Trivial Grievances

An oddly optimistic, witty and insightful generation-defining book for a lost generation, the miserable millennials, from Bridie Jabour, opinion editor at Guardian Australia

In 2019, Bridie Jabour wrote a piece for the Guardian about the malaise of millennials and how the painful, protracted end of their adolescence is finally hitting home. They're looking at their lives and thinking: 'Is this it? Have I chosen the right place to live, the right job, the right partner? Am I, perhaps, not as special as I thought?'

The article went viral overnight and Bridie decided the time had come to write a book about her generation - those much-maligned millennials. After all, she reasoned, this generation is coming of age in a unique set of social and economic circumstances, including precarious work, delayed baby-making, rising singledom, a heating planet, loss of religion, increased unstable housing and, now, a pandemic. But despite her assumption that this generation of 31-year-olds is the most miserable ever, she discovered that wasn't the whole truth ...

Forthright, funny, incisive and provocative, Trivial Grievances is truly a book for our times, and for every 20- or 30-something-year-old anxious about their place in the world.

About the Author

Bridie Jabour is opinion editor at Guardian Australia. She has previously worked as a journalist for NewsCorp and Fairfax, where she has reported on social affairs, politics and regional issues. She has worked in the Canberra press gallery and was a reporter for Brisbane Times after starting her career at the Gold Coast Bulletin in Queensland. Bridie writes commentary on feminism, inequality, and pop culture, and appears regularly on The Drum, Triple J and ABC Radio Sydney. She is the author of the novel The Way Things Should Be.