It's easier to be a grownup than to be a kid. When you're a kid, you lie constantly and people are always calling you on it. And when you're a grownup, you lie constantly and people rarely do. Children are constantly being caught. Adults rarely so. Being an adult, you also get a free pass, which means you have to actively be a good person because nobody's around to tell you to do that. Even evil kids will be good when adults are watching. But once you're an adult, no one is. As a grownup, you've got an agency over your own life, which hopefully you use for the greater good and not evil.

I admired the earnestness of these people, many of whom had joined Greenpeace and marched for noble things in their youth. But I didn’t share their hatred of the establishment. After all, the establishment had given me so many of my favorite things: Nick at Nite, the New York Knicks, Stephen King, Taco Bell, Green Day. The list went on and on.

People are funny in like young adulthood, just like how people's musical tastes are cool, but it changes very rapidly. In five or ten years, I'll probably still be confident about what's funny but it probably won't be funny anymore.

I never really liked "cool" books. I plowed through as much Borges and Joyce as possible, read the first half of V. and spent whole Bar Mitzvah checks on Beat poetry.

I read a ton of nonfiction. I tend to read about a lot of very extreme situations, life-or-death situations. I'm very interested in books about Arctic exploration or about doomed Apollo missions. I tend to read a lot of nonfiction that's sort of hyperbolic and visceral. And then I kind of draw on my own personal experiences and my own sort of generic life experience, and I kind of try to feed my day-to-day reality that I have with sort of high stakes reference points that I read about. They're things everyone can relate to.

By the time I got to college I had stopped reading books because I wanted to "be cool" and started reading books simply because I wanted to read them. I discovered heroes like Roth, King, Dahl, Shirley Jackson, Patricia Highsmith, TC Boyle, Douglas Adams, Neil Gaiman, David Sedaris. These people weren't trying to "rebel against the literary establishment." They were trying to write great, high-quality books that were as entertaining and moving as possible.

I’m too young and ridiculous a person to speak for my generation, but I’d be happy to talk about my own experiences as a generation Y writer. I was raised by a generation of hippies. Throughout my childhood, teachers urged me to fight the establishment. My English teacher assigned Ginsberg and Kerouac and declared Bob Dylan “a genius.” My science teacher told me that television was “the new opiate of the masses” and bragged about never having owned one. My drama teacher made us perform Beckett.