Is Gen X Actually the Greatest Generation?

Amanda Fortini’s latest for T Magazine is a sweeping consideration of Generation X’s creative class and the circumstances that shaped their art. Her feature is richly textured with the voices and notions of the so-called “Slacker Generation,” from Douglas Coupland and Liz Phair to Bret Easton Ellis and Rosie Perez. (You could make a Bingo game from the thirty-five names gathered for Neal Slavin’s fantastic group photos in New York and West Hollywood. Janeane Garofalo, Christian Slater, free space, Aimee Mann, Ani DiFranco!) The best moments come from Fortini herself, whose attachment to Gen X gives this feature its lived-in intimacy and critical heft.

It’s important to note that Gen X-ers formed their artistic sensibilities in a time before the internet or cellphones existed to entertain, distract or assist in the processing of anything. Ours was the last generation that wasn’t online until adulthood. We did have home computers — I wrote my school papers on a large, clunky desktop and printed them on a dot-matrix printer — yet we were still free of the stress of being connected to a vast realm beyond our immediate concerns. If you were lucky, you had your own phone line (I’d talk on mine three hours a night), but your bubble consisted of home, friends, school, maybe a part-time job. It wasn’t until my freshman year of college that I got an email address. Once a week, I’d wait in line at the library to check my email at the shared computer terminal.

Without doomscrolling, texting, emailing, online shopping, tweeting or posting, there seemed to be eons to fill. I remember lying on my carpeted bedroom floor, waiting for a particular song to come on the radio so I could record it. I remember long afternoons spent reading books that were far too adult for me, like “The Thorn Birds” (1977) or the “Flowers in the Attic” series (1979-87). “You had to figure out a way to keep yourself entertained,” says Molly Ringwald, 57, the queen of Gen X films, who starred in “Sixteen Candles” (1984), “The Breakfast Club” and “Pretty in Pink” (1986). “I was always creating or collaging or putting outfits together, singing, dancing. I didn’t have this little box to distract me.” Our focus wasn’t fractured, our attention spans hadn’t yet been destroyed.