Post Grad: Five Women and Their First Year Out of College / Caroline Kitchener

What really happens in the first year out of college? When Caroline Kitchener graduated from Princeton, she began shadowing four of her female classmates, interviewing them as they started to navigate the murky waters of post-collegiate life. Weaving together her own experience as a writer with the experiences of these other women—a documentarian, a singer, a programmer, and an aspiring doctor—Kitchener delves deeply into the personal and professional opportunities offered to female college graduates, and how the world perceives them.

The five women in this diverse group confront challenges, such as parental estrangement, mental illness, financial anxiety, and heartbreak, all the while tackling their nascent careers and forging their own paths forward. Relationships with their parents warp and strain as they cross into adulthood and negotiate their newfound independence. Romantically, the women cast off in a number of directions, with some exploring nontraditional relationships and others latching onto a single partner for stability in an uncertain world.

Kitchener writes with the fervor of a journalist, the rigor of a sociologist, and the nuance and empathy of a skilled memoirist, and she has crafted a brilliant work of reportage, replete with human characters. Both a broad and an intensely individual exploration, Post Grad is an account of the generation people can’t stop talking about, from one of its own.