While we find out later that her life may not be all that it appears, the fact is that she is unhappy with her daughter’s choices and the resultant state of her life, a scornful assessment that only worsens (to the point of excising Maggie from her will) when in one day Maggie is dumped by her boyfriend, has no place to live, gets kicked out of her university for overstaying her academic welcome and finds out she has a $70,000 Centrelink (Australia’s social security agency) debt. Her mother, still smarting from the departure of her gambling, deadbeat husband some years earlier, certainly thinks so, eyeing her daughter with the disdain of someone who lives in a nice suburb (in this case, Camberwell, Melbourne, Australia) and who has fought hard to get to where she is in life.

She is, then, by society’s rather exacting standards, the proud owner of an epic fail of a life. The light filtering through Jen’s bedroom window fell upon her cleavage, which rose like two pale boulders over dangerously stretched lace. The one my best friend Jen was squeezed into smelt like rotted hair, mothballs and musk, but that was because the dress was one hundred and three years old and had been stored with the meticulous care that old ladies take of their broken dreams and bitter memories. “Wedding dresses have a special kind of perfume. She casts boyfriends aside with unfaithful alacrity, has yet to land a paying job owing to taking 10 years, and counting, to finish her accountacy degree, doesn’t own or even rent a home, and is in possession of goods and chattels so scant it’s like someone forgot to send her the modern capitalist memo of endless consumption whether you need it or not.

Hurtling towards her 30th birthday, Maggie is not exactly ticking the boxes of an idealised adulthood. There’s not a lot of grey or wiggle room in there, something of which Maggie Cotton, the likably flawed protagonist of Rose Hartley’s Maggie’s Going Nowhere, is all too aware. It all sounds laudably good but like any societal constant, there’s always a dark side, one that opines that should you fail to observe this social compact you will be regarded, by most people at least, as something of a colossal failure. There is a universal agreement, the exact origins of which are lost to time, that people born into this world will enjoy a fun-filled childhood full of learning and love, somehow survive the confused indignities of the teenage years before moving onto adulthood where they will get a job, find a significant someone and generally behave like a mature person worthy of love, respect and admiration. (cover image courtesy Penguin Books Australia)

Maggie's Going Nowhere by Rose Hartley