The Casuals
Sally Breen
The Casuals
Sally Breen
Sally Breen gives voice to her generation - those somehow smashed in between all the X’s and the Y’s - maybe lost, maybe beat but most of all casual.
‘three things happened at the dawn of the 1990s that would change everything about how we had lived before. We graduated high school, Microsoft shipped Windows 3.0 and America started the Gulf War. We became adults in the 1990s. the start of the world gone mega. Gone global. Gone mad. We became the Casuals and this is our story.’ the Casuals is the story of the life and times of one young woman’s journey through the last two decades of the 20th century; from her pop-fuelled adolescence in the 1980s to a full-blown grunge ride in the 1990s, Sally Breen is the girl your mother warned you about. A charged and heady exploration of sex, drugs and pop culture, it is also a meditation on loss, death and grief as the author struggles to reconcile her place in a chaotic world. Sally Breen gives voice to her generation; those somehow smashed in between all the Xers and Ys - maybe lost, maybe beat, but most of all casual. ‘a stunning example of the honest, meticulous and beautifully rendered details of a supposed ordinary life’ - Matthew Condon'a memoir of unquiet things told quietly but with courageous brio against a finely etched suburban background of the 1980s and 1990s’ - Frank Moorhouse
Review
Jo Case
The Casuals has been blurbed as Generation X’s version of Puberty Blues. Like Sally, I was born in 1975, and grew up in an outer suburb where ‘new estates explode out of the bushland like instant Lego lands’, so was particularlycurious. Like the Puberty Blues authors, Breen captures the zeitgeist of her generation. The cultural references hit the mark – catching tadpoles in buckets from local creeks, sleepovers watching John Hughes movies on video, proud ownership of ‘boom boxes with double-decker tapes’, ra-ra skirts and white denim jackets. And Breen similarly captures the essence of awkward, painfully uncertain adolescence – the importance of ‘tribes’ (‘for a high school kid, not having a group is terror’), the suppression of self in order to fit in, and, most resonantly, the secondary role of desire when it comes to relationships and sexuality.
‘When gangs of girls begin negotiations with gangs of guys it’s more about power than desire,’ she writes of her reluctant first kiss, in year five. That link seems to continue, from early crushes on seemingly unavailable boys as a teen, to a series of ill-fated encounters with rock stars, and a live-in affair with her university lecturer. Perhaps themen in her life never live up to her idolised, six-foot-something charismatic father, with his ‘movie star style’, his legendary drinking capacity and his commitment to keeping the lawns meticulously edged.
An underlying tone of nostalgia tinged with melancholy reflects Breen’s sadness about her father’s loss, to cancer, when she was in her twenties – and John Breen is a huge presence in these pages. The Casuals is, on one integral level, a daughter’s love letter to her father. It’s also an absorbing coming-of-age; fellow Gen-Xers will enjoy the trip down memory lane, and find much to recognise.
Jo Case is editor of Readings Monthly.
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