Meg Jay

A clinical psychologist who got tired of hearing that the twenties are a throwaway decade and wrote a book arguing the opposite.

The Defining Decade makes the case that identity capital, weak ties and choosing a partner deliberately rather than by drift do more to set the shape of a life than anything in the thirties, and that treating the twenties as an extended adolescence is expensive. She writes from case notes, so the argument arrives through people rather than statistics. Some readers find it clarifying and some find it a source of fresh anxiety, which she has acknowledged.