Meanwhile, at home, Ruth is struggling to admit to herself how much her father’s mental state has deteriorated. When she goes home to Southern California for Christmas for the first time in years, her mother asks if she’d be willing to live with them for a while, because her father is in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease.
She’s still not over Joel, her ex-fiancé, who broke off their engagement in the cruelest, most passive-aggressive way possible (he tells her they’re going to move into a new apartment, and it’s not until the night before the move that he informs her she’s going to be moving into it alone meanwhile, he has a new girlfriend). Ruth, the 30-year-old protagonist of Rachel Khong’s “Goodbye, Vitamin,” most definitely does not have it all figured out.
Yet 30 still looms large over the psyches of 20-somethings, as though it’s the age when you’re supposed to at least be on your way to figuring it all out. The average age of first marriages has been creeping upward for years, we have children later and later, and owning a home, particularly in expensive cities like New York and Los Angeles, has become out of reach for all but the wealthiest millennials. In previous generations, the age of 30 was practically middle-aged it was a realizable aspiration to be married, have children and own a home by then.
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