, Adam, cautious and observant, Richie, magnetic but volatile, and the introverted Marco. It’s also where Mia and Marco first connect.
The novel is built around a series of gatherings across the years, including a lavish destination wedding in Cancun, a beach house birthday, a suburban Halloween party and, eventually, the funeral that frames the story. Each reunion captures them at a different stage, with old tensions resurfacing when they have to see each other again.
By the time we reach the 2014 wedding in Mexico, the energy of youth has curdled into something brittle. The wedding is over the top, but no one is really enjoying it. Mia and Marco have broken up, and he arrives with someone new. Adam and Richie are together, but Richie’s drinking is becoming intolerable. Sasha is married but caught between the life she has chosen and the one she imagined.
Ginder captures this jadedness with precision. As they accept that who they imagined themselves to be at 22 is off the table, it begins to feel like “another adolescence”, filled with uncertainty, regret and self-doubt.
Mia and Marco’s relationship continues to define them as they move through different cities and relationships. Do they belong together against all odds, or have they taken too many steps in opposite directions to find their way back?
Richie’s story is where much of the novel’s emotional force lies. Once the life of the party, he unravels. His drinking is destructive, eroding his relationship with Adam and driving a wedge between him and his friends. Even when he tries to get sober, he cannot stop himself. At one point, he thinks: “What was today … if not a day to spectacularly fall apart?”
Ginder is sharply observant about the details of millennial life, from the late-2000s pre-streaming-era pop-rap to the eclectic boho-chic aesthetic to the pre-app hookup culture of the decade, where you met at parties, sized each other up across a crowded room and made questionable decisions.
His sharp, dry humour has a satirical bite. The cringeworthy dress code at the wedding, “formal hacienda chic”, turns Mexican culture into a party theme. It feels awkward and patronising. The comedy comes from watching the guests try too hard to get it right and get it badly wrong, exposing how preoccupied they are with performing themselves to each other.
Shifting points of view show how each character interprets the same events differently. They avoid dealing with minor misunderstandings, which add up over time and create resentment. Later gatherings, like the beach house weekend and the Halloween party, repeat the same dynamics.
The novel returns to the idea that choices close things off, that every decision “cuts future possibilities in half”. At its core, So Old, So Young is about what happens when life does not turn out the way you thought it would. The characters look back at who they were in their 20s and try to make sense of who they are now.
It joins recent novels such as The Celebrants by Steven Rowley (2023) and Clutch by Emily Nemens (2026), which explore long friendships, with reckoning and nostalgia for lost youth.
Ginder balances humour with pathos and treats his characters with care, even at their most flawed. By the time we return to the funeral, the distance between who they were and who they are is impossible to ignore. It forces a reckoning, even if they do not fully know what to do with it.
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