in defense of the bildungsroman
a love letter to coming-of-age stories
I think I’ve always lived with one half of myself in reality and the other in a dream. Not the sleeping kind — more like the kind that hovers just above an everyday existence. It’s a coping mechanism I developed young: the habit of turning mundane moments into movie scenes in my head. I go about my days with the weight of possibility in my chest, more concerned with the potential of everything rather than accepting them at face value. It feels strange to say aloud, but every moment feels like a scene just waiting to be rewritten. My current circumstances never feel enough; never feel like the end scene of the film of my life. This isn’t how it ends. There has to be more.
Reality and I have a complicated relationship to begin with, but as I grow older, we’ve come to an understanding: it sets the boundaries, and I soften them with imagination until they become bearable. There’s something interesting I’ve noticed about myself over time: I don’t consume media to escape real life, I consume media to confront it. I toe the line between being an idealist and a realist at the same time; knowing that the actions I take hold real consequences and that life should be taken seriously, while also recognizing that routine and mundanity can take a toll on a person, and it doesn’t hurt anyone to daydream a little. I’ve realized that all of my forever favorite pieces of media, regardless of type, happen to fall into the category of the bildungsroman narrative.
Bildungsroman (n.): a literary genre that focuses on the psychological and moral growth of the protagonist from childhood to adulthood (coming of age), in which character change is important. The term comes from the German words Bildung ('education', alternatively 'forming') and Roman ('novel').
To me, they offer a way to find meaning and beauty in the state of being unresolved. They give me an alternative to the strict, developmental narratives of the generations that came before me, as well as the relentless improvement rhetoric of self-help culture; suggesting that maybe the point isn’t to enter adulthood, but to find ways to exist meaningfully within the journey of getting there. But if you really think about it, we’re always coming of age, because continuous transformation has become a defining feature of modern life. These stories raise the idea that confusion and uncertainty are necessary parts of human development. It isn’t simply about nostalgia or escapism, though of course these elements exist and contribute greatly, but rather about the complex relationship between personal development and systemic pressure in an age where adulthood feels simultaneously mandatory and impossible.
I’ve always been drawn to these stories like a moth to a flame, considerably more than I had been to fantasy or superheroes or anything else — although, I do very much love every Spider-Man movie ever made (they’re all on my favorites list on my Letterboxd) and I grew up on Harry Potter and Percy Jackson, but I suppose all of those stories have something to do with coming-of-age, too. But these stories are set apart from that of the bildungsroman, because they have a main plot and objective to the narrative, meanwhile, the bildungsroman is a story with no real plot, bringing attention to character growth. The events that occur throughout the narrative are not the main focus, their moral and psychological reactions to these experiences are.
I’ve been thinking a lot about why I love stories like this so much — stories like Lady Bird, Frances Ha, Little Women, The Idiot & Either/Or, and even as immature as the title is: the show PEN15— and I think the answer lies in how they not only reflect my own experiences, they sanctify them. Media is consumed to escape, yes, but bildungsroman stories offer a different kind of departure. Instead of fleeing from my reality, they allow me to dive deeper into it, facing the beast head on instead of running away. I return to these stories again and again, not because I need to escape real life, but because they help me to normalize what I’ve experienced, feel less alone, and find meaning in every interaction. To live with intention. They remind us that aimlessness is not a death sentence, but rather a sign that we’re still moving, still changing, and still alive to the possibility of surprise.
Sometimes I’ll be doing something utterly mundane, like waiting for coffee to brew, walking through the city with friends, trying to beat traffic on the way home, and I’ll feel it: that acute awareness that I’m living through a scene in my own narrative. These coming-of-age stories taught me how to see the poetry in the “boring” moments, how to find meaning in the mess, how to turn my loneliness into something like art. The other day, I found myself sitting in my car, parked outside of the CVS and listening to a song I used to play on repeat in high school (There Is A Light That Never Goes Out by The Smiths; yes, I was that girl). For a split second in-between noticing and then continuing to listen, I was both who I am now and who I was then, like a double-exposed film photograph where two images exist in the same frame. For me, coming-of-age stories do just that: allow me to exist in multiple eras at the same time, and reassure me that growing up isn’t something that only happens once. Like losing baby teeth, it happens over and over again. They also remind me that my own life is worth writing about, even (and especially) at their most chaotic and unfinished.
I kept thinking about the uneven quality of time — the way it was almost always so empty, and then with no warning came a few days that felt so dense and alive and real that it seemed indisputable that that was what life was, that its real nature had finally been revealed. But then time passed and unthinkably grew dead again, and it turned out that that fullness had been an aberration and might never come back. I wanted to write about it while I could still feel it and see it around me, while the teacups still seemed to be trembling. Suddenly it occurred to me that maybe the point of writing wasn’t just to record something past but also to prolong the present, like in One Thousand and One Nights, to stretch out the time until the next thing happened.
– The Idiot, Elif Batuman (page 380-381)
The thing about growing up is that it never stops feeling like falling. Every time I think I’ve finally learned how to be a person, something shifts and I’m back at the beginning. But these stories hold me like a friend’s hand in the dark. I watch these characters make the same mistakes I’ve made, am making, will make again. Their shortcomings feel like permission slips for me to keep trying, suggest that true meaning might not be found in arriving, but in the sustained process of almost-arriving. When Frances says she’s not a real person yet, she’s not admitting defeat but articulating a truth about contemporary existence: that personhood itself is an ongoing affair, not a destination.
As I endure the first few years of my twenties, I’ve made the quiet observation of my own demeanor — and people I know who have had similar life experiences — that when a Lady Bird girl gets older, she just turns into a Frances Ha woman. I repeat this in my head like a mantra whenever I feel aimless, because for some reason it makes me feel better about where I’m at. In the sweet violence of growing up, every Lady Bird finds herself turning into a Frances, stumbling through the streets of New York like a bird that’s forgotten how to fly. There’s a devastating poetry in watching this change; the way teenage conviction folds itself into twenty-something uncertainty, how the sharp edges of adolescent defiance soften into something more tender and lost. The cosmic joke of feminine becoming is that this same girl, fierce and certain and full of plans, will one day sit at a table full of productive people and mutter, “uh, because I don’t really do it,” when asked why her career is complicated.
This is the curse of the small-town dreamers, the girls like myself. Our cries of rebellion and defiance gradually transform into nervous laughter and apologies. The girl who demanded to be called by a name she gave herself shifts into a woman who cannot name what she does at all. Both versions of myself sometimes seem to exist simultaneously, performing their own kind of protest against constraints of who I’m supposed to be, but here lies the difference: the Lady Bird portion of me does it with raised fists and determination, while the Frances side does it with a self-deprecating shrug.
“What do you do?”
The question rings through countless parties and gatherings like a death knell for former Lady Birds everywhere. Each one now a Frances, discovering that arrival isn’t the same as becoming, that getting to New York was never the hard part. The hard part is standing in New York, surrounded by people who know exactly what they “do”, and feeling yourself dissolve at the edges of definition. The guy who asks the question, a lawyer, knows his lines. Of course he does. Men like him contain the certainty that Lady Birds fought for and Franceses lost somewhere between graduation and a quarter-life crisis. He can answer the cursed question without flinching, without feeling his identity scatter at the sound of his own voice.
But Frances speaks the truth that every former Lady Bird carries with her, wherever she goes: sometimes we don’t know what we do because we don’t really do it, because we’re all just trying to figure out how to exist in a world that demands we turn our very beings into marketable commodities. She breaks the social contract of easy definition, of pleasant party conversation, of knowing exactly who you are and what you’re worth in dollars per hour. And when the room turns to look at her, they’re really looking at every Lady Bird who grew up to find that changing your name doesn’t change who you are. That escaping one place doesn’t mean arriving at yourself.
These narratives keep finding us exactly where we are, reaching through the screen like a lifeline thrown into the drowning waters of early adulthood. Every time I revisit them, I feel seen in a way that burns and soothes at the same time, because the truth is that we need both — Lady Bird’s defiant courage, and Frances’ stumbling vulnerability. We need the girl who throws herself from moving cars and the woman who can’t explain herself at dinner parties. They live in us simultaneously, these versions of ourselves, like layers of sediment pressing against each other under the surface of the earth. And sometimes, in between who we were and who we’re becoming, I think I’m starting to understand something important about growing up: it’s not about choosing between these selves, but about learning to hold space for them both. Understanding that the same fire ignited in us at seventeen still burns in us at twenty-four, even if it flickers differently now, even if its light has softened into something more like wonder than rebellion. Because in the end, we’re all still growing up; still trying to find our way home.
I dropped the term “Bildungsroman” in class at university last week and everyone was like “what?” and looked at me funny. I would like to note that I attend a GERMAN UNIVERSITY.
I absolutely love what you wrote! This is so poetic. You just manage to make all versions of the young women we are coexist in this piece. It has the tone of the coming of age story: hopeful, hopeless, aimless but sti with a little sense of direction. Well done. It's very moving 😊 I am saving it to read it again!