YOUTH NOW
I Was Sure I’d Die Young
From nightclubs to rehab to motherhood, I’ve always been the youngest one in the room. Not anymore.
The year is 1984. The setting: a playground in Connecticut. A twentysomething father with long reddish hair is milling around with a group of young mummies as his daughter plays on the monkey bars. One of the mothers leans over and asks him, “How old is your adorable girl?”
“Four,” he says.
There is an audible gasp. The other mothers are horrified: How are their own children so wildly deficient? How is this four-year-old so impossibly advanced?
That adorable kid is me, and I’m actually six. My father is lying about my age so these women will think I’m a genius, and it’s working. Perhaps that’s where I learned that age could be used, that youth was a virtue that could be traded on. Years later, my mother would dine out on the story of how he “won the playground wars.”
I grew up in Manhattan in an intellectual household. I was expected to be precocious, piping up brightly at dinner parties, my ideas on the news of the day eagerly indulged. I learned to act like a grown-up well before I was one, an adult in miniature.
