Old Writing

In this essay I consider the effects of contemporary technological developments on writing. Have digital innovations infiltrated literary genres and critical styles? With these questions in mind, I focus on what autobiographical projects and millennial fiction may tell us about twenty-first-century aesthetics through a mini case study of Molly Jong-Fast's 2025 memoir How to Lose Your Mother and her mother Erica Jong's 1973 best-selling novel Fear of Flying (reissued, most recently, in 2023). Throughout the essay I query the role played by age in the production and reception of writing across genres in our relentlessly digital era.