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Chapter 17
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Such a Fun Age, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
External Behavior vs. Internal Truth
White Guilt, Ignorance, and Redemption
The Quest for Meaning
Race, Class, and Privilege
Summary
Analysis
Briar cries into the vomit-filled napkin. Mrs. Chamberlain tries to pick up Briar, but Emira stops her—she’ll handle Briar. Emira scoops the crying toddler into her arms and carries her upstairs. Once they’re alone in the bathroom, Emira wets a towel and cleans Briar’s face. In between her tears, Briar timidly says, “I don’t like when Catherine bees the favorite.” Emira hurts for the little girl and promises her everyone is the same in families—that there are no favorites—even though she knows this is rarely true.
Emira more instinctively knows how to care for Briar, which underscores how uninvolved Alix is in Briar’s life. Further suggesting this is the fact that Briar confides in Emira—not Alix—about feeling slighted by Alix. Though Briar is still young, she can sense Alix’s disregard. She can feel that Alix prefers Catherine for what Catherine contributes to Alix’s vision of an ideal life.
Themes
By the time Emira heads back downstairs, the bartenders are clearing the table. Kelley makes a big show of clearing his own plate and helping the staff clean up the table. Then Mrs. Chamberlain’s friends start to clear out for the evening. Emira and Kelley offer awkward goodbyes, and then they leave, too.
Kelley may accuse Alix of being put-on and fake, but the show he puts on of helping the waitstaff clear the table shows that he’s just as performative and desiring of others’ approval. And he has just as much white guilt as she does.
Themes
Emira and Kelley are initially going to take a cab back to Kelley’s place, but Kelley changes his mind and makes the driver stop at a nearby bar instead. It’s a dingy dive bar with only a few old white men inside and a picture of John Wayne on the wall. Emira and Kelley sit at the bar; Kelley orders a drink, but Emira doesn’t get anything. She feels uncomfortable and doesn’t want to be here. Though some of what she learned tonight bothered her, it all happened a long time ago, and she can’t bring herself to care all that much. Kelley drinks and doesn’t say anything.
Another way that Kelley and Alix are more alike than they realize is in their tendency to make Emira’s problems about themselves. Kelley drags Emira to a bar she clearly feels uncomfortable in—this bar has a palpable white, masculine energy that makes her uneasy—because he is worked up about running into Alix tonight. It’s also worth considering that Emira’s livelihood could be in danger, since the fact that she’s dating Alix’s sworn enemy could jeopardize her employment.
Themes
Kelley finally breaks the silence to tell Emira that Alex Murphy is a bad person, and that Emira can’t work for her anymore. Emira reminds him that she works for Alix Chamberlain, not Alex Murphy. She doesn’t understand why he cares so much. Kelley pauses, then he tells Emira that she’s not the first person Alex’s family has hired to work for them. This doesn’t faze Emira, though. She’s met many people like Mrs. Chamberlain before: rich white women who try too hard to be nice to the people they employ. If she weren’t working for this Mrs. Chamberlain, Emira thinks to herself, she’d be working for a different one.
Referring to Alix by her old name, “Alex Murphy,” is a clear power play on Kelley’s part; he knows that Alix’s self-worth is tied up in her ability to present herself to the world in a particular way, and he uses her old name to rob her of the ability to reinvent herself. It’s also pretty bold of him to order Emira not to work for Alix anymore. Once again, Emira is faced with a white, well-intentioned person who thinks they know what’s best for her. But in reality, Kelley’s stance only betrays his own privilege: for Kelley, having incompatible values with his employer is enough to warrant quitting. His financial security gives him a safety net to fall back on as he searches for a new job. But for Emira, who is living paycheck to paycheck, things aren’t so simple.
Themes
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Kelley tells Emira that there’s more to the story of his and Alex’s breakup. Then he briefly tells Emira about Robbie. He insists that Alex should have known the consequences of calling the police on a bunch of Black kids. He tells her about the Black housekeeper Alex’s parents employed. And though Alex always acted embarrassed about her parents’ wealth, Kelley says, she’s grown up to be exactly the way they were. Emira pauses before telling Kelley that working for Alix is her job, and she can’t afford to quit.
Kelley’s version of events, if his version is in fact true, makes Emira sympathize with his perspective. Still, Kelley’s insistence that Emira quit over her boss’s latent racism reinforces his privilege. Kelley can afford to quit because he dislikes or disagrees with his boss, but Emira’s dire financial situation simply doesn’t allow her this freedom—she literally cannot afford to quit.
Themes
Kelley refuses to back down. He tells Emira about the uniform Alex’s parents made their Black housekeeper wear—a polo shirt that had “Murphy” stitched across the back. The word “polo” makes Emira freeze. Kelley notices her response. Emira falters, then she explains that she does wear the same shirt during her shifts at the Chamberlains—but nobody makes her wear it. It’s just so that her own clothes don’t get dirty when she and Briar are painting or are at the park. When Kelley asks Emira whose name is on the shirt, Emira goes defensive and tells him to back off. When he brings up the Market Depot video again, she suggests that he cares more about shaming Mrs. Chamberlain than about racism.
Emira’s visibly shocked response to Kelley’s remark about the polo shirt is telling. Her horrified expression suggests that she’s genuinely seeing things from Kelley’s perspective now—she sees how her LetHer Speak polo symbolically ties her to Alix in much the same way that the Murphy’s housekeeper’s uniform tied her to the Murphys. At the same time, though, Emira also recognizes an important subtext to Kelley’s words: that moral righteousness isn’t the only thing that makes him irate toward Alix. Lingering feelings of resentment over their breakup motivates him, too. And Emira is sick of being the token minority they’re fighting over.
Themes
Kelley tells Emira that if she’s worried about money, she can move in with him. Emira has had enough and gets up to leave. She exits the bar, and Kelley runs out after her. Outside, Emira goes off on Kelley for acting like he’s better than the Chamberlains—he works for a cool start-up company and lives in a building with a doorman, so who is he to talk? What’s more, he was incredibly rude tonight. Emira also tells him that the big show he made of helping the hired staff doesn’t help anybody but himself.
Again, Kelley’s offer to help Emira out financially is well-intentioned but ignorant. Giving her a place to stay and funds to help her get by might allow her to take her time and find a new job, but it’s paternalistic, too. It just indebts her to another well-intentioned white person who thinks they know what’s best for her. Emira also reinforces another important point here, which is that Kelley’s big show of helping the waitstaff is as phony and put-on as Alix’s efforts to befriend Emira. In either instance, a white person who feels guilty about their privilege is using an underprivileged person to feel better about themselves.
Themes
Then Emira starts to cry as she admits that she wants to leave her job but can’t, since she can’t bear to leave Briar. Kelley realizes he’s been too harsh and tries to comfort Emira. Then he says he “more than just like[s] her.” Emira understands his meaning but can’t bring herself to return the sentiment. An hour later, they’re back at Kelley’s apartment. Emira sits in bed as Kelley chats with his family, who are in Florida. His voice changes as he speaks with different family members.
Emira’s admission about Briar reveals that she’s not only working for the Chamberlains for financial reasons, but for personal, emotional reasons, too. This makes it all the more ironic that Emira continues not to see her babysitting as real work and herself as lacking in ambition, since she clearly is invested in childcare in a meaningful, real way.
Themes
When Kelley is done talking to his family, Emira tells him she has some things to get off her back. First, she knows it’s not her job to raise Briar, but she needs to decide how and when to quit on her own. Next, she tells Kelley to stop bringing up the Market Depot tape. She knows he has a lot of Black friends and is into Black culture, but the video could have real consequences for her life—consequences that he could never even imagine. Kelley doesn’t understand but promises not to bring up the tape again.
This is an important moment because how Kelley responds to Emira’s requests likely will determine the chances of them having a future together. If Kelley continues to try to act as though he knows what’s best for Emira, they won’t have a future together. And if he continues to think that his awareness of the oppression Black people face is the equivalent of understanding and experiencing that oppression himself, then they cannot have a future together either.
Themes
Inwardly, Emira considers how little she and Kelley have talked about race. She wonders what a real future with Kelley would be like. Would he take their child to get his hair cut? Would he know to tell their son not to stand too close to white women on public transportation? Then she addresses Kelley again. She tells him he doesn’t have to change things about his life for her. Mrs. Chamberlain has made a big deal about boycotting Market Depot, for example, but what does this actually do for Emira?
Emira seems to wonder if her and Kelley’s differing degrees of privilege makes them incompatible after all. Can she and Kelley really have a future together if they cannot see eye-to-eye on so many critical issues? Is Kelley’s mere sympathy to the plight of Black people and other people of color enough to cancel out the fact that he will never understand all that she goes through? Are his good intentions enough to counteract his ignorance?
Themes
When Emira is finished speaking, Kelley apologizes for insinuating that she wouldn’t be able to find a new job on her own. Emira laughs—she may need his help if Mrs. Chamberlain fires her after the awkwardness tonight. Kelley promises that firing Emira is the last thing that someone like Mrs. Chamberlain would do, since it would say more about her than Emira. Then Kelley changes the subject and asks Emira if she wants to talk about what he said at the bar about not just liking her. But Emira can’t handle any talk of the L-word tonight, so she says no.
Talking things through seems to have calmed the tension that Thanksgiving dinner created between Emira and Kelley—for now, at least. But Emira’s going to have to return to work for the Chamberlains, and it seems likely that Alix will try to interfere in Emira and Kelley’s relationship when Emira does return.
Themes
